Start Your Own Affiliate Program

If you have your own website, then you should look into starting your own affiliate program. Whether you're just starting out, or you're already making a good living from your website, you can always use more sales. Starting an affiliate program means that you can essentially hire a team of professional salespeople to help you by offering them a commission on every sale that they recommend for you. Now, maybe you're thinking you won't make as much off of each sale by giving out commissions, which is true, but you will be making more sales, and more money in the end. It's better for you, and it's better for your affiliates. Also, more affiliate links means more incoming links, which will often mean better search engine rankings.

Here are my top recommendations of places you can go to get started:

1. 1ShoppingCart
1ShoppingCart is my top recommendation for affiliate software because it comes as part of their shopping cart service. They also include a full email management system with autoresponders, and complete tracking for your ad campaigns and sales conversions. If you're looking for software to run your affiliate program, and you don't already have a shopping cart, then I recommend giving 1ShoppingCart a try.

2. AssocTrac
AssocTrac is a great piece of affiliate management software for anyone who already has a shopping cart that they like and is looking to add an affiliate program. It will manage everything for you. All you have to do is log in to see your statistics and send out checks to your affiliates when the time comes. I highly recommend it for anyone who plans to run their own affiliate program, and not use a third party system.

3. ClickBank
ClickBank is great for anyone who wants to sell virtual products, meaning anything that can be downloaded like an e-book, software or a subscription to a newsletter. The great thing about ClickBank is that they already have an army of affiliates who work with them, who will be willing to recommend your product to people for you. And they handle paying your affiliates for you. But they only work with virtual products. If you want to sell physical items using a large affiliate network, then check out Commission Junction below.

4. Commission Junction
Commission Junction is similar to ClickBank in that you can use them as a source for products to recommend and you can use them as a place to find affiliates for your products. They can be used for virtual or physical products. You will see that many of the biggest names on the internet use them, like Yahoo! and eBay. Commission Junction will also handle paying your affiliates for you. They have a great system and I personally use them all of the time.