own associate program
By Kristine M. Lammy
webmaster, Prism Air
Some associate programs out there are total scams and give the rest of us a bad name, but people shouldn't be so quick to judge a new program.
We know how skeptical most web owners are about honesty in these programs, which is the reason for our letter. When we decided to start our affiliate program, we didn't want to worry about our reputation, the program not working right, etc., so we planned on using a well-known program (which generates server logs and every detail known to man,) to track affiliate sales.
Our launch date was set for July 31, 1998. After all the bad press and questionable ethics with some of the tracking sites, we chose to do the tracking ourselves (with the now infamous tracking program which we purchased!) and set our program up as a 10% commission based on sales. No worrying about people clicking on a banner hundreds of time just for the few cents they'd make! Thinking we had covered every base and had a great program to offer, we went to work advertising the program.
We were stunned by the response (much thanks to you, since 99% of our affiliates have come from your site!), and started adding more features to the program. In addition to being able to link to our site from any or as many pages as they wish, we also offer co-branded pages with exceptional graphics, a free banner design, an affiliate banner page, a search engine, a free "Affiliate of the Week" page which is a complete page with their ad, info, graphics, etc., and much more! We have been as excited as our affiliates about getting started!
We purchased the (supposedly great!) tracking program the first week of July, knowing we'd have plenty of time to get it set up. After getting 3 weeks of the run-around, countless unanswered e-mails and telephone calls, they finally told us that the program isn't capable of tracking sites the way we need it to. One week away from our launch date, and no way to track sales! What a terrific day that was!
We had already approved over 100 web sites and they were all waiting to get started! Well, the gist of the whole thing is, we've had to redesign our entire site (well over 600 pages!) from a site with static HTML pages to a site that runs from a CGI script. Each page has to be capable of tracking sales, because that is what we offer in our affiliate program!
Our thought was if web sites could link to any or as many pages as they want, their sales would be much higher, making them and us much happier! In addition to the program being behind, all of the other freebies we offer were also behind because of this one huge change! We didn't want to lose the people who had already signed up, but we had to tell everyone in our newsletter that it would be a few more weeks before the program was up and running. A few people were less than happy, but we felt it was much more important to be honest about our dilemma than trying to slither out of the problem!
We planned this for almost a year, did everything we could to make sure it would be a terrific opportunity and there were still huge glitches after all that planning!
Most people have no idea what starting an affiliate program entails and are quick to judge when things aren't perfect immediately! All programs go through trials and tribulations when they first get started. You find what works and improve on it . . . you find what doesn't and get rid of it! I'm not saying that they're all just going through growing pains . . . there are a lot of scams and unethical people out here in Never-Never Land and the sites who are ripping people off should be trounced on hard and everyone should be told to stay away from them, but I'll bet the majority of sites with little quirks are just experiencing the "Get Started Blues!"
My point is this . . . for anyone thinking of joining an affiliate program, the best advice is caution . . . there is no way for you to see people on the Internet, no way to assure yourself that they are honest, no way to know 100% if who you're dealing with is a genuine business entity or a group of crooks! Be careful, be cautious, but don't be so quick to judge!
What software or script did you use, Kristine?
Would you believe I've ended up using a reworked version of Perlshop? I didn't have time to learn an entire new programming language so I did a quick study in Perl and CGI. It's been a nightmare all the way around, but I've learned a lot!
UPDATE:
Wonderful news! We finally finished our site, sent out the ID#'s on August 18th, and everything seems to be up and running smoothly! I hope you get a chance to look at some of the great options we offer. In addition to exceptional banner and graphic links, we also offer a mini-page with links already encoded, 25 exceptional co-branded page choices, and text links!
Sincerely,
Kristine M. Lammy
http://www.prismair.com
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