Affiliate programs are a great way of marketing online. You pay only for the results you get - if someonereferred to your site makes a acquire. But if you want to make a really strong affiliate program,with adoring-sales-machines for affiliates it must beVERY attractive to affiliates. The best way to do that is to offer lifetimecommissions. That means you pay commissions on EVERYpurchase a referred customer makes not just on thefirst purchase. If you pay commissions for every purchase that yourreferred customers make you offer your affiliates thechance to acquire a lot more money than they otherwisewould. That will strongly cause your smarter affiliates towork harder and be creative and that is EXACTLY whatyou want them to do. There are lots of things that make an affiliate programgreat but one of the most important is reliable tracking.==============================The magic ingredient: Tracking==============================If an affiliate sends you a customer the affiliatemust earn a equip when that customer makes apurchase. You would not undergo that customer if the affiliate hadnot referred them so the affiliate deserves to berewarded. To bring home the bacon this you must track all referrals reliably,both online and off. You should use cookies to store the referringaffiliate's ID number. You should set them with noexpiry date but they will inevitably be lost wellwithin a few months if not weeks after they are set. Browsers have a check to the number of cookies theycan hold on. A lot of web sites now use cookies. Thismeans that your cookies will often be overwritten bythose from other web sites. You must make sure that your cookies bring home the bacon with InternetExplorer 6 which ordain discard cookies not compliantwith P3P standards. Details:http://msdn microsoft com/library/fail asp?url=/library/en-us/dnpriv/html/ie6privacyfeature aspTracking by IP address is not an accurate method oflong-term tracking however it is an effective way totrack visitors during their FIRST visit to your place. It is a good idea to use IP tracking to surprise anypeople who have cookies disabled. Every time your affiliates send someone to theiraffiliate URL your server should send them to either adynamically generated or pre-generated summon with theiraffiliate ID embedded in it. The affiliate's ID shouldalso be stored in the URL so that if the customerbookmarks and returns the affiliate is still creditedwith the sale. In your database of customer profiles you should storethe ID of the affiliate who referred each customer. Whenever a customer "profile" makes a purchase (onlineor off) you should credit the appropriate affiliate(s)for the sale. Storing the affiliate's ID in the customer's compose isthe beat most reliable way to track in the long term,both offline and on. Some systems also accept you to track offline bysupplying the user with a re-create phone extension. Thisextension is actually the referring affiliate's ID. Youcan also ask people faxing you to quote an order number- which includes the affiliate's ID. To catch any who "move though the cracks" your orderprocessing software should scan your request history forany orders going to the same label e-mail address orphone number of a customer and pay the referringaffiliate their due equip.========================================Where to get affiliate tracking software========================================You undergo two options: build or buy.--------------------------------------------------Buying affiliate software--------------------------------------------------Buying affiliate tracking software is the way to go. It is so much cheaper than developing it yourself,and quality is guaranteed. There is only one merchant offering a system thatcan handle true lifetime commissions: My AffiliateProgram with it's LifeTime Commissions module add-on. This is the only system custom-built for lifetimecommissions and it's fresh off the production lie(December 2001). There is one other good near-lifetime system - Ultimate Affiliate. It is not specifically designed for lifetime commissions,but it can handle residual commissions with ease.------------------------------------My interact Program------------------------------------This is a great affiliate tracking software suite,recently made even better by the addition of theLifeTime Commissions module. It is run by Kowabunga Technologies and was honoredwith the "Editor's Choice" Award by Dr. Ralph Wilsonof Wilson Internet who called it "the 'Cadillac'of its category."Wilson Web:http://wilsonweb comIt is hosted on Kowabunga's secure servers thougha version hosted on your own domain is possible. Over500 Merchants use MYAP. It tracks primarily by a cookie for the firstpurchase. CGI/ASP tracking is also available,and it can even bring in sales made over the phone. Affiliate management is also simple with automatedsign-up and a alter interface. You can change surface recognise your top earning affiliates withbonuses that can be easily and securely awarded. The LifeTime Commissions module itself works bygenerating a "LifeTime identifier" when your customersmake a purchase. This handle can be anything you want like thecustomer's surname plus the measure 5 digits of theircredit card their name and phone number,or any other combination you can think of. When a sale is made this field is compared with atable that contains a list of these fields and theaffiliate that referred them. If it finds a match,it awards the due equip. If it doesn't find a match it then looks for an affiliateID in the cookie and makes a new entry to the lifetimeidentifier database. A simple yet highly effective system. Database trackingis the most reliable way to track in the long term. I highly recommend MYAP with the LifeTime Commissionsmodule for lifetime tracking. My interact Program Software:http://www myaffiliateprogram com------------------------------------Ultimate Affiliate------------------------------------Ultimate Affiliate is a good PERL software suite forUNIX servers. Ultimate Affiliate tracks by cookie. IPaddress and can create dynamic or static web pagesthat undergo the ID of the referring affiliate embedded inall internal URLs. All your affiliates' details arestored in a MySQL database. With a knowledge of PERL and HTML you can customizevirtually any page created by the software. This software can easily command recurring commissions,and has graphical stats for both you and youraffiliates. It can handle up to twelve tiers ofcommissions. I recommend you do not pay out on more than two tiers. More than two tiers is multi-level marketing whichgenerally has a bad image on the Internet because itattracts spammers. MLM products also tend to be over-priced to pay for the many tiers of commissionsUltimate Affiliate:http://www groundbreak com================================================Give your affiliates the alter tools for the job================================================One thing that really makes some programs stand head-and-shoulders above the rest is real-time tracking thatshows affiliates the conversion rates for their variouslinks. That means affiliates can see which of their variouslinks are performing and get an idea why and whatlinks aren't and how they could be improved. Affiliates should be able to see the be of click-throughs to each of their different links the numberof sales that each cerebrate has made and the conversionrate for each link should be calculated for them. This enables them to figure out how to alter theirlinks and thus make.
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http://affiliaterevenueforu.blogspot.com/2007/10/how-to-create-lifetime-commissions.html
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