Affiliate Programme - which one?

What type of website do you have? Is it a shop and if so what program?

We were in a similar situation to yours a few years ago and ended up going with http://www.idevdirect.com and that worked on our horrible old ecommerce software (Erol).

Same question being asked in several places it seems!

Two issues, 1 is technology, the other is process:

Technology:

For an information product, clickbank is OK as a beginner way in.

1shoppingcart is a reliable shopping cart engine used by a huge number with affiliate programme built in - although IMC assoctrack, is more sophisticated still - if you can afford it!!

For a membership site amemberpro is a cheap script that handles affiliates

If you are serious about IMC ( the best!!!) go to their workshop on Nov 3/4 in London where they will mentor you through - but be prepared to pay £2K+ - the help of the best doesnt come cheap.

PROCESS

You need to pick super affiliates first who are heavyhitters in your niche with complementary product - and give them a VERY special deal.

Make sure you know the metrics of your site: the conversion rates to targetted traffic. Noone will want to waste traffic on an unknown quantity. So be ready to answer the questions.

And you must provide affiliates with tools - banners, emails, autorespnder series and so on. The easier you make this the better you will succeed:

1shoppingcart ( and assoc trak) have sample tools all built in - you to configure.

I am looking for an affilaite too at the moment, have contacted affiliate windows over the last couple of days, said they would get back to me. I have a feeling they will be stupid expensive, suppose you get what you pay for, but I really do not want to chuck £4k at something.

I also contacted a company called 'Paid On Results' who have seemed more reasonable. They have an offer on at the moment £300 set-up fee and then £75 a month on a six month contract basis. They said they will design two banners for me.

As for being able to intergrate their code, best thing to do is get a sample and you get your web programmer to have a look to see how hard it will be to get the whole thing working.