When deciding to become an affiliate marketer, there are 3 paths you can take. Affiliate marketer, affiliate advertiser, or affiliate network. As an affiliate marketer, you will avoid the hassles of negotiating with vendors, getting paid by your vendors, and the accounting of paying your affiliate marketers. You will be able to focus on marketing offers with a pre-determined commission so managing expenses will be simplified slightly. You still have to plan effective campaigns which can be risky but you will be leaving the other problems to the affiliate network.

As an affiliate advertiser, you will post offers for products that you have the right to sell and your primary responsibility will be to deal with the best networks that give you the most quality traffic to maximize your sales. You will have some accounting to do especially if you’re dealing with many different networks. Also, during the “net-30” payment period each month, you and the vendor will have to determine which conversions resulted in a payable sale. I say payable because if a product is returned within 30 day, you might not get paid on that sale. The vendor has the final say.

You will be keeping the difference between what you receive back from the vendor as payment and what you committed to pay on each sale so this reconciliation period is going to be your main activity. The networks that you advertise on are depending on you to collect from the vendor and pay them to protect the integrity of their network. Affiliate marketers do not like dealing with networks that don’t pay on time or don’t pay at all. Good networks will drop your advertisement if you have a history of slow payments.

If you decide to become what we are, an affiliate network, there will be a significant financial commitment upfront to get your network up and running. At Affiliate Money Store, we are on the Hasoffers network but there are a few others out there too. What that means is that we pay a monthly fee to use the Hasoffers platform that does most of the affiliate activity tracking for us. You, as the affiliate network owner are responsible for posting the offers that you will be making available to your affiliate marketers, monitoring offers posted by advertisers, and accepting or rejecting affiliate marketer applications. You don’t want every affiliate that tries to sign up with your network.

The Hasoffers platform has some built-in fraud protection features that check the information submitted in the affiliate application request form for it integrity. If the address you entered does not match the IP address from which the application was submitted or if the phone number doesn’t match the same, your fraud factor will increase. If you are using a “free” email account in addition to the above, you might be considered 100% fraudulent. Ultimately, it’s up to the network owner to override or reject each application but the Hasoffers platform helps in the process. It also generates invoices for both your vendors and your affiliates but you will have to run each one individually. At the moment, there’s no batch procedure for that.

So as an affiliate network, you will be dealing directly with your affiliate marketers, your affiliate advertisers and vendors, and other affiliate networks. It can be both fun and a nightmare at times, because you have more responsibilities to more people as an affiliate network owner but the rewards can be greater too.

We would suggest that you take your own personal inventory first. Decide whether you’re more of a people person or more of an internet geek which is a good thing in this field ;-). Also decide what upfront capital you have to start your business. What’s also important is whether you’re in it to make a few extra bucks or if you want to retire with a 7 figure income. If you aren’t too experienced with internet marketing and have limited funds, I would start as an affiliate marketer or as an advertiser. If you can negotiate an exclusive deal with a reputable vendor, you could advertise their product for free on our network and get paid when sales are made leaving the advertising expenses needed to find the customers in the hands of the affiliate marketers.

If you have a decent budget for advertising, becoming an affiliate marketer will offer more rewards but also a little more risk because you will have to experiment with finding the most productive way to advertise different offers. Either way the most important thing to do is start NOW! Figure out which one you want to be, come up with your “game-plan”, and start TODAY. You can also decide to become all 3 like we are at the Affiliate Money Store but we also have a staff so that helps. Good luck with whatever you decide and feel free to contact us with any questions or concerns. Happy Selling!