DIY Affiliate Program with iDevAffiliate

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If you are selling goods or services online a great way to grow your business is by providing an affiliate program so that professional marketers, website owners with related niches and possibly even hobbyist can make a percentage of the sales they help generate by sending leads your way.

You get two choices in this realm the first is to use an established Affiliate company who has a built in army of Affiliate Marketers. The second is to setup an in house application that you will host and build the army of Affiliate Marketers yourself.

Sounds like an easy open and shut case right? Go with the Army of Affiliate Marketers and call it day! Well not so fast let’s take a closer look at the details. A smaller Affiliate company could require you to put up to $5000 up front to cover payouts and fees with larger Affiliate companies requiring even more. Your product will be given a test run and if it does not perform well guess what? You get dropped!

Having started a new company, shelling out $5000 and potentially getting dropped didn’t seem to me like such great idea. So I scoured the internet in search for Affiliate software and found iDevAffiliate. I also found out that a lot of people that I know that have affiliate programs use iDevAffiliate and didn’t even know it! But finding out that Aaron Wall over at SEOBook uses iDevAffiliate put it over the top and so I downloaded a copy.

iDevAffiliate is pretty solid from top to bottom, it has great reporting built in and it took minimal time to integrate into my existing payment system so if you have integration questions feel free to post them in the comments and hopefully I can answer them for you. It supports PayPal mass payment, invoicing and QuickBooks exporting. You get a ton of great features with prices starting at $99. I will probably do a review of iDevAffiliate in more detail later.

One other great thing about going on your own and building a DIY Affiliate Program is getting to know the people who will be selling your products. To me it’s important to know that the affiliates that get approved are going to represent the products in the best possible way and support them with creatives and analytics conversion data.

Of course its impossible for me to know about every Affiliate Company out there and this post is definitely not the last word on this subject, so if you know of or you have a great experience with an Affiliate Company or Software post it in the comments!

Check out iDevAffiliate at: http://www.idevdirect.com/

If you are on the fence about iDevAffiliate post your questions in the comments.