Over the past 18 – 20 months I have managed to build up 2000-3000 customers. I have been adding new customers at a steady rate of approximately 5 per day mainly via PPC advertising as well as advertising on a few niche websites. Whilst I this is not a bad customer acquisition rate I would like to take things to the next level.

I have reached the stage where I am finding it very difficult to exceed 5-7 new customers per day and seem to be running out of new PPC websites etc. which give me a good ROI.

Funds are reasonably tight as I now have 3 people employed full time so my total monthly advertising budget is limited to about $2500-$3500 per month.

I have been looking at www.cj.com and am very interested to know how effective other hosting companies have found affiliate based systems like this as well as how much you generally have to pay each affiliate per customer they refer.

Any other suggestions would be very welcome!

Thank you for your time.

cj.com has very high start up costs.
Consider clixgalore, affiliateshop, darkblue networks for more affordable costs.

I’m not massively concerned about the start up costs for cj.com. I’m more interested in how many affiliates are likely to be interested in advertising my plans for me assuming I offer competitive rates. Are cj.com able to put a lot of affiliates your way or do you have to do most of the leg work yourself?

Besides start up costs, I haven't ever liked cj.com

Years ago I signed up and got some customers through, then one day they said I had some illegal activity and they banned my account. They banned my e-mail addresses as well so I couldn't contact them. I used another e-mail address, but they wouldn't ever reply. I got screwed out of a hundred or two hundred.

Because of that, personally, *I* won't ever go with them

Personally, The few sales I've had have been from my affiliate program.
I offer my affiliates 75% of the refered's first month payment.
I don't require a site or anything, and it's ree to sign up. I've got about 12-13 people promoting my services to friends, family, etc. It works okay... Though, I was thinking "boohoo! only 5-7 signups per day!" And I saw 2500-3000 advertising budget, and had to laugh :P

Anyhow, kool that you're doing good :)

Yes I had thought about launching my own affiliate system and doing a mail shot to all of my customers about it to try to get them involved. My estimates are that I would be lucky to get 1 in 100 customers to actively participate in this which would result in approximately 30 affiliates. Assuming they send an average of 2 customers my way each month that may increase my signup rate by 2 customers per day.

I was hoping however that if I joined an established affiliate system such as cj.com they would be able to send a reasonably large quantity affiliates my way which in turn would allow for far faster growth.

I would love to hear from anyone who has used an affiliate system in the past (cj.com or another affiliate system) and is willing to share the amount of affiliates the system managed to put there way.

Thanks to everyone for your input.

Peter I've heard bad news about cj from the affiliates point of view. I haven't used them myself.
I would consider joining more than one at the same time and test them out. You can always drop them if they don't work.
I have noticed the larger hosting firms run their own inhouse program plus join networks.