Starting Affiliate Program/ Need Advice

I recently did quite a bit of reading of great information by Harvey Segal. He's a really common sense man. What he believes makes a lot of sense. Google him. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised at his information.

All the best,
Dr. Mike

Most affiliate programs pay out more to the affiliate then they get like a 60/40 split
affiliates getting 60%

Instant approval is definitely recommended. You can't do too much about people buying through their own affiliate links, but honestly that's VERY rare and hardly ever happens, so don't worry about that.

Products for $10-40, you'd need higher commission percentages to attract decent affiliates, anything from 50-75% commission. 20-30 percent won't really get you anywhere to be honest. But that ultimately depends on the product, sales page and funnel (if you have one)

There's nothing wrong with instant approval, instant payout is what's risky.

For commission, it's recommended to give at least 50%.

To avoid people just signing up to get a discount it is quite easy, the payout threshold.
Say for instance you set a payout threshold to $50 then they would need to buy a lot to get this discount at once, so they won't be able to get a payout if they sign up only to buy at your shop once for a $30 product.
I don't know the other specifics, but you can put the threshold a little higher too, if you wish.

Why not just use an industry standard like Clickbank?

As to the percentages..you'll just have to test to see what works best. There is no other way.

1) Instant approval in very important. Some user are so enthusiastic to work with vendors/publishers that they might loose their interest if you delay to approve them.
2) Affiliates always hunt for good opportunities, so if you will give them 40-50% share they will take more interest in working with you.

Analyze affiliate program of successful publishers and try to implement same strategy in your affiliate program.

Instant payout is risky, be careful when doing this, you will get fraud, we do an affiliate program at WebNet Hosting at Affiliates », it works well but I always recommend verifying every single affiliate.

I wouldn't recommend auto approval on your first campaign to be honest. Yes you may get more affiliates on board but if they are poor ones with un-responsive lists it will only damage your EPC's and in the long run you will never get any of the bigger affiliates on board as they will always check your stats before they ever think about promoting.

As for commissions, again that depends what your platform is and how your funnel is structured.

If it's a WSO and your front end is say $10 or under then I personally would offer 100% to make it attractive to affiliates to get on board.

You can then look at reducing the % for any OTO's / upsells / downsells to say 50%

Any applications that come to you can usually be sounded out pretty quickly by asking a few questions such as list size, target niche, proposed methods of promoting etc.

One thing you could think about doing with WSO's is to manually approve affiliates for the first 7 days then as momentum begins to die down you can then open it up to others.

Hope that helps a little!

I've always had auto-approval, have 1000's of affiliates and do not have that many who have purchased just that product without sending more traffic my way. In the range of 20% perhaps...so it's really not that big a deal given that the top 10% of my affiliates generate 50% of my sales and so I would not have wanted to lose them because I didn't have auto-approval.

Jeff