Your own affiliate program is the best way to get free traffic.

[sniperhiga]

Affiliate program on your site is the best way to get traffic and share only % if you actually sell something.
Think!

1. You don't have to pay for PPC
2. You don't have to pay for advertising space
3. Your ads appear on many sites
4. Your website becomes more visible
5. People can visit your site clicking affiliate banner but make a purchace later from their office computer.
6. You create brand recognition.
7. You are getting extra traffic when people check your affiliate program.
8. Extra links for your site from directories of affiliate programs. It will increase your domain power.
9. People who follow affiliate links can click Google ads or any other ads and you don't have to pay comission to source.
10. Your banners will appear on homepages.

[David_ Bowie]

So very true. Having a website and no affiliate program is like cutting off 30% of your potential customers. Keeping your affiliates active by paying out great commissions and holding a quarterly contest. I own three sites that all so offer affiliate programs. One site I own will allow you to have a stand alone Co-Branded website featuring their own domain.

The downside is to attract good affiliates and so far my experience is most affiliates will sign up for free and do nothing. Lately, I have been charging a one time fee for an affiliate program on one of my sites and the ones who take me up on it tend to do better, since they have a small stake in it.

Anyone has suggestions to attract better affiliates, I am all ears...


David

[allreal]

How have you guys built out your affiliate programs... open source options? third party? proprietary?

[ajhaveri]

Yes, affiliate programs are great - the only problem is recruiting good affiliates. That is a lot harder than it seems. My firm just launched its own affiliate program (20% commission, 10% recurring) and we have been contacting potentials to see what they think. If you can get it off the ground and manage it, its perfect.

After looking through all the affiliate options out there, we decided to build our own solution so it better integrated with our site. It was pretty simple actually. And since we only pay on a CPA (cost per action, sale in our case) basis, we integrated it with our paypal payment processing. Got some good activity graphs for our affiliates too by using the Yahoo Astra Charts API!

I'd be more than happy to talk about our experiences if any of you would like. Just shoot me a PM or post back on this thread.

[David_ Bowie]

Originally Posted by ajhaveri

Yes, affiliate programs are great - the only problem is recruiting good affiliates. That is a lot harder than it seems. My firm just launched its own affiliate program (20% commission, 10% recurring) and we have been contacting potentials to see what they think. If you can get it off the ground and manage it, its perfect.

After looking through all the affiliate options out there, we decided to build our own solution so it better integrated with our site. It was pretty simple actually. And since we only pay on a CPA (cost per action, sale in our case) basis, we integrated it with our paypal payment processing. Got some good activity graphs for our affiliates too by using the Yahoo Astra Charts API!

I'd be more than happy to talk about our experiences if any of you would like. Just shoot me a PM or post back on this thread.

I pay pay my affiliates 40% commission, 10% recurring. It has been really hard to attract good affiliates when I pay less. Last summer, I had a website that was paying 75% commissions on a $20 product. Funny thing is for several months I would get 40, 50 $5 paypal payments daily.

David

[ajhaveri]

Thanks for the reply David. If I might ask, what's the average price of the products you are selling through affiliates? I'm asking because we have three versions of our subscription product ($50, $100, $200) with gives affiliates ($10,$20,$40) per on the 20% payout. If the average payout from your program is around the same perhaps my company can get away with the 20%, or if need be raise it to 25-30%? If you have the time, I'd love to compare affiliate recruiting tactics with you. Let me know.

[David_ Bowie]

Originally Posted by ajhaveri

Thanks for the reply David. If I might ask, what's the average price of the products you are selling through affiliates? I'm asking because we have three versions of our subscription product ($50, $100, $200) with gives affiliates ($10,$20,$40) per on the 20% payout. If the average payout from your program is around the same perhaps my company can get away with the 20%, or if need be raise it to 25-30%? If you have the time, I'd love to compare affiliate recruiting tactics with you. Let me know.

Average price on my products can vary quite a bit. For instance, I own a traffic website that offers 150 different traffic campaigns starting from $8 to $2,500. My brain is to lazy for that one.

I just launched a membership website which pays a different percentage depending on what level they optin under. For instance, I had a member join at level four and he earns 50%.on any member he brings in. He just joined three days ago and is over $100 in commissions.

He will get paid 50% for every paid member each month. since the site is new, I am hoping that the average member will subscribe at $25 monthly
We will also sell 500 lifetime memberships at $197 each.

I`ve also added a new twist which some may already know and have done before. Each paid member will have his downline built for him by my efforts.
Every time I promote my main url and some clicks on the link, the user is taken to one of the paid affiliates page.

I thought my programmer made a mistake and was going to tell him to fix it but then I thought, this could be another good perk for top notch affiliates.
It has been my experience that the better I pay affiliates the more cash they bring in.

It`s like, you can work at Walmart for $8 bucks an hour or you can work at Macy`s for twice as much. Another way to put it: If you want top affiliates you need to pay top bucks.

This is not a hard and fast rule and some may beg to differ. It has been my experience that I make more when I give away more.

Hope this helps.

David