Starting Your Own Affiliate Program

For the last few weeks I’ve been buzzing about my new affiliate program, which has turned into a few people asking the question, “What program / service do I use to track my affiliates?”. After some searching, I decided to use 1shoppingcart. I was also looking at clickbank, but I’ll tell you why I chose the first option.

If you want to sell a digital product / information product and you are looking for a reasonably priced / robust affiliate management service, clickbank is a great option. They are affordable and they have network of thousands of experienced affiliate marketers looking for new products to promote, which means you don’t have to spend SOOO much time looking for affiliates trying to get them to signup to your program. Clickbank is practically perfect, but not completely. During my research I found that it’s not very flexible, as far as allowing you to really customize your pages like you want to. Now if you have no clue what I mean by that, then your clearly not in need of intricate customization and what clickbank offers just might be enough for you.

1shoppingcart costs more, but I think you get more bang for your buck as far as being able to control your money, your affiliates, and the design of your pages. Plus I was able to do a 30 Day Trial of 1shoppingcart for $3, so I got to play around with ALL the features for 4 weeks to really know if it was right for me. With all that control comes responsiblities, so you have to make sure you will pay your affiliates on time and that’s VERY important. You don’t want unhappy affiliates giving your program bad press. Also keep in mind that by law, you are required to have any of your affiilates who make over $600 fill out a w-2 from. The pro of starting your affiliate program via websites like glam, linkshare, or commission junction is that they do the payouts for you but you’ve got to have pretty large and lucrative businesses to be applicable to join some of those affiliate networks.

I’ve got a small and thriving operation and I wanted to be able to manage it on my own, so 1shoppingcart was the best choice for me. During my research I also came across ABESTWEB, which is an affiliate marketing forum great for chatting with other people who have and/or want to create their own affiliate programs. If I come across any interesting issues or highlights along the way I’ll be sure to let you know.