Small businesses often lack of a big advertising budget. So affiliate marketing seems to be attractive to them. Basically there are two choices of diving into the world of building income from an own affiliate network:

1. Hosted solutions:

There are many affiliate networks out there that promise more traffic and more sales within just a few weeks. Basically anything sounds easy: After registration, they take over all technical aspects and you just have to find people willing to subscribe as affiliates for your site.

Of course, there is an initial setup fee in most cases, a monthly fee that increases with each new registered affiliate and for some services you are getting charged separately. Finally you need to spend much money and sometimes wish that not another affiliate has subscribed that costs you an extra amount each month regardless bringing new sales or not.

2. The do-it-yourself method:

This means nothing else than buying a software tool and installing it on your server (sometimes installation is also included in the license fee). After installation and first configuration you are ready to start.

Now the same job begins as already stated above - find people willing to get an affiliate of your company. And there are many ways to do so:

Existing satisfied customers may be your first choice. You may not need to convince them, since they are already convinced from your products and services. So just asking them should be enough. And remember that the best seller is someone using its own products :-)

Also visitors of your website may be interested in subscribing as affiliates. So placing a link on your front page is all needed. And since you don't have to pay anything for new affiliate sign-ups, it doesn't matter how many people subscribe - just important they have and are linking from their websites to yours.

No one can promise you getting rich within a few months just by starting an affiliate program, no matter hosted or self-managed. But even the fact that people recommend your business will definitively increase your website's traffic, customer awareness and even search engine ranking. Finally this leads into more sales sooner or later as well.

Summary:

While an hosted affiliate management solution may sound the easiest way, it is also the most expensive one. And can you be sure that your affiliates' personal details are kept confidential and are not being sold to other companies ? Who knows.

So investing some time and getting familiar with managing an own affiliate program (which isn't as complex as it sounds) is surely worth the efforts. It is a one-time investment in software and brings you the same success as hosted solutions. Furthermore it is more secure, since all personal affiliate data is stored on your very own server.

At this point I want to recommend YourAffiliates - it is an easy to use affiliate management software that installs right away on your server. Installation is included and a lifetime support provided free as well. See YourAffiliates - affiliate management software for more information.