If you are looking for new opportunities to expand your online business, launching an affiliate program is a good way to go with. With its rapid growth, affiliate marketing proved to have the potential to drive sales and generate significant revenue.

Why is it so popular? First, you don’t spend your time on product promotion. Affiliates do it for you, while you concentrate on strengthening the product. Second, it’s efficient, as you pay only for the final result. And people you work with are from the start motivated to produce this result.

What do you need to start with affiliate marketing?

If you still wonder whether it is worth to start affiliate program – stop doubting, just try it! Launching an affiliate program can increase your revenue, the number of sales, conversion rate, average order value, and the amount of traffic you get.

Define Your Vertical

If you already have a product to promote, you can probably skip this step as your product already determines the vertical. However, if you don’t – choosing your vertical will be the first thing to do. Take a look at the most popular verticals, research on peculiarities of each, but also think which one you find interesting to work with.

Find Offers

Once you’ve settled on a vertical, you can start looking for relevant advertisers and offers to promote. There are a lot of directories of top affiliate programs available online, where you can read reviews and access information on offers.

If you don’t have a database of advertisers you work with yet, there is another option for you – data transfer tool CPAPI, that serves as an intermediary between sources of offers and Affise. It allows you to add hundreds and thousands of offers from advertising platforms into your network.

Choose Commission Rate

There are several different ways to reward your affiliates, and it depends on what you sell. It doesn’t always have to be a percentage of each sale. It can be a set dollar amount for each valid lead if you are interested in lead generation.

The most common reward plans are:

CPA – cost per action, one of the most common commission rates;

CPL – cost per lead;

CPC – cost per click;

CPI – cost per install;

CPM – cost per thousand impressions;

CPS – cost per sale.

All affiliates have their own rules that touches upon payment policies. Expect to find different payment conditions while looking for offers. Currently, the most demanded payment plan is a pay-per-conversion plan, where you pay only for a final conversion, not losing money on empty impressions or clicks.

Plan Marketing of Your Program

To make your program more enticing for affiliates to join, think about the corresponding promotion. Design user-friendly affiliate sign-up page, properly advertise your program online. Join affiliate communities to recruit more affiliates who promote products in the same niches. Besides making your program more visible, also think about its term, make offers more attractive for affiliates and comply with all agreement terms.

Find Affiliate Tracking and Management Solution

The success of affiliate program depends on the technical part not less than on initial investments and workflow management. Even if you work with only one affiliate, you still have to track the traffic flow, conversions, and make payouts. But what if there are dozens, hundreds, thousands of affiliates? It becomes much harder for you to manage all the offers, creatives and publishers in the most lucrative way.

To track everything properly you may either develop core capabilities in-house or go with a ready-to-use performance marketing platform. For advertisers and affiliate networks, it’s a decision with the direct impact on short and long-term business growth. Besides, having accurate tracking data on hand will save you from any discussions that might arise if the numbers of sales at your end do not match your affiliates’ figures.

In-house & SaaS: which one to choose?

An in-house solution is attractive in terms of data security and control over any additional developments – you have your own server with database and you decide how to use it. You keep all data within your software – everything is under your control. Flexibility, transparency, and control are the three main reasons why some like the idea of having their own tracking software. But at the same time, it is pretty troublesome as you are the one responsible for all updates, settings, errors etc. Further, the development process will be time and cost consuming.

The option that dispenses you from these responsibilities is a SaaS platform. It is installed and hosted on the software’s servers, and there is no complicated software installation, which guarantees you a quick start. SaaS provider is responsible for all updates and any technical support you may need. Besides, SaaS platforms are subscription-based, which allows you to predict the approximate amount of expenses and significantly lower initial costs.

Fortunately, there is a bulk of tracking platforms on the market. Unfortunately, you can’t trust all of them. Don’t get scammed choosing a solution for your business. You neither want to risk your business by using an unproved tracking solution, nor lose partners due to a lack of features that your partners may request. That is why you need a reliable tool, such Affise, that is developed by the best professionals of the sphere and trusted (or even endorsed) by the leading companies. Besides, starting with ready-to-go platforms have some clear advantages. Let’s take a look at some of them.

It’s Easy to Start

With performance marketing platforms, such as Affise, you can start your business and get first revenues in less than 72 hours. Besides, you will have a dedicated onboarding specialist who will lead you through the whole setup process.

PRO TIP: The most common and time-consuming challenge when starting a campaign is to pull all your offers. CPAPI solves this issue. It is a technology that enables prompt transfer of all your offers and import of existing affiliates/advertisers profiles into our platform.   

The whole package

Affiliate platforms cover different business models, such as CPA, CPL, CPI etc. Through them you can run different verticals and directions. Further, you also get all needed features, like statistics, Smartlinks, cap management, KPI section, smart targeting, API, 3rd party integrations etc. Everything that you need for the affiliate marketing business is here.

You Get Support of Best Professionals

Starting in affiliate marketing may be quite difficult, so you have to be sure that you have a back-up from the best professionals. If you are not sure about something, there is always a dedicated team from the platform provider who will walk you through the whole platform setup and management process.

At Affise you have a dedicated team of an onboarding specialist, customer success and technical support managers. They will help with all integrations and setups, carry out any needed demonstration or training calls, monitor your accounts and give recommendations. You can rely on their support 24/7.

Want to see how your sales skyrocket with affiliate marketing? Try Affise for free during 30-day trial. Use ReklamStore10 code to get 10% OFF for the first month on Affise.