If you’re looking for some software to run your affiliate program, chances are that you’ll have come across iDevAffiliate.

iDevAffiliate is software that you usually install on your own web server (the most economical way) or if your hosting setup is a pain in the neck then you can use their hosting solution.

The iDevAffiliate software is well supported and comes with a year’s worth of upgrades included in the price. Support is by email or – if that can’t resolve an issue – then it gets escalated to phone support. The email support is responsive and helpful.

So, what can iDevAffiliate do for you?

The quick answer is that iDevAffiliate can completely run your affiliate program for you.

You’ll need to set things up – it’s not like Clickbank where you sign up for an account, wait for approval and get issued with a hoplink to give to affiliates. iDevAffiliate is much more flexible than that.

You can use near enough any payment system in existence. There’s a whole list on their site of systems that are supported “off the shelf” and there are ways of integrating near enough any other system. So whether you’re using PayPal, Google Checkout, E-Junkie, 2CheckOut or a shed load of other payment processors, you should be covered.

iDevAffiliate also integrates with near enough any shopping cart from free systems such as Zen Cart through to other options such as 1ShoppingCart and AMember. So if you’ve spent time and effort getting your shopping cart up and running and now want to add an affiliate program, iDevAffiliate is definitely a system to look at.

Payments are completely customisable. You can pay a fixed amount per sale or a percentage. You can pay affiliates per sale or per lead. And you can pay them once or on a recurring basis.

You can choose to offer a tiered commission system so that affiliates get commission for other affiliates they introduce. Just make sure that you stay within the terms of service of companies like PayPal who aren’t fans of that idea.

iDevAffiliate also lets you offer higher payouts to affiliates who introduce lots of business to you.

Setting up iDevAffiliate is straightforward but it’s worth going through all the settings and making sure that they are all correct. You’ll need to allow yourself some time to do this.

Installing iDevAffiliate on 1&1 hosting

One problem I encountered installing the software is that that it is protected by ionCube. It’s not a problem if your host supports that (most do) but I happen to use 1&1 for the hosting that I wanted to run iDevAffilliate on and 1&1′s hosting is non-standard (to put it nicely). In common with most of the sites I found, the instructions 1&1 give for loading ionCube are out of date – they refer to a file called ioncube-loader-helper.php that does not get installed in the standard installation and doesn’t come with the latest downloads either. This seems to have been replaced by a file called loader-wizard.php which is invaluable in identifying problems – just upload it to the problem folder and run it. It will then tell you why ionCube isn’t working in that folder and what you need to do to fix the problem.

1&1 require you to create a file called php.ini and place this in the root folder of your domain. On 1&1 hosting the iDevAffiliate installation needs this php.ini file in any folder that runs the program files – the main directory, install directory, etc. Essentially anywhere you get an error message. Once I got over that issue with the help of 1&1 support and the loader-wizard.php file, all was well.

Overall verdict

iDevAffiliate is a cheap but highly flexible way to run an affiliate program. It will do all the laborious background work of checking affiliate sales and it will run the processes necessary to pay out affiliates, including creating a PayPal mass payment file if you want it to. It’s well supported – tech support is fast and helpful.

You can check out all its features before you buy with the online demo and they also answer any pre-sales questions you may have promptly as well.

Click here to take a look further at iDevAffiliate.

Clickbank is probably the place most affiliates start and there’s certainly a wide choice of Clickbank affiliate programs.

You join once and can then promote any of the thousands of different programs they offer and treat yourself to a healthy slice of the profit every time you make a sale.

A typical commission at Clickbank is at least 50% of the retail price and can often go as high as 75%, which means you get at least as much as the person who produced the product in return for introducing a sale.

Clickbank only pays for sales. You don’t get anything for introducing leads.

Things to check before promoting a Clickbank product

Always check the “pitch” page. You’re looking to see whether or not the sales page looks reasonable. You won’t know how well it converts to sales until you send some traffic to it, but it should look “OK”. Make sure it doesn’t have ways that your commission could leak away – you’re checking here for things like Google Adsense on the page as well as whether they only take Clickbank for payments.

If they display Google Adsense, don’t despair. Instead of promoting the product, use the techniques discussed in Adwords 180 to display highly targeted adverts on their site.

Some people are put off if the main page has an email opt-in box on it. Personally, I don’t mind as it means that the site is likely to be sending out follow-up emails to promote their product. Your Clickbank cookie will still be there unless another affiliate sends the same visitor to the site, so you’ll still get your commission until the Clickbank cookie expires 60 days after you first send your visitor to the site. Chances are that if they haven’t bought the product in 60 days they never will. So don’t panic!

The Clickbank Marketplace is where you find products to promote. The search is fairly basic but workable. You get a bunch of figures below each product like these:

$/sale: $21.24 | Future $: – | Total $/sale: $21.24 | %/sale: 50.0% | %refd: 67.0% | grav: 0.38

The first figure ($/sale) tells you the likely payout you’ll get from the sale. This is after Clickbank’s commission and also takes into account refunds and special offer prices. So it almost certainly won’t exactly equate to the percentage shown. However, it’s a good guide.

Future $ applies if the product offers a recurring commission on sales, for example if they also sell a monthly membership.

%/sale shows the percentage of the sale price you’ll get. So long as this is reasonable, go with it. Sometimes a product will offer a lower percentage because they have more support costs or they know they convert visitors well. Other times a site will offer the maximum of 75% to bring in affiliates but may not convert as well. The only way to find out is to test. Sorry.

%refd  is the amount of sales that are “referred” or not sold by the product owner themselves. The higher this is, the better as it means the product owner isn’t competing against their affiliates.

Finally there’s “grav”. This is Clickbank’s figure that takes into account how many affiliates are promoting a product and a few other things. Personally, I ignore it but other people use this figure to judge how many other affiliates they are competing against.

The important thing is not to get too hung up on all this. Dip your toe in the water with various Clickbank affiliate programs and see how you get on promoting Clickbank products.