Hello, I run a hosting company and have kind of setup an affiliate program. My question is do you think its best to do the affiliate scheme yourself by using one of the many script available as I have done or would I get better results with an affiliate company? Thanks
both will be good to try. Example : justhost, bluehost, hostgator have affiliate scheme by them self and they have register in CJ too.
You will certainly get a larger affiliate audience by going with a network, but at the same time you will need to pay a percentage of each commission your affiliates earn to that network. At hostgator we started with an in-house only program, then we moved into using CJ as well. We now offer both. There are certain perks to going in-house with us, such as better payouts, stats, live tracking, and domain information. It is probably best to make your in-house program offer a higher payout or some kind of feature that will outdo your network options, since in the end it will likely cost less per commission.
IIt depends on a lot of factors. First, are you willing to invest more time developing your in-house affiliate program? Or you want to just set it up and see it run by "itself"? Would you like to not just sell but do some branding and link building at the same time? or you want just to offer your product and earn some income from it? Do you want to determine who gets paid what, how much and when? or you want to just choose from pre-determined options? Do you want to create your own affiliates and super affiliates data base, being able to contact them? or you just want affiliates to sell your product? If you prefer the first questions you definitely should get into an in-house affiliate program but if you preferred the second ones go for an affiliate network. Both of them have pros and cons, but the important thing is to determine your goals in having an affiliate program, and how much you're willing to invest, not just money speaking, but in time and effort. Hope this helps you somehow. Have a very nice day
sentryhosting, I do affiliate recruiting and promotion for a living and can tell you it's MUCH easier to recruit for network programs than inhouse programs. MUCH! I also used to manage programs it's it's much easier on a network for lots of reasons. I have a whole list of benefits of going with networks, just need to find out where I made that post. CJ and some of the other affiliate networks are more than $5,000 to set up. So I recommend ShareaSale as a good but much lower cost alternative. Hope this helps and best of luck!
I think that when dealing with hosting there are quite a few differences than most affiliate programs out there. One of the biggest being that it is a service with no physical product, and it is VERY cheap to get started. The amount of fraud in any open signup network is going to be huge. In a network you are going to be very limited in what you can troubleshoot and what you can say isn't a good sale. People will try to scam your affiliate program and its quite possible that the network will have the final word in if you have to pay that user or not. You lose a certain amount of control in a network, which is something you need to be prepared for if you have ever managed an in-house program. However, there are benefits. And one of the biggest ones is you will reach a ton of affiliate marketers you would have had otherwise missed. An in-house program will most likely only be seen by your customers unless you are going out of your way to advertise it. Theres also the fact that you do not need to print checks, send out paypal payments, deal with missing payments, etc. Which can eat up a lot of time each month. My full time job mostly involves going back and forth with affiliates about commissions that are missing, invalid, etc. and finding a resolution. A network will pretty much provide that resolution, but it may not always be in your favor.
I found bits and pieces of my list of reasons, why a merchant would want to go with an affiliate network over in-house software, all over the place. So I just re-wrote the post over at my affiliate manager forum. I get asked this question often so want to have all the reasons in one place. It's a little long and for duplicate content reasons I don't want to post the whole thing over here, so here's part of it.