Bec,

As it happens for the last month or so i have been writing a series of tutorials on how to go about setting up your own paysite or affiiate program however, every time i think i have finished the tutorial i remember something else i forgot to add , hopefully ill be finished with the tutorials sometime in the next month or so and they truely are about as in depth as you could go

Anyway, to answer your question briefly youll need a bunch of things the least of which is a design for both the paysites, the affiliate program (if you are going to start one) and also, for promotional matrials such as banners, buttons, hosted galleries, tgps, link lists etc. In total for one paysite, not including the 'affiliate' side of the desin work i would estimate the cost being close to $1500 then if you add an affiliate program onto that design work, you will be talking roughly another $1500

Thats the first aspect out of the way, the next thing you will need is content, there used to be a time when you could start a paysite with as little as 500 images in total however, currently you should look at spending around $1000 in content purchases alone of course, this is in addition to any exclusive content you may want to have on the paysites each shoot should cost certainly no more than $1000 per scene / shoot.

As Luke mentioned so far as he affiliate side of things go, you can use processors such as CCBill, iBill and i beleive, Epoch who have the ability of generating your affiliate links for your webmasters however, in all honesty, getting something custom programmed is the method i would recommend if you are going to do something right, again as Luke mentioned MPA2 from Mansion Products is a good off the shlf script however, it is costly running into low five digits if you want to purchase it outright or, $500 per month if you want to lease it from Mansion. Custom on the other hand will only cost you in the region of $5000 (less than one years leasing of MPA2!). In addition to the affiliate scipting stuff however, you also have the cost of the Visa registration fees which i beleive are currently $750 every year.

In addition to the affiliate scipting, you will also need to look at some form of content management system again there are some very good ones on the market at pesent which you can buy 'off th shelf' however, again i would suggest going custom and having a solution programmed to your EXACT requirements that, if you need to, can be upgraded and have modules added at a later date. Custom programming of a CMS (Content Management System) will cost around $1500 including everything that the off the shelf systems have and more

The next thing you will need to launch a paysite is a range of different traffic sources, this is to ensure that the tour you are using for the paysite/s actully does what it is supposed to... convert surfers into members.

Then you need to think about your marketing budget for both the sites themselves on the surfer side of things and, if you are running an affiliate program, also on the webmaster side of things, in addition to the paysites you will also need to look at marketing (if applicable) the affiliate program itself to webmasters. Total estimated marketing budget i would set at around $2000.

Of course, you could do what most other small program owners do and make your own paysite and affiliate program designs without all of the custom CMS and affiliate programming and launch several paysites for less than $1000. I guess it depends on the route you want to take and, the amount of investment you want to put into your program / paysites.

Regards,

Lee