Affiliate programs enable businesses to generate a lot traffic and consequently boost sales through promotion by third party individuals or sites. It is a cost-effective way to advertise your products and services as you dominantly pay for only efforts that turn into sales.

Setting up an affiliate system can be an easy or overwhelming task depending on how many affiliates you want to recruit, your payment policy, availability of time and the kind of product or service offered.

When it comes to affiliate systems, there are two options for a business : you can outsource the entire system or run your own customised affiliate system on your web host. Each has its own advantages and disadvantages.

If you have a relatively small amount of affiliates to deal with, then you can run your own affiliate software but if you are going to recruit an unspecified or a large number of affiliates, then you may need to outsource. The reason is, you will find it easy to deal with a huge number of sign ups, track payments, manage banners, monitor clicks, among others. The shortcoming is that you will have to pay flat fees or a percentage of sales generated to the company maintaining your system. A self-managed affiliate system will work well if you have a small number of recruits , have the time to answer queries and send out a few checks each month.

DIFFERENT TYPES OF AFFILIATES

There are several types of affiliate programs you can choose from. There is the pay per sale whereby an individual is paid only if a sale is generated from that affiliate