How do you start an affiliate program for your website?

[Trebor29]

Hello people, its been a while....
I have been looking all over the internet trying to find out how to start an affiliate program for a website and earn commision from sales made by affiliate sign-up'ees!
I have found info on becoming an affiliate for another website and info on making an affiliate website, but with no mention of making money. I think marketing/promotion would be the profit here.
What I would like to know, if anyone can help me, is how would someone go about being "at the top of the food chain" if you like, in an affiliate context. Asuming you had a popular website already up and running, how would you go about setting up an affiliate programe so to take a percentage of every sale of future affiliates? AND, subsequent affiliates taking a percentage from their sign-up'ees... and so on...!

A little bit of enlightenment would be much appreciated. Thank you.

[Neo]

hi Trebor,

Basically this is done by using cookies.

1. First and affiliate is registered with your system with an id: 1234
2. He provides a link in his website (or somewhere else) by asking users to click on a link like http://www.yoursite.com?aff_id=1234
3. A user click on that link and come to your site.
4. You store a cookie in client with affiliate id (1234)
5. That user grab information and come to your website again to buy the product.
6. You read the cookie and get to know that he was introduced by affiliate 1234.
7. You credit commission to affliate.

[Trebor29]

Hi Neo,
Thats a much more indepth professional answer that what I had at digitalPoint very good!

So if you have the website up and running, with alot of traffic and alot of members etc. and in a good position to offer an affiliate program, would it be a case of designing/writing a program to do the job of reading cookies etc. or is there a cheaper and easier way?

[Neo]

First, It is good to understand the process. Read http://www.devshed.com/c/a/MySQL/Buildi ... -PHPMySQL/

Then, there are loads of free & commercial implementations. I'll list down some of the free ones I found.

http://www.qualityunit.com/postaffiliate/
http://scripts.kunals.com/index.php?pag ... il&itmid=1

You can try each one of these and select the best match for you. Obviously you will have to do minor modifications to get it going.

Also, thanks for the compliments. I just do my best to help you guys

Good luck!