Building a Web Site For Dummies®, 3rd Edition

Running Your Own Affiliate Program

It must have occurred to you by now that this affiliates bit is a pretty good thing to use if you set up your business online. I couldn’t agree more. In fact, if anything, it’s better for the business owner than it is for the affiliates. The following sections tell you what you need to know to run your own affiliate program.

Doing the math

Just look at the numbers. Say, for example, that you’re selling a product for $20 that costs you $10, so you make $10 per sale. You pay your affiliates a 10 percent commission on each sale. If you have 1,000 affiliates selling your product, and each one generates a single sale in a month, you’re getting an extra $20,000 income per month, and it costs you only $2,000 to generate it.

Take off the $10,000 for your costs and the $2,000 for the affiliates, and that’s $8,000 per month profit — or $96,000 per year of free money. For a lot of small e-businesses, that’s enough to justify their existence. The individual affiliate, though, gets just $2 per month.

Of course, a savvy affiliate makes more than that, but it does show that the affiliate system is heavily weighted in favor of the merchant.

Using software to host affiliates

Some software is designed to enable you to host your own affiliate program. (See Figure 15-7.) Table 15-4 shows some of the products that you can get. As with reciprocal linking, you have to hunt down the people you’re going to be connecting with. On top of that, you have to manage everything. ...