Affiliate programs can be a win-win solution both for the company with products to promote, and for people who want to add a new revenue stream to their current income.

This article focuses on best practices for maintaining an affiliate program. For basic information about setting up an affiliate program, or for information about joining affiliate programs, read the article in it entirety here.

Tips for setting up an affiliate program:

1. Have a lawyer do your affiliate agreement. You want it to be in plain enough English that you aren't scaring off potential affiliates, but you also want to make sure that you are not leaving your business open to any misinterpretation and legal action.
2. Pay for purchases - not click-throughs. If you set up an account that pays based on the number of visitors referred to your site, you run the risk of falling prey to false clicks. These can be committed by either unscrupulous affiliates, or by your competitors who want you to pay extra for your advertising efforts.
3. Have multi-tiered affiliate programs. Don't just pay for a purchase, pay your affiliates if they bring more affiliates to your program. It widens your sales force, and makes them more inclined to promote the program itself above and beyond the products.
4. Set a minimum payout level. Be reasonable about the amount for the smallest cheque your program will issue. If your associates are making $0.80 per sale, do not make them wait until their balance reaches $100 before issuing a cheque. They may lost interest long before that and take your channel with them.
5. Pay as much as you can afford for the traffic. The more money your affiliates stand to make, the more motivated they are to promote your offerings to a wider audience. You will also attract a wider pool of affiliates as they tell their friends and networks about the program.
6. Provide training and support. Give your affiliates guidance about how to position your products or services, how to identify potential customers, and how to avoid chasing time-wasters. Affiliates who feel abandoned quickly lost interest in promoting your offerings.
7. Be flexible. Provide quality link text, graphics, and banners, but also allow your affiliates the freedom to create their own ads within your style guidelines. This may involve providing a version of your logo on a transparent background so that they can use it in context without being limited by the size, shape, and colour of your existing banners. It also lets them use the link in a body of copy such as articles and advertorials.
8. Check out the links once in a while. If the copy pointing to your site is misleading or ineffective, you are simply wasting bandwidth.
9. Be sure to weed out ineligible sites. While even the poor performing sites will serve as advertising (at no cost if you are only paying per purchase), illegal or inappropriate sites may reflect badly on your business. Web sites with little or no content and lots of links will be useless to you as there is nothing to draw visitors, and you will be competing for what few they do have.
10. Have a process in place to deal with complaints. Whether it is from a customer or an affiliate, be sure to handle any issues quickly and decisively. Better still to have the complaints process in writing in the agreement and in the site policies.
11. Keep in touch with your affiliates regularly. This helps keep your program from slipping down their priority list and helps them to feel part of a team.