I know of some companies which will manage the affiliate program for you, but are there any companies which would handle the the payment part only (mailing a check to the affiliate).

What (dis)advantages for an affiliate management company?

Thanks

The disadvantage is that they will take out a chunk for themselves :(

Here's a list of affiliate networks & Programs:
http://www.clixgalore.com/
http://www.shareasale.com/
http://www.fineclicks.com/
http://www.cj.com/
http://www.myaffiliateprogram.com/
http://www.affiliatetracking.net/

Those are the smaller ones with the exception of CJ and are listed in no perticular order.

Outsourcing your affiliate operations can cost more than doing it inhouse - that's prob the major obstacle for most hosts. The cost is usually 35% on top of your commission paid.

Example: add $35 to every $100 paid in commissions.

In addition, there are setup fees ranging from $150 to as high as $3000.

But the advantages are many: man hours saved, no accounting or tracking hassles, little paperwork, no need to issue payments directly, etc.

Originally posted by HostAZ
In addition, there are setup fees ranging from $150 to as high as $3000.

Don't forget BeFree and LinkShare.com which range in the $15K - $30K! Ouch :(

I would not recommend going with a small affiliate network unless you are going to do the marketing for yourself. They don't have the base of webmasters you need to make money off of the deal and the small sign up fees do not outweigh this disadvantage..........written by someone who went with one of those companies listed above and is still waiting for the first sale to come in 4 months later.

My fav is cj.com since they have a large existing network of affiliates for you to tap into already .. you don't have to waste time and money marketing your aff program from scratch. :D

Yeah CJ is good from starting from scratch.

Also if you plan on running multiple affiliate programs call and talk to a sales rep the fee is <cough>not set in stone <cough> ;)

Check out Darkblue.com ...A WHOLE NEW WAY to do affiliate programs. They do everything for free. Serious as a heartattack and they've got a great company and support

do everything for free....

hmmmmmmmm

Just seen their site ... what is free???? you mean they don't charge their merchant fees??

I just looked at Dark Blue. On the sites where your ad is placed, when someone clicks on your ad, a popunder goes up underneath your site. It looks like they are selling these popunders as a way to make their money and there is no fee to the advertiser for using the network..............

Now that I have said that, I went and signed up as an advertiser and when I got to the page in the admin where you enter your credit card, it was not even SSL protected. Another thing that was fairly odd was that if you are doing more than $500 per month, they require you to wire them money and you cannot use credit card to pay them.

Even though I am not a big believer that many unsecure credit card transactions will be snapped up by the bad guys, there is something just not "right" about a company that in this day and age does not have their own SSL cert for processing credit cards. Other than that, their site looks nice and it is an interesting take on the affiliate network concept.

just want you to be ware from affiliate sites ..

i'm with shareasale for more than month now, i got maybe 30 affliates .... all of them are poooooor sites, most of this sites add your banner in a page full of banners .. all kind of banners in all sizes in 1 page .. really s*ck


i think your banners in such sites will make negative impression about your business ... i put $50 as a deposite about month ago .. and i pay $3 comession for each sale .. guess what .. the $50 still as is :(

2Mhost, yep, my worthless affiliate program is with shareasale as well. After several months now I have had maybe 30-40 affiliates sign up, 0 real orders and 1 fraud order. What makes me more mad than anything else is the time wasted in setting up the program.

I think CJ got some big affiliates that sell alot of hosting each month .... definitely worth considering

can you compete with the hosts at cj. if not then don't bother

yes darkblues "payment" is through a exit pop.