Setup Guide

Affiliate Program

An affiliate program give you a very powerful way to increase sales. If you read any of the information about selling online, affiliate marketing is considered one of the most powerful ways of increasing your sales. All of the most successful online marketing programs involve affiliate sales.

Affiliate marketing dramatically enhances your reach into the marketplace. You can reach thousands of potential customers that you would never reach without an affiliate program. Your affiliates are your sales people. 

One of the things you must do to acquire and keep active affiliates is provide a complete and accurate accounting of what business each of your affiliates is sending to you. This includes the number of visitors, or clicks, they sent to your pages and the number and amount of sales that resulted from those visitors.

There are two basic payment methods for affiliates. One is Pay Per Click (PPC). You pay the affiliate an amount for each visitor that they send to your site. So, if you're paying them 10 cents per visitor and they send 100 visitors to your site this month, you owe them $10. This very similar to the Pay Per Click search engines like Google, etc.

The second method is Pay Per Sale (PPS). Each time an affiliate sends you a visitor that results in a sale, you pay them either a percentage of each sale or a flat dollar amount for the sale. In this case it doesn't matter how many visitors an affiliate sends, you only pay when a sale occurs.

There are pros and cons to both methods. My personal preference is PPS because you only pay when someone purchases something. The potential downside of PPS is that you can have a hard time getting solid affiliates if you can't demonstrate a solid closing ratio. For example, if you can't show that if you get 100 visitors you get a sale, or two sales, or more, you may only get affiliates that deliver mediocre results. The affiliates that will deliver thousands of visitors a month are not interested unless you deliver results.

Another feature of affiliate programs is how long the visitor is "remembered". If the visitor doesn't purchase on the first visit, how long do we remember them to pay the affiliate their commission? When your affiliate sends a visitor to your site, we place a cookie on their browser. We also write a record in our database indicating the affiliate and the visitor. When we place a cookie on the visitors browser we set a time for how long the remember the visitor. The default value is two years. So, if the visitor purchases something in the next two years we will remember who the affiliate was that sent the business. That way, they get paid even if the visitor didn't purchase the first time they visited.

Another way affiliates typically get paid is if people they refer to your site become affiliates. If the new affiliate produces sales, the original affiliate may receive an additional flat dollar amount or percentage of the sale resulting from the new affiliate. This is called a two level affiliate program.

You have a lot of flexibility with eCOMpal's affiliate program. You can pay per click or  pay per sale. You can pay a flat dollar amount or a percentage. You can set up a one level or two level affiliate program. You establish the length of time we remember the visitor. 

Setting Up Your Affiliate Program

1. The first step is to click on the Affiliate Program link in the My Affiliate Program Menu.

2. Name - Give your program a name, like "Selling Widgets Online".

3. Pay Per Sale - If you're going to Pay Per Sale, check the Pay Per Sale box. If you don't check Pay Per Sale, it will automatically be a Pay Per Click program.

4. Cookie Days - Decide how many days you want the visitor to be remembered. This is Cookie Days. The default is 720 days, approximately two years.

5. Program Info URL - Where can your affiliate find out all the information about your affiliate program. This is a reference to your web site and all the information about your affiliate program, including how much you pay, how often you pay, what form of payment, etc.

6. Web Address URL - Where do you want the visitors to go when they click the link from the affiliate?

7. Pay Amount Per Sale Or Lead

8. Payment Percentages - If you check this box, you are paying a percentage. If you want to pay a flat amount, uncheck the box. Note: If you're paying per click, this should be unchecked.

9. Pmt Level 1 Premium - How much is the payment amount or percentage for the first level affiliate?

10. Pmt 2 Premium - How much is the payment for the second level affiliate? I.e. the affiliate that referred the affiliate that got the sale or click.

11. Welcome Message - This is the message that will be sent to new affiliates when they sign up for your affiliate program.

If you want to set up an Offline Affiliate Program the following fields are available

12. Coupon Not Required - If you're not running an offline affiliate program exclusively from your account you want to check this box. Normally, the visitor can NOT proceed until he or she enters a coupon code to continue the process.

NOTE: For the offline affiliate program, the visitor (customer) that's making a purchase will be asked for a coupon code. The coupon code is the Affiliate Id of the Offline Affiliate that sent the visitor. If you are selling exclusively through an offline affiliate program, don't check the Coupon Not Required box. If the checkbox is unchecked the visitor MUST enter a coupon code (the affiliate's ID) in the coupon code before continuing.

13. Free Shipping - Do you want to give the visitor Free Shipping with their order as an incentive to purchase

14. Discount - Or, do you want to give the visitor a Discount as an incentive to purchase. Enter a discount amount or percentage

15. Is the Discount a Percentage - if you entered an amount in discount check this box if it's a discount percentage rather than a flat dollar amount.

That's it for the setup. There's one more thing you need to do.

Create Links For Your Affiliates

To make it easy for your affiliates, you need to create one or more links they can add to their site to send their visitors to your site. You can create either text links or image links. Personally, I think you should create at least one of each. On some sites an image link has the most impact. On others, including newsletters, a text link is more effective or useful.

1. Click on the Links For Affiliates link to start the process. 

2. The first thing you'll see is an empty list of links you've created. Click on the New button to create a new link.

3. Description - This is used in two ways. If this is going to be a text link, this is the text that will be displayed for the link. Give people a compelling reason to click on the link. Why do the want to go to your site?

If you're creating an image link, then the description is the Alternate Text for the image. It will be displayed if a visitor puts their mouse over the image for a few seconds. It should complement whatever the image is representing and give people a compelling reason to visit your site.

By the way, the description can contain HTML formatting, like <B></B> to bold a section of text.

4. Image URL - If this is an image link enter the URL address of the image. Where is the image coming from?

5. Image Height - If an image link, what's the height of the image? This improves load speed.

6. Image Width - If an image link, what's the width of the image? 

That's it. 

If you create several links with different ../images and compelling descriptions you can monitor how many clicks and sales from the clicks you're getting from each of the links. It can help you refine your message.