Managing affiliates
Good affiliate schemes can be seen as a win-win situation for both parties involved. The affiliate gets to add high value products and services to their site with little or no costs or administration.
For the site that created the affiliate, the benefits include increased visibility, visitors and sales.
As Amazon.com has proved, setting up a good affiliate scheme can be the key to a site's success. Implementing and managing an affiliate scheme can be a time-consuming and difficult process however.
| Amazon.com has around 200,000 affiliates! |
Here are some tips on setting up an affiliate scheme and using it to make your site more successful.
What kind of affiliate scheme you have depends largely on the content of your website. If you sell a product online, you can have a reseller affiliate scheme where your partners sell products for you, earning commission on all the sales they create.
If your site is mainly content-based then you will need to pay affiliates for generating traffic to your site. This is less reliable than the first method, because traffic does not always equal profit and it is difficult to ensure that the visitors directed to your site by affiliates are going to benefit your site in any way.
A good program to try is available from Kowabunga but it can sometimes be difficult to integrate and manage an affiliate program. ShopFactory is easier to integrate but offers no management ability. There are, naturally, various other options available on the internet. Larger companies should consider the option of an overall marketing management scheme.
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