If you plan on launching an information product — be it a course, a membership website, a coaching program, or simply a book — through a network of joint venture partners, one of the more important considerations is the software used for affiliate tracking.

Your most important task is to make sure your affiliates are paid all the commissions they are entitled to. Alas, many software packages are much less than bulletproof when it comes to commission reporting and tracking.

Some shopping carts offer built-in affiliate systems. There are also a number of stand-alone affiliate tracking solutions that are either hosted for you or that you can host yourself.

Here is the list of the most important things to consider when choosing an affiliate solution:

1. Are the referrals tracked only via cookies or are there additional level of assurance like IP tracking?

2. How much control do you have over the way cookies behave? (How soon would they expire? Is it the first cookie or the last cookie that gets the sale?)

3. How many levels of commissions can you pay? (Many launches only pay one level of commissions, however, adding an extra level will allow you to approach joint venture brokers and off-load a lot of JV partner recruiting to them. You may want to stop at two levels as anything more than that and you will be considered a multi-level company with many regulations and restrictions around what you can and cannot do.)

4. Would you be able to set commissions to a different level for individual partners? (You may want to be able to offer some of your key partners a special deal and possibly pay them a higher percentage).

5. Is the reporting function adequate? (Many affiliate programs simply don’t give you much information or the information in the report may be delayed by 24 hours, which is almost eternity in a product launch scenario.)

6. Does it offer you an easy way to host media files (email copy, banners, text links, pre-written tweets, etc) with the affiliate’s link automatically built in?

7. Will it work with your current autoresponder / email marketing system?

8. Will it scale to handle the traffic and the load on the server?

9. Will it allow you to go into the system and manually verify the commissions by matching them to the orders from a particular affiliate? (Blindly trusting the software can be disastrous. Best practices include thorough testing preceding the launch and spot check throughout. Be aware that some affiliate tracking packages will report to you the number but may not give you enough information to know how this number was arrived at, rendering any manual verification impossible.)

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