Hey guys, I'm looking for a company to help me setup a "customized" affiliate program and I was wondering if anyone would be able to point me in the right direction.

I don't know if commission junction, linkshare, performics, etc. would be right for what I'm trying to do. I could be wrong though.

Without getting too in-depth, I'm probably going to need to setup an autoresponder/broadcast system on my own server with multiple campaigns per affiliate.

I'm also going to need some fairly advanced tracking capabilities (at least in my view, maybe they really wouldn't be by industry standards). I'll need to do tracking across two different programs that would be combined under my affiliate program. I'll also be implementing brandable ebooks for my affiliates.

My webmaster thinks he can do most of this stuff...but...I think it's a little over his head. Besides, he's overstretched as it is.

Any help much appreciated.

Thanks,
Isaiah

Hi Isaiah,
Any specific reason why you want to do this on your own server?

If it were me, I would go with Aweber for the tracking/autoresponder.

And since you will have a downloadable product I would use Clickbank for the affiliate/delivery system.

Both are reliable and have been proven to work for hundreds of others.

Well, each affiliate would have their own campaigns with pre-written emails and their affiliate urls, which would be created as soon as they opened an account. Would an autoresponder like Aweber be able to integrate with my system in order to do this? It could potentially be an enormous amount of campaigns all within one account, I don't know what would be more efficient.

As far as clickbank, one of the reasons I was shying away from them is because I want to be able to use my own checkout process and not theirs.

Another thing too is I really don't want anyone to be able to go into the clickbank marketplace, grab an affiliate link to our website and then slap some adwords up for it.

Isaiah,

For e-mailing and auto-responders, I recommend 1-2-All by Active Campaign. I've set up a # of my hosting clients with their own stand-alone installations, and I also run a shared install for smaller Mom & Pop type businesses who run smaller lists. 1-2-All does scheduled mailings, stacked/series of messages each of which you can schedule, runs ordinary mailing lists, the whole 9 yards. Has click-through tracking/stats and LOTS more. It is very effective for the price and the only ongoing fees are your own hosting account.

Just make sure that you host on clean IP space, your host allows the volume of e-mail you are sending out, and that your mailing practices are reputable so that you don't end up with spam complaints. There is nothing that will make your day more miserable more quickly than to break net etiquette and create a spam/UBE mess. If you use a reputable host w/ clean IP space, and use reputable mailing practices yourself, you won't have any problems running your own list.

Bailey

Thanks for the resource, I'll check it out. Any suggestions on an affiliate management software?