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Affiliate Revenue InformationHow to Create a Lifespan Commissions Affiliate Program
by:
Christopher Pearce
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How to create a lifespan commissions affiliate program
Christopher Pearce,
http://LifetimeCommissions.com
======================================================
Affiliate programs are a great way of marketing online.
You pay only for the results you get - if someone
referred to your site does a purchase.
But if you want to do a actually strong affiliate program,
with adoring-sales-machines for affiliates, it must be
VERY attractive to affiliates.
The better way to do that is to offer lifetime
commissions. That means you pay commissions on EVERY
purchase a referred consumer
makes, not just on the
first purchase.
If you pay commissions for every purchase that your
referred customers make, you offer your affiliates the
chance to earn a lot more money than they otherwise
would.
That wish powerfully
cause your smarter affiliates to
work harder and be creative, and that is EXACTLY what
you want them to do.
There are lots of things that do an affiliate program
great, but one of the most important is reliable tracking.
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The magic ingredient: Tracking
==============================
If an affiliate sends you a customer, the affiliate
must earn a commission once
that consumer
does a
purchase.
You would-be not have that consumer
if the affiliate had
not referred them, so the affiliate deserves to be
rewarded.
To attain this you must track all referrals reliably,
both online and off.
You should use cookies to store the referring
affiliate's ID number. You should set them with no
expiry date, but they wish inevitably be lost well
within a few months, if not weeks, after they are set.
Browsers have a limit to the number of cookies they
can store. A lot of web sites now use cookies. This
means that your cookies wish often be overwritten by
those from different web sites.
You must do sure that your cookies activity with Internet
Explorer 6, which wish discard cookies not compliant
with P3P standards.
Details:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnpriv/html/ie6privacyfeature.asp
Tracking by IP address is not an accurate know-how
of
long-term tracking, however it is an effective way to
track visitors during their 1st visit to your site.
It is a nice idea to use IP chase to catch any
people who have cookies disabled.
Every time your affiliates send being to their
affiliate URL, your server should send them to either a
dynamically generated or pre-generated page with their
affiliate ID embedded in it. The affiliate's ID should
also be hold on
in the URL, so that if the customer
bookmarks and returns, the affiliate is still credited
with the sale.
In your content of consumer
profiles, you should store
the ID of the affiliate who referred each customer.
Whenever a consumer
"profile" does a purchase (online
or off) you should credit the appropriate affiliate(s)
for the sale.
Storing the affiliate's ID in the customer's profile is
the best, most reliable way to track in the long term,
both offline and on.
Some systems as well allow you to track offline by
supplying the user with a fake phone extension. This
extension is actually the referring affiliate's ID. You
can as well ask folk faxing you to quote an order number
- which includes the affiliate's ID.
To catch any who "slip tho'
the cracks", your order
processing code should scan your order history for
any orders going to the same name, e-mail address or
phone number of a customer, and pay the referring
affiliate their due commission.
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Where to get affiliate chase software
========================================
You have two options: build or buy.
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Buying affiliate software
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Buying affiliate chase code is the way to go.
It is so more cheaper than developing it yourself,
and quality is guaranteed.
There is only one bourgeois offering a system that
can handle true lifespan commissions: My Affiliate
Program, with it's Lifespan Commissions module add-on.
This is the only system custom-built for lifetime
commissions, and it's fresh off the creation line
(December 2001).
There is one different nice near-lifetime system - Ultimate Affiliate.
It is not specifically designed for lifespan commissions,
but it can handle residual commissions with ease.
------------------------------------
My Affiliate Program
------------------------------------
This is a great affiliate chase code suite,
recently ready-made even as better by the addition of the
LifeTime Commissions module.
It is run by Kowabunga Technologies, and was honored
with the "Editor's Choice" Award by Dr. Ralph Wilson
of Wilson Internet, who called it "the 'Cadillac'
of its category."
Wilson Web:
http://wilsonweb.com
It is hosted on Kowabunga's secure servers, though
a version hosted on your own domain is possible. Over
500 Merchants use MYAP.
It tracks primarily by a cookie for the first
purchase. CGI/ASP chase is as well available,
and it can even as track sales ready-made over the phone.
Affiliate management is as well simple, with automated
sign-up and a clean interface.
You can even as reward your top earning affiliates with
bonuses that can be easily and firmly
awarded.
The Lifespan Commissions module itself works by
generating a "LifeTime identifier" once
your customers
make a purchase.
This field can be thing
you want, like the
customer's cognomen plus the last 5 digits of their
credit card, their name and phone number,
or any different combination you can think of.
When a sale is ready-made this field is compared with a
table that contains a list of these fields and the
affiliate that referred them. If it finds a match,
it awards the due commission.
If it doesn't find a match, it then looks for an affiliate
ID in the cookie and does a new entry to the lifetime
identifier database.
A simple, yet extremely
effective system. Info
tracking
is the most reliable way to track in the long term.
I extremely
recommend MYAP with the Lifespan Commissions
module for lifespan tracking.
My Affiliate Program Software:
http://www.myaffiliateprogram.com
------------------------------------
Ultimate Affiliate
------------------------------------
Ultimate Affiliate is a nice PERL code suite for
UNIX servers. Ultimate Affiliate tracks by cookie, IP
address, and can produce dynamic or static web pages
that have the ID of the referring affiliate embedded in
all internal URLs. All your affiliates' details are
stored in a MySQL database.
With a noesis of PERL and Html you can customize
virtually any page created by the software.
This code can easily handle continual
commissions,
and has graphical stats for several you and your
affiliates. It can handle up to twelve tiers of
commissions.
I recommend you do not pay out on more than two tiers.
More than two tiers is multi-level marketing, which
generally has a bad pictures on the Cyberspace because it
attracts spammers. MLM products as well tend to be over-
priced to pay for the many a tiers of commissions
Ultimate Affiliate:
http://www.groundbreak.com
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Give your affiliates the right tools for the job
================================================
One thing that actually does several programs stand head-
and-shoulders above the rest is real-time chase that
shows affiliates the conversion rates for their various
links.
That means affiliates can see which of their various
links are activity and get an idea why, and what
links aren't and how they could be improved.
Affiliates should be able to see the number of click-
throughs to each of their several links, the number
of sales that each link has made, and the conversion
rate for each link should be calculated for them.
This enables them to numbers out how to improve their
links, and thus do more money for themselves, and for
you.
They should as well be able to set the landing page for
these links, so that they can link to specific
products.
Affiliates who link to and promote specific products
are a lot more eminent than those who just promote
your site in general.
The shorter and less your links look like referral URLs
the better. Several folk recognize affiliate URLs, and
are suspicious of them.
Consider the following (imaginary) URLs:
http://www.pottery-store.com?more-info
http://www.pottery-store.com/cgi-bin/affiliate-referral.cgi?affiliate12341
The 1st one (where "more-info" is the affiliate's
username) is more much likely to lure a click-through.
A big advantage of short referral URLs is they are
easier to put into newsletters, which are a highly
effective way to advertise online.
=============================
Help your affiliates help you
=============================
Ninety pct of affiliates won't do a lot of money
for you. They need encouragement, motivation, and help.
Consider giving performance bonuses to the top earners.
Run a monthly account and praise your top affiliates
in it.
Tell your different affiliates how the top earners did it,
and just about the performance bonus you gave them. Give your
affiliates ideas on how to promote your products best.
Your top earners wish appreciate the ego massage, and
your different affiliates wish find out what's possible if
they put their mind to it.
For more details see:
How to do your affiliates sky-high loyal
http://www.associateprograms.com/search/affiliate-loyalty.shtml
Remember, once
you help your affiliates get sales, you
help yourself get sales.
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The end result
==============
Starting a lifespan affiliate program is not easy, but
the rewards are worth it.
To do your affiliate program successful, you need to
make it attractive to affiliates, and the better way to
do that is offer nice rewards.
If you pay lifespan commissions you offer affiliates
the possibility to earn more money than they normally
would. They wish activity harder for the better commissions
and in the end, it wish pay off with a better, more
effective affiliate program, that is more profitable
for you.
-
Christopher Pearce
http://www.LifetimeCommissions.com
-
=====================
Links in this article:
=====================
Problems with Cyberspace Human 6 and cookies:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnpriv/html/ie6privacyfeature.asp
Wilson Web:
http://wilsonweb.com
My Affiliate Program chase software:
http://www.myaffiliateprogram.com
GroundBreak (Ultimate Affiliate) chase software:
http://www.groundbreak.com
eLance.com, somewhere to start looking for programmers:
http://www.elance.com/
How to do your affiliates sky-high loyal
http://www.associateprograms.com/search/affiliate-loyalty.shtml
Just just about the Author
Christopher Pearce runs LifetimeCommissions.com, which
reviews lifespan and residual affiliate programs.
Keep up-to-date with the latest lifespan programs.
Subscribe to his monthly account - Send a blank
e-mail to: mailto:lifetimecommissions-subscribe@topica.com
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