Building an Affiliate Strategy that Affiliates will flock to

Hey everyone,

I am looking for some advice. I have a niche website I've been running for nearly 8 years now. I recently relaunched it as a WP Multisite, membership site.

My primary site has over 5,000 articles I've written myself and has always been free to read. If you do a simple keyword search on any topic within my niche, you'll find one or more of those articles. Each of my new 7 subdomains are all related to my primary site and offer inexpensive (my readers/visitors run businesses on narrow margins) products and services.

Up to this point, my primary revenue has been through advertising and book sales (I've written an official "for Dummies" book on my niche). With the membership, I hope to build an additional revenue stream. I am currently working with several partners to create discounts our members will receive outside of the discounts they'll receive on my products and services. This will provide additional value to a membership purchase. Once I have a few more partnerships locked up, I will be working on my marketing/advertising plan.

Part of this plan is to include an affiliate program, and that's the reason for this post.

I am struggling to develop an affiliate plan that will attract professional affiliate marketers. My membership plan costs roughly 20 bucks a month (recurring) or 200 for a year subscription. My subdomains offer products ranging in price from 10-50 dollars.

I would like to know what type of percentage you think I should be offering? I've seen similar sites in different niches offer anywhere from 20-50% to affiliates for only paid membership sign ups. Also, should I offer percentage commissions on sold products by non-members they refer?

Since my memberships and products are so low priced, a split won't be big money if you look at a single purchase, but at the same time, if they build a strong funnel to the site, they could end up with a lot of smaller recurring commissions.

I would love to hear your thoughts on building my affiliate program the right way. One that will entice not only the beginner affiliates, but also the true professional and experienced affiliate marketers.

FYI, I am currently planning on running the program in house and use AffiliateWP to help monitor affiliates, if that matters to your advice. I'd like to stay away from the affiliate groups so I can provide more to the individual affiliate instead of losing the percentage of the split with the Clickbanks of the world.

Thanks in advance.