Affiliate Software for Your Affiliate Program

If you haven’t already started an affiliate program for your online business, now is the time, and if you aren’t a very large company, you will need affiliate software to start.

An affiliate program allows people to sign up under your affiliate program. They then put links, text and banner ads that you have created for them onto their website. They start promoting your products or services and every time they sell your product or service via their affiliate link or banner, you give them a pre-arranged commission or flat rate.

This affiliate software from idev affiliate, is a server side option, which means you can manage your affiliate program from your own hosting server. If you don’t know how to install it and configure it, you will need to hire someone or pay idev a small fee to set it up for you.

It’s an inexpensive investment (around $200) where you don’t have to pay recurring amounts every month like you do with a hosted affiliate solution. Using this software also means you don’t have to give a commission to an affiliate directory like Commission Junction (CJ), LinkShare, Google’s Affiliate Directory, Share a Sale, etc.

As an affiliate myself, I personally can’t stand most of the affiliate directories out there.

Just so you understand the market, most of these affiliate directories make millions of dollars per year and don’t care about the code or interface of their site. Most of them coded and designed their site/program back in the 90’s and never bothered to change or update the code even though code and design has improved 10 fold in the last 15 years.

CJ has tried to improve their site in the last couple of years which is a positive thing, my complaint still is that it took them around 10 years to get their act together & I still find it difficult to intuitively find some areas on their site.

They clearly don’t hire a user interface person to design their site and since it’s a complicated site, that speaks volumes about their lack of respect towards affiliates.

I’ve even had one of their customer service reps REFUSE to let me speak to a manager.

CCBill is another example. Their backend and structure makes no sense at all, and is cumbersome. Yet according to a manager at CCBill, they have no plans to change anything. They even admit it was created back in the 90’s.

I’m telling you this because when you start an affiliate program, you need to keep in mind how your affiliates will use your backend with your affiliate software. If they find it difficult, they may drop your affiliate program and you will potentially lose a lot of sales and gain a bad reputation.

IDev affiliate software now has a cloud version where you can pay $39/month so everything is already set up for you.

You can start off slowly just getting someone to create an affiliate signup page for you, then get someone to create banners and text ads for you and away you go. The new thing now is creating video and social media ads.

Over time if you really get serious, you should learn the ins and outs of how to REALLY make your affiliate program work for your company.

Hope this helps & let me know which method you chose to start your affiliate program.

What Michelle Prefers