HOW TO START YOUR
OWN AFFILIATE SCHEME

You've probably heard of the money making potential afforded by joining affiliate schemes. Earning commisions by selling on behalf of another company can be a great way of earning some extra cash on the net.

Clickbank.com is a great way to bring would be affiliates to YOU! And if you want to get truly rich, then you shoud consider setting up your OWN affiliate scheme. If you've developed your own recognisable brand, website product or service then this is an opportunity you should grab.

Effectively you can multiply your sales potential many times over by signing people from around the world to sell for you. As the owner you will pay affiliates a commision (decided by you) for referring buying customers to your website. Although you're paying out money, this is coming from sales that you otherwise may not have made, so its a win-win situation.

WHY START AN AFFILIATE SCHEME?

Here are the main reasons why an affiliate scheme will be so successful in boosting your income:

• If you have your own website, you need to publicise it in order for people to come and look/buy. This can be costly with advertising. Having affiliates promote it however is like having a team of sales people selling your product around the world 24/7 effectively increasing the size of your'shop window' many times over.
  
• Having an affiliate programcan be better than paying to display a series of ads as your affiliates have a direct interest in your business and will aggresively promote your product to a highly targeted market.

GET STARTED THE EASY WAY

The easiest way to get started is to get listed by many affiliate scheme directories, which list the many schemes available to join.

Should you require assistance, many affiliate scheme directories have their own special templates and hosting services which you can use to build your own program. You can customise them to your own requirements and the site will host everything for you. The good thing about using this kind of service is that these directories are normally effective in terms of attracting affiliates since they have a faily high profile.

Apart from  Clickbank which is more worldwide, a couple of UK based networks to try are AffiliateWindow  and  CommisionJunction.

GOING IT ALONE

The alternative is to do it by yourself and control your own program. This takes a lot more planning and effort but gives you far more flexibility and enables you to build far greater brand loyalty among your affiliates.

Most affiliate schemes offer you either your own site or a piece of html code which is placed in your website and serves as a link to the owner's website. The purpose of this is to add your own 'branding' to each affiliate's site(e.g. your logo; a banner ad) and also to monitor clickthroughs and sales so that comission can be calculated.

So how do you set up the technical side of things to administer your affiliate program?
You could do it yourself if you have the skills or pay a web designer to do it. Alternatively you could buy special software to do the job. There are various programs out there that range from a few pounds to a few thousand.

Here are some affiliate software program sites to try:

www.affiliatemarketing.co.uk
www.clixgalore.net
www.myaffiliateprogram.co.uk
www.affiliatewiz.com