About Affiliate Programs

A good Affiliate Program can be an important piece in your marketing plan.

An Affiliate Program is one way of generating leads to your web site from other web sites your potential customers visit.

This is similar to banner advertisement you probably see all over the internet. Generally though, banner advertisement is done through an advertising agency and you pay a price up front based on the sites traffic and your expected response. With an Affiliate Program, you actually locate web sites that attract the same clientele you are interested in reaching. You will probably want to find complementary sites rather than direct competition. Complementary sites will likely informational sites that contain information your customers are interested in, or other e-commerce sites that sell products or services that are similar to yours. For instance, if you are selling computers, good affiliate sites maybe software web sites, computer discussion boards and office equipment sites. Once you have decided on what types of web sites your potential customers frequent, you must identify specific sites within those categories you wish to be associated with. A good affiliate program will have over 25 sites advertising your site. You will probably want to limit the number of affiliates you have to a number you can monitor though. Remember, an affiliate reflects on your company; if you indiscriminately choose a number of web sites to become affiliates your reputation could suffer; there are many sites on the internet that become affiliates for any site they can. You probably do not want to be affiliated with these sites. Try to target sites you would like your company to be associated with and that you have done business with, or would like to do business with in the future.

Once you have contacted the sites you would like to have in your affiliate program, you will need to create special links for their sites so you can track customers that are coming from each affiliate. The Precision Web shopping cart can do this for you, go to our affiliate program page to find out how. Once you have created unique affiliate links, create a nice image your affiliates can put on their sites rather than a simple text link. For instance, a general affiliate link from Precision Web is http://www.precisionwebhosting.com/index.php?source=abctoyshop.com, ABC Toy Shop could put that link directly on their page, but it would look better if we gave them the following image:

Then, the customer can hyperlink the button to your site using the http://www.precisionwebhosting.com/index.php?source=abctoyshop.com url.

Go to our Affilate Program home page to learn how to manage and track your affiliates using the Precision Web Shopping Cart.