Affiliate program questions

Is there a tutorial that can explain affiliate programs? Like what is it? What do you do with it when you get one for your site? How do you go about getting people to sign up to yours?

I'm sure these questions are loaded so it may be easier to just direct me to a tutorial or article. Or if you are willing to explain it, I'd appreciate it.

And for the record, yes I'm aware how stupid I look that I'm asking these questions. I admit it my cart is in front of my horse BIG TIME. :mental:

So go ahead, make jokes. But please help me anyway.
Thanks

Hey MamaKity,

Think of an affiliate program as a big traffic generating machine, or in another way, think of it as having 100 employees working for you on straight commission.

It's so hard for one webmaster to get traffic to their site. I mean you can do it, but you hoofing it pretty hard, non-stop. So with an affiliate program, a webmaster agrees to share the money from any sales with the referring webmaster. And your payout rate could be anywhere from 5 to 100%, although if you're paying anything less than 50% you're probably not going to get a lot of people interested.

So a webmaster signs up with your program: they send you traffic and you agree to pay them on any sales generated from that traffic. How they get that traffic to you is up to them, although it's probably a pretty good idea to include some point in your TOS that forbids things like e-mail spam.

The webmaster attaches a link code to the links going to your site. The link code includes their affiliate id, which is tracked by your billing company. A company like ccbill does all of the tracking and even sends out the payment cheques. There are big advantages to this because the webiste has no say as to whether ccbill pays you or not, in other words, the website owner can't take your money and run.

I think BadPuppy is in the process of developing an affiliate program for you guys. See the problem with BadPuppy at the moment (as I understand it) is that I can't send traffic direct to MegaHung and earn a commssion. If I send the traffic to you and the surfer buys, you get the commission and I don't. If I send the sale direct to BadPuppy, then I get the commission. From what I understand, this new system fixes that up.

While losing half of your money to a webmaster isn't a great thing, when you start to see the traffic that comes in, you'll change your mind. There's no way that you as an individual site owner can get as much promotion for your site. With an affiliate program you can end up with hundreds of webmasters promoting you all over the web. And wouldn't you rather make 50% than nothing.

Cheers
Dzinerbear

there are several models of affiliate program - pay per sale, pay per click, pay per email address and revshare are the common ones. i figure you're asking about revshare, which is where the webmaster sending the hits to your site gets a percentage of the money spent by his surfers.

ccbill and epoch both have affiliate programs sort of built into their programs. if you use either for your processing, you just have to do a few things and voila! instant affiliate program that pays your affiliates for you :)

almost anyone who has a paysite can benefit from having more webmasters send them traffic and members.

you can get affiliates by putting a banner or text link about your program in your sig on the boards. you can advertise at boards and resource sites. you can get your affiliate program listed with different resource sites, and also send the resource sites a press release announcing your new program.

you may also get affiliates from a webmaster link on your site, so don't forget to have that there somewhere :-)

you're not stupid - you don't know. there's a BIG difference between the two.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by basschick

you're not stupid - you don't know. there's a BIG difference between the two.

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HOW TRUE! I want to smack MamaKity every time she says that. Since I can't go to the LA luncheon, basschick maybe you can take care of that for me. I'll FedEx you some wet noodles so you can dole out MamaKity's punishment. :)

Cheers
dzinerbear

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Dzinerbear

I'll FedEx you some wet noodles so you can dole out MamaKity's punishment. :)

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Or, you could just ask Don or Jasun to do it for you LOL

I *think* we have a tutorial series in the works *somewhere* about setting up an affiliate program to Teresa ill see if i can dig it out and get it finished up for you over the next couple of days :)

Regards,

Lee

[QUOTE=Dzinerbear]I think BadPuppy is in the process of developing an affiliate program for you guys.

Yup, they did. http://www.puppycash.com/fcsites.asp

"See the problem with BadPuppy at the moment (as I understand it) is that I can't send traffic direct to MegaHung and earn a commssion."

Now you can. Up to 45% and if your a big referrer I think they bump you up to a higher commission.

"If I send the traffic to you and the surfer buys, you get the commission and
I don't."

Not anymore. The person doing the work ie. you, makes the bigger commission.


But that was all I knew of it. Your explanation has made that clear for me. Thanks love.


Basschic, Thanks for clearing up the marketing part for me. I have my TO DO list and I'm on course.

Dzinerbear, if Basschic takes you up on the whole beating me with the wet noodles then my fantasy will be complete and I'll have yet more to thank you for. hehehe

Lee, Don or Jasun? Just make sure they are gentle. ;) That tutorial will be great, thanks toots.

:love:

Mamakitty:

The entire way I make my living is with affiliate programs on my websites now. Let me suggest that you think about it like this:

The full term is affiliate marketing - and I like to use that because it reenforces the role that affiliates play. They are marketers, and marketing is an *active* verb. I am basically marketing their products and services, as a substitute for them marketing elsewhere, like in print advertising, etc.

So if you run a website and want to market it, affiliate programs are great because it allows others to sell your products and brand your identity. For that reason, they make the commission. So in order for your affiliate program to be a success, the best thing you can do is to run it like you are keeping a marketing team motivated in your product.

All the adult sites you see use affiliate programs. Almost all non-adult websites use them too. For example, Amazon and eBay have very mature affiliate programs, which I have found very lucrative.

The programs that I use the most are the ones that inform me fully of their products, so i can figure out ways to sell them. That is sort of a general big picture explanation.

Good luck.

Steve

Quote:

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Originally Posted by basschick

you can get affiliates by putting a banner or text link about your program in your sig on the boards.

Done.

you may also get affiliates from a webmaster link on your site, so don't forget to have that there somewhere :-)

On order with my designer.

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I also spammed the spam board here so maybe that will help too.

Thanks again for your advise. :sun: