Join a network
You can pay commission (and often horrific start up fees) to an existing affiliate network. They will tell you they have thousands of affiliates ready to take your product. What they do not tell you is that your product is instantly in competition with the products of all their other merchant customers. Your ultimate customers might be shouting to buy from you, but if your affiliates do not sign to your programme, you never connect.

The affiliates in a network are never your people. Even in schemes where you are allowed to contact them, you may have to sign to a deal that prevents you using them after you have left the scheme. They think of themselves as partnering the commission organisation, not you. It is far better for you, if the affiliates are your people - people you can communicate with whenever you like, people who have actually chosen your product.

Worst of all, affiliate networks cost an arm and a leg. Do not be seduced by the chance of being quickly in to a big deal. Within a very short time, you will have paid out thousands for sales you could have achieved with your own affiliate sales force. Remember, there is competition here too. Your affiliates are likely to go where the money is. If your competitor is paying 15% and you are paying only 10% because the network takes 5%, where will the affiliates go? Of course, they will sell your competitor's products.

Worse still, the company may increase the fees they charge you. There is usually nothing you can do to stop them increasing their percentage or imposing a high minimum level for their commission.

When you look at your management figures, have you ever noticed how you thought your margins were really good, until you get to the bottom line. Your gross margin is great at 50%. You are making double your direct cost. But by the time you have factored in all your expenses, you find you are looking at a meagre 30%, and you still have to pay your sales team out of that. So the extra 25% or even 30% of commissions paid as an over-rider to the network is like a hefty extra tax - it takes most of your real, net, bottom line profit.

A further problem with using a network is that they have caught you as a captive. Yes, you can up-sticks and go somewhere else, but would you really want to lose the sales and profit you are now used to receiving? Moving can be expensive. Of course, people do move. They come to a system like Euraffiliates! At the end of the day owning your own affiliate team is like owning anything else. You are in control!

What is more, your private statistics are available on many networks to all potential affiliates , even if they have not yet signed up. That means even your competitors can go on some of these sites and see figures for your site conversion rates and affiliate average earnings. This is not data you should be sharing!


Run your own bought-in software
You can download software and set it up. You will need technical skills you may not have, to connect it into your shopping cart and your merchant service provider. Then you have to live with it. It may not be flexible enough to satisfy what you really want. It may not have the capacity to grow with you. It may not accommodate unforeseen changes in the way you want to pay your affiliate team. Support may be non-existent. Upgrades, if any, will cost money. That seductive saving of $200 when you buy translates into incalculable lost sales and additional time and expense.


Euraffiliates - the web based advantage
Euraffiliates is a web based system. When you sign up to us, you are signing to a service, not taking out a software license. You have no worries about new hardware, software redundancy, systems, reliability. All you do is nurture your affiliates and bank your money.

If you are looking seriously at affiliate schemes, you will be aware that there are other offerings than Euraffiliates out there. We know that. Two years ago, we tried what was then the market leader for a few weeks. We abandoned it and wrote our own programme because theirs was not sufficiently flexible. We have been improving our own software ever since. Now we reckon we have a World beater.

Euraffiliates has all the features you want and might ever need, but we do not drown you in dross which seems only to score points over our competitors. Euraffiliates is a clean simple system, set up and hosted by us and backed by a support system second to none.

What is more, we have a team working constantly on improvements and additional features, so that you can benefit ongoing, by the capital expenditure we are now committing to this project. This software takes a lot of writing. That is why you cannot buy in for $100. If you find affiliate software you can buy in for that sort of price, just use it for your hobby business! If the results matter to you, use Euraffiliates. A further issue on quality is that your more experienced potential affiliates will want to satisfy themselves that they really will get paid for every introduction. You cannot give them this assurance if you use a "home made" system. If you want to project a professional image, you have to use professional software.

We know that you will never leave Euraffiliates, but just to give you comfort - if you did want to do so, that is fine by us. You can even take your affiliates with you - names, addresses and all details. We will give you a print of all affiliate information.