In the last chapter we looked at a plan for building your own product empire. Here, I want to elaborate a little more on this by looking at a few of the issues raised by running your own affiliate program to help sell you products.

If you are not thinking of selling your own products, you can skip this section.

One of the great things about having your own affiliate program is that affiliates provide you with traffic in exchange for commissions on any product they sell for you with their traffic. What this means is that even if your own pages are not ranking well in the search engines, you still get traffic. That is one of the great reasons (often overlooked) for having an affiliate program. An affiliate program is a great traffic builder!

The easiest option for setting up an affiliate program is to use Clickbank. This will cost you around $50 for an account that allows you to sell your products.

There are a few "niggles" associated with Clickbank (but most have work-arounds) including:

1* No control over your affiliates. People can re-engineer your Clickbank link and buy your product at a discount by collecting the affiliate commission for themselves.

2* Clickbank only allows you to specify one landing page. The landing page is the page you specify as the sales page for your product. If you have 5 products, they all have to share the same landing page. Not very professional!

3* Statistics at Clickbank are poor (and tedious). There is no way to email customers, you only have one year of "accounts", and trying to get any meaningful information out of the statistics is near impossible.

OK, the good news is there are options for those wanting to sell multiple products, and even ways you can have total control over your Clickbank Stats. There is no way though to stop people signing up for your program and buying your products at a discount (though there are ways to minimise this).

To achieve the extra functionality that should be included in Clickbank, you need two pieces of software.

The first is easyClickMate by Adrian Ling, and the second is CB Accountant by Rod Beckwith.

Easy ClickMate is a script I have used for several years. The main reason I use it is to sell multiple products through one Clickbank account. I can set up different landing pages (sales pages) for different product (even on different domains).

Other benefits of this script:

* Increased Page Rank passed to your site as links are constructed with your domain, not Clickbanks.

* You can "hide" your products in the Clickbank Marketplace from those wanting to buy your product through their own link. By setting up easyClickmate on one domain, but selling your products from other domains, people searching for your products in Clickbank will only find the domain on which easyclickMate is installed, not the domains for your products. This can stop the average commission thief.

OK, one of the features all marketers need is a way to contact customers, verify that someone is a customer etc. EasyClickMate cannot do this since it works independently of Clickbank. There is no way this script could know whether someone who purchase is a valid customer, or someone who bought and had a refund. For this, we need CB Accountant.

CB Accountant can download your transaction history from Clickbank so you can search and manipulate on your own computer. When Clickbank issue a refund to one of your customers, CB Accountant can download that new information to update your database. Also, whereas Clickbank only keeps one year of accounts, CB Accountant will just keep adding new transactions to the database on your hard disk. In five years time, you will have five years of customer accounts.

CB Accountant also allows you to email your customers. Since your database has all of your customer details, you can extract customers who bought a specific product, even over a specific date range. This is valuable stuff for online marketers. CB Accountant has a lot of nice features.

In my opinion, easyClickMate and CB Accountant are essential for anyone selling multiple product through Clickbank.

OK, other options?

Well, the new boy on the block is Paydotcom.

This site offers a similar service to Clickbank, but uses Paypal as the payment processor. That means your customers buy through Paypal giving you immediate access to your funds.

Paydotcom also allows you to control who becomes an affiliate, so you can largely prevent the commission theft associated with Clickbank.

One big disadvantage of Paydotcom is that you have to send out payment (via Paypal) to your affiliates each month (although they do provide you with a mass pay text file which can just be uploaded to Paypal, and they will pay everyone). This is something Clickbank does for you. The other of course is that you have to have other systems in place to keep customer databases up to date. Clickbank is certainly more convenient if you want a hands-free approach.