If you decide you’d like to have your own affiliate marketing program or reseller program, you’re basically going to be putting up a separate page within your website for each of your affiliates. This is how you and your affiliates will track their sales and know how much compensation they get. The process of creating a separate web page for each of your affiliates is time consuming but there’s usually no cost involved so that’s the up-side to having an affiliate marketing program.

Here’s how you set up the pages for your affiliates:

Let’s take my ProgramReview.com website for example. The first time you get someone who wants to be your affiliate, you’d simply create a page within your website for your first affiliate and call it: ProgramReview.com/af1

The next time someone comes to you and asks to join your affiliate program you’d simply make them a new page within your website called ProgramReview.com/af2

And for the next affiliate who joins your program you’d call their page ProgramReview.com/af3

Next person get ProgramReview.com/af4

And so on. You just keeping counting along while you grow a massive army of affiliates that are out there advertising and branding your products and even your domain name. Because remember, since the websites of your affiliates look like this: ProgramReview.com/af5, that means every time one of your affiliates advertises their affiliate page, they’re actually advertising your domain or in this case my domain name which is ProgramReview.com

Each of the pages of your affiliates are going to be identical. The only difference between ProgramReview/af1, ProgramReview/af2, ProgramReview/af3, ProgramReview/af4, and af5 etc, is the fact that each one of those pages will have a different tracking number. You will actually code in a unique tracking number for each one of your affiliates right into the html code of their page.

For instance, the affiliate who owns the website at: www.ProgramReview.com/af3 would have the affiliate tracking number of “3.” And that way when an order comes in from the site at ProgramReview.com/af3, a hidden code in the order form will track that code and show it to you(the owner of the affiliate program.) This is a simple method to manually track each sale that comes from one of your affiliates. This also makes it simple to know which affiliate gets the credit and how much credit they get.

Since ProgramReview.com is the root part of their affiliate website, the search engines are going to list my main website at ProgramReview.com extremely high up in their listings. Yes, each of the people that are promoting my affiliate program and using their affiliate website that contains “ProgramReview.com” inside it, they’re actually making my website more popular on the search engines. It’s not like I’m taking anything from them or doing anything in a dishonest fashion. My affiliates all get paid exactly what they earn and I pay them on time. But most of my affiliates aren’t aware that they’re doing me this enormous favor of helping my “Link Popularity”, and most of them don’t even understand what link popularity is. If they knew affiliate marketing as well as I do, they’d be making the kind of money I am.

Although this manual method of setting up an affiliate marketing system I described above is extremely inexpensive to set up, it can be very time consuming to manage if you end up with hundreds of affiliates. And it’s easy to end up with hundreds of affiliates.

The first time consuming event that often happens when you run affiliate sites is when you want to make a change to the affiliate site. This means you potentially need to change hundreds of your affiliate sites by hand. So whether you want to change a picture or some of the ad copy, it must done by hand.

Also the manual method doesn’t allow you to your affiliates any real time statistics of their own sales and prospects, and the contact info of their prospects. Plus they won’t know how much money they’ve earned until you add it up with a calculator or adding machine. And you’ll probably only batch up the totals once a month and add up all the sales your affiliates have made. Doing this any more often than once a month would be a nightmare.

Plus your affiliates will be putting a lot of trust in you because many of them fully know and understand that you’re the only one who knows the actual totals. This means each of your affiliates must trust that you won’t short change them and cheat them out of some of their share. So obviously this is a very old fashioned and quite primitive way of tracking your affiliates. And this primitive tracking system could actually scare off some of your potential affiliates because these days affiliates are getting smarter and smarter about only doing business with companies that have rock solid affiliate tracking systems or software. Don’t skimp on your affiliate marketing program.

Now I know you’re probably wondering why I even told you about this manual, old fashioned way of tracking affiliates since now I’m telling you it can be a pain in the rear. So you’re probably wondering what the real advantage of this old tracking method really is? There is just one simple advantage and that’s cost! It’s almost free to set up a manual system for tracking your affiliates. So if you don’t have any extra cash and you have plenty of extra time, the old fashioned tracking method might be perfect for you and you’re affiliate marketing program.