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The meaning of affiliate turns out to be 'associate' or 'partner' in any dictionary and similar is the meaning of an affiliate program. An affiliate program is nothing but an arrangement between two parties with one being the affiliate provider or the merchant and the other being the publisher or salesperson. Through an online affiliate program the publisher earns a commission for referring visitors to the affiliate merchant website.

How to start an affiliate program

Starting an affiliate program is a means of increasing your website traffic which would in turn account for promotion of your goods and services. An affiliate program works on the simple process of click and register. Generally the affiliate merchant has a tracking software installed on his server that registers clicks on the basis of when and where the click was made, items purchased etc. Now the main question before a company going in for an affiliate program is, how to get affiliates?

Getting affiliates

You can get affiliates by providing adverts in newsletters/websites, providing information on your website etc. But if these don't work the best way is to go in for online affiliate network programs like commission-junction. An affiliate network generally takes care of everything from procuring affiliates, recording tracks to making payments and are your best bet. Some affiliate networks are commission-junction, befree, clicktrade etc. But in case you are averse to providing your business details to other services you can go for in-house tracking softwares like Pro-TRACK that can be downloaded from affiliatesoftware.net. Similarly many other tracking softwares are available and most of them can register affiliates automatically.

Decide how to pay

The next most important decision you need to make is to figure out how to pay? There are many paying modes available. Some popular ones are.

• Pay per sale This mode involves you to pay a sales commission to the publisher or salesperson based on the number of sales that occurred due to his reference

• Pay per referral This is a one time pay mode, which involves you to pay the publisher a one time commission per customer referred.

• Pay per click In pay per click mode you need to pay the published based on the number of clicks generated on your website based on his referral

• Two-Tier mode A two tier payment system involves you to pay the publisher for the direct sales he generates and also for the sales generated by his own affiliates.

After making these two important decisions you are well on you way to starting you own affiliate program.