Though always advancing with time and technology changes , Affilliate marketing (paying commision to clients / businesses or individuals for a product purchase) is a marketing stategy that dates back to the late 1880’s . It coincided with the launch of the world wide web in 1989. It all started with an american firm PC flower and Gift company adopting the pay per sale model as a means of generating sales. The idea worked really well for them as in a span of three years they were able to gain profits of at least six million dollars per year.  This revelation spurred amazon to adopt the model which they picked up in 1996. The Adoption of affiliate marketing by amazon is widely credited to making affilate marketing a online revelation.

Just like SEO , pushing your product or service via affiliate marketing takes time to build and thus care must be taken when deciding an affiliate program to run with.

Factors To Consider When Beginning An Affiliate Program

1. Have a Clear Goal: is your goal to create more traffic or to make more sales. This must be clear so that information communicated to your affiliates is clear and consistent.

2. Budget

When beginning an affiliate program one has to look into a number of factors:

1. Cost and resources involved in Creating the afffiliate landing page including content cost, advertising cost, software cost to manage and track affiliates. When creating content for an affiliate programme, you can decide to either provide deisign banners, promotion codes and links to be used on affiliate websites, blogs, and social media pages or leave that burden to the affiliates . The latter idea would mean affiliates will spend more time creating visuals than actually creating content that really helps push foward the affiliate program.

1. The Commission structure: one can decide to pay affiliates based  on:
   • Pay per click: this is commission paid based on how many clicks a web browser makes on a site
   • Pay per acuisition: is based on any sale made by an individuall through an affiliates link.
   • Pay per impression: this is payement made based on how many times a web browser views your advertisment.

According to tipalti.com report of 2017, the best affiliate program is not the one that pays the highest, but one that has streamlined its payment process to ensure that all affiliates are paid on time. The report gathered information from 150 publishers that had sourced for affiliate programs and found out that more that 68% of affiliated dropped out of doing affiliate marketing with a company that based on payement issues.

An example of a company that had this issue in the past is domain hosting and domain registering firm GoDaddy which lost some affiliates because of their systems inability to make crossboarder payements. To solve this issue GoDaddy decided to outsource for an automated payment system that would allow affiliate payments to be made regardless of the country of the affiliate. The program also was able to minimize any extra cost affiliates would incur when accessing their commissions.  

The tipalti report furthermore says  98% of affiliates regard timely payement as critical to staying loyal to an affiliate program.  More than 92% also said that they value being notified upfront incase a payement issue arises.

3. Choose affiliates you would like to work with. To be safe ensure they provide relevant content or have access to a specfic niche of people you are looking to attract.

4. Target Affiliates To Work with

• Coupon sites

Thesea are one of the most popular affiliate types because a regular customer can easily buy into the idea of getting a coupon for  every refereal made.

• Content and Media Sites

Despite the upsurge of fake news , media companies and webistes are still the major source of news for the regular customers. Thus having a deal with a media site that relates to your business can help in getting affiliate sales. Sites that also bare similar content to yours can be a place to find affiliates.

• Review Sites

Sites like Amazon encourage their book reviwers to use amazon affiliate links in their sites and banners. Thus, any purchase made from the links is credited to the affiliate.

• Cashback sites

One can come to agreement with webistes that relate to your industry to reward every client with a discount if they purchase their product through the set out affiliate links.

• Bloggers and shopping sites

Concentraring on blogs that are to your specific niche can be helpful in choosing which  affiliate blogger to choose. Sports, Money, comedy, jobs, wealth and relationships websites/blogs are a furthermoremarket to look into finding affiliates as these markets are always filled with traffic. Having affiliate s on local shopping webistes is another way to tap into affiliates.

• Email Marketing

When choosing an email marketer to carry your affiliate program one should be careful to choose an email affilaite/ contact that is anti spam.

              2021 Ranking of Best Paying Affiliate Programs  In Kenya

1. Hostfit wed builder: Creates websites for business owners and pays its affiliates 20-25% commission
2. Jumia : links sellers and buyers and pays comission ranging from 2-13% depending on item sold with electronics at 4%, shoes and clothers 13% and Computing at 5%.
3. Travelstart: Assist tourists get best travel experience and accomodation services. They pay affiliates a flat rate of kshs 400 for online booking made by local travellers and 1200 for foreign/international travellers.
4. Kilimal:Is an Online shopping platform with an affiliate program that pays 2-8% comission.
5. Other companies 22bet 22-25% commission ,Betway 25-45%, Ipay africa 10% and Kenya Pea at 0.05% comisson.

User Friendly Programs One Can Use To Start Their  Affiliate Programs

• Affiliate Royale: This is a wordpress enabled plugin that one can easily sign up to and intergrate into their webiste and begin their affiliate program. The best thing about this program is that one is entitled  to only make a one off payement to begin using the plugin. It does not charge  monthyl fees or transaction fees for affiliate transactions. Once you have the plugin, you can be able to access your links, monitor affiliate commissions and view payement history.
• Affiliate WP: besides being wordpress intergrated, this plug in allows you to manage referal links and can be used with ecommerce tools such as paypal.
• Affiliate Manager: offers a free version to set up and track your refereal links. It also is the cheapest plug in as one can subscribe to the premium package for only 40dollars.