When looking to launch an affiliate program for your company or gain additional affiliate distribution for your offer, there are a multitude of options to consider. Everyone wants to grow a large, productive affiliate program for their company, but cutting through the misconceptions can be difficult for many companies. I will discuss the affiliate network options you have for your company and what I think is a good strategy to pursure in order to grow your affiliate marketing efforts as quickly as possible.

The first place to consider setting up your affiliate program is with one of the “major” affiliate networks like Commission Junction, Linkshare, Shareasale, and the Google Affiliate Network. The nice thing about the major networks is you have complete publisher transparency, i.e. you know who your affiliates are and how they generally promote affiliate programs. Most networks also provide referring url data so you know where the traffic is coming from, which is good if you are concerned with controling the quality of sites promoting your company or offer. My personal favorite affiliate network is Commission Junction (CJ) for a few reasons. CJ has a great tracking platform that has been quite reliable over the years. CJ has a wealth of diverse “affiliate/publishers” you can prospect from in their database, allowing you the ability to send recruiting emails to particular countries and categories of affiliates. They have a great email system, that allows you to send newsletters and promotions to your affiliate base without cost, and the deliverability is good. CJ also allows you to recruit affiliates into the program by sending them “pending offers” to join your program which they may or may not accept, but the option to do this is great. The other major affiliate networks do have good affiliates and good systems, I have just personally found that CJ is on it’s own higher level of publisher quality and platform consistency. All companies that are serious about growing a large, productive affiliate program, over-time, should launch on CJ and possibly 1 or 2 other major networks, but you have to really watch duplication of order IDs across networks when you run on multiple affiliate networks.

Companies with an “offer” that pays a flat fee or engaging in lead generation may want to consider “CPA Networks” or cost-per-acquisition affiliate networks. One of the issues with CPA networks is that they don’t give you that publisher transparency to know and interact with all of your affiliate-publishers personally. This is fine for some companies with CPA offers, but most medium to large size companies and ecommerce companies tend to shy away from CPA Networks due to the fact that you can’t work with your affiliate base personally or send newsletters promoting deals. However, some companies don’t mind this as long as the network is producing good sales or leads, so CPA Networks do work well for certain companies.

The 3rd option is running your own private affiliate network. Operating your own affiliate network can be a great idea because you can recruit affiliate partners directly and work with them one-on-one because you get their phone number and other contact information. Private networks don’t inherently have any affiliates, so you have to mobilize a force to recruit good affiliate partners through a lot of outreach to relavant websites and blogs. I recommend HasOffers.com for running your own private network because they are reliable, feature-rich, and extremely cost-effective (starting at $99/month). HasOffers allows your affiliate partners the ability to log-in and check their stats at any time in a nice interface. It also holds unlimited offers so you can operate with 1 offer or 100s of offers in your private network. I usually recommend operating a private affiliate network in conjunction with a program on a major affiliate network for the best results.

Regardless of where you grow your affiliate channel you need to have competent, pro-active affiliate managers minding the fort. If you launch in a major network without good affiliate management your program may not grow at all and seriously disappoint you. There are a few options for managing your affiliates, i.e. in-house managers, outsourced managers, or hiring an affiliate manager from the affiliate industry. In-house managers can be good if they know what they are doing and have some experience with the affiliate landscape, otherwise they won’t know how to handle issues and you may get burned by fraud if they aren’t watching it closely enough. Outsourced affiliate managers can be a great option if you use the right company with connections and good strategies for growing the program. Hiring an experience affiliate manager can be a good idea if you hire the right person that doesn’t have too many preconceived bad ideas about how to manager you affiliates. Whomever you use to manager your affiliates, make sure they are experience in web promotion, HTML, and SEO. Also they should be really nice, friendly, and a good social networker, so they can build great partnerships with your affiliate base.

All and all, launching and running an affiliate program on an affiliate network is a great idea for most companies. Keep your expectations in check and plan to grow it year over year strategically. Don’t be afraid to invest into your affiliate program by launching on major networks, running contests, bonusing producers, and other promotions to create excitement among your affiliates so they try to promte the company moreso. Running an affiliate program should be a fun and exciting endeavour that grows over time through the right management strategies and principles. It can be a very profitable channel for companies with little risk because everything is on a performance basis. Now get out there and launch your affiliate program!