Affiliate Programs

Having an affiliate program for your products and services brings a number of  benefits. The first being the amount of traffic you get, it's going to be a lot. You can use this traffic for free because even if visitors don't buy they might subscribe to your Ezine or opt-in list and then you could follow up with offers of your product or recommend other products via an affiliate program that your a member of.

You could also use the traffic to attract advertisers and then sell banner space on your site at a premium rate. The third and final extra benefit you'll get from starting your own affiliate program is better search engine rankings. This is because nowadays link popularity is a big factor among many of the major search engines, since affiliates have to link to your site to earn commission you can easily have thousands of links pointing your way.

You simply can't lose with affiliate programs, you invest nothing up front except the cost of the software which in most cases is ridiculously low, usually you can make the cost of the software back within a very short time and you don't have to pay for advertising unless you make money first.

Source: by David Callan Starting your own affiliate program

About our E-Commerce Affiliate Program Application:

Our application is installable via a simple installation script. It automatically installs APA (Affiliate Program Application) with no hassle. The installation process creates APA's backend and frontend:

• A new menu in the E-Commerce administration menubar, called "Affiliate Administration" which allows access to all of the affiliate program's parameters, logs, configuration, banners, etc. All of the affiliate program's behaviour is manageable from there.

• A new menu in the Main Menu of your CMS (Content Management System), called Affiliate Program. Immediately after installation, this menu link can be moved wherever suits you better

• The shop administrator may configure APA the way it suits his/her needs.

• It's ready to go.

How does it works:

• A user visits your site, and is interested in your affiliate program;

• He clicks on the Affiliate Program link, and is greeted with a login page to the affiliate program, and also a link for registration, and information about what your affiliate program can offer;

• He reads the affiliate program's benefits and rules, and he signs up for it;

• He gets access to the Affiliate Panel, where amongst being able to change profile settings, preferences, check logs, etc., he gets access to automatically generated links to specific VirtueMart products, categories, or Banners & Text Ads the administrator might have created. These links contain their unique affiliate ID.

• He just clicks into the corresponding box which contains the HTML code for the ad/link which contains his affiliate ID. Upon clicking, the field's content is automatically selected, and he can just right click and copy the code, and paste it somewhere in his website.

• A user visits HIS website. He clicks on the link which leads him to YOUR website.

• VMA detects the affiliate's ID in the URL, and automatically credits the visit to that affiliate, and creates a tracking cookie in the visitor's browser. The time the cookie will last can be set in VMA's configuration.

• The referred visitor may purchase something now, or may return whenever (as long as the cookie lasts; default lifetime is one year) and purchase one or more items.

• Upon finalizing the order, APA detects the referral cookie, and automatically assigns that order to the affiliate. But he is not yet credited for it.

• When the order is marked as Confirmed in the E-Commerce shopping cart (either by an IPN script or by manual approving of the order by the administrator) commission is given to the affiliate. The final status of the order, when APA should give commission to the affiliate, can be set in the Configuration.