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Mr.Moe

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Hello, my name is Moe, I live in Austria better known as Ösiland.

At the moment I am planning on starting a partner network in Vienna and later on I want to expand it throughout Austria. I have been dealing with Internet Marketing for about five months now by reading about this issue on the internet. Unfortunately, my circle of acquaintances and contacts is not wide enough to reach my goals, that is why I need your help and support. I would be really thankful if you could give me helpful and worth knowing tipps and tricks which can be important in order to reach my goal of building a partner network.
I want to thank you in advance and I will be happy about any kind of information you can give me.

I wish you a wonderful day.

Yours sincerely, Moe
 
To start, Networks require two things: Advertisers (offer owners) and Affiliates (aka publishers)

The bummer part is that this a question of "which comes first, the chicken or the egg". In order to get Advertisers to sign up, you need traffic from affiliates! In order to get affiliates to sign up, you need offers they can run their traffic to! So it's going to require good timing on your part.

Aside from bringing business in the door, you will need to have a tracking platform. Network tracking solutions in particular are quite pricey compared to standard affiliate tracking solutions. Expect to pay between $1500-$5000 USD per month for your tracking solution. Most tracking platforms will allow you to create campaigns, set Pay Out/In amounts, collect banking info for payments, allow advertisers/affiliates to log in and see only their own sales, run reports, etc.

Once you've got the tracking platform, you need to integrate the tracking platform with your (1)Advertisers' websites and (more often than not) with your (2)Affiliates' tracking solution. I'll touch on both points. (Note that my response leans towards direct response marketing advertisers as opposed to traditional ecommerce style advertisers, although I'm happy to provide a more specific response if your circumstances require it)

1. This will more than likely will require server-side programming.
- The landing page will need to grab GET variables from the url and save them in cookies
- You may or may not want to do a globally included file on the site (so it's more than just the home page) to allow for retargeting pixels to be fired
- If you have multiple "steps" or activities to track conversion for and you want it to be tracked under separate campaigns (not all tracking platforms support multi-step tracking), you may need to include a "Hit Generator". It's code that imitates a click to the new campaign. Your tracking provider will likely point you in the direction of their developer docs to help you with this.
- Place conversion pixels on the Receipt / Thank You page. For Networks, I would say the most common type is an iFrame. You'll echo the cookie variables saved from the landing page into the iFrame's url in the receipt page.

^If this makes no sense to you, no worries! Any developer familiar with affiliate marketing will completely understand this. If you don't have a developer, consider reaching out to your Network provider because they may have a partner to recommend you to.

2. Most Network tracking solutions will allow affiliates to log in and place their own pixels. ie. They can save an iFrame to their campaign so any time they get a sale on your network, it alerts their own tracking software too. Functioning consistently and accurately is CRUCIAL for keeping affiliates around. If the offers are converting great, but the affiliates don't know it because their pixels aren't placed properly and therefor aren't alerting their system of the sales, you'll probably lose their business/traffic. Therefore, when an affiliate launches a new campaign or updates their pixels, it's best practice to place test sales with them to confirm the tracking is working properly.

It is very common for affiliates to not know how to do this, or to have just 1 pixel that doesn't work. You'll want to know how to troubleshoot this quickly. Every minute that it's not working is another minute they're not running traffic to you because they can't track their sales. Might be a good idea to inquire about troubleshooting pixels if/when you're getting a demo of tracking solution. Some companies have folks in-house dedicated to help you figure that out, some don't. You'll want to ask about that.

So.....

If you have Advertisers, Affiliates, a tracking platform, a pixel-savvy customer service (Skype is uber popular for communicating with Networks), and accounting in place - then you've got a basic Network ready to go!

You'll quickly learn that there is an infinite number of ways to provide more value, so this really is just an outline of the bare minimum you will need to call yourself a Network. At the end of the day, you need to provide extra value to everyone - something that they can't get by working directly with one another and cutting out you, the middleman. Curating only quality offers and traffic is just one example or Network-added-value. So definitely start thinking of other value you can add to the advertiser-affiliate relationship!

Hope that helps!
 
Hello, my name is Moe, I live in Austria better known as Ösiland.

At the moment I am planning on starting a partner network in Vienna and later on I want to expand it throughout Austria. I have been dealing with Internet Marketing for about five months now by reading about this issue on the internet. Unfortunately, my circle of acquaintances and contacts is not wide enough to reach my goals, that is why I need your help and support. I would be really thankful if you could give me helpful and worth knowing tipps and tricks which can be important in order to reach my goal of building a partner network.
I want to thank you in advance and I will be happy about any kind of information you can give me.

I wish you a wonderful day.

Yours sincerely, Moe

Welcome to AffiliateFix @Mr.Moe !

What kind of partner network?

Vienna seems to be a very small geo to start up a partner network.

Looking forward to your posts and threads.

Check out the new enhanced membership option here.

See you around the forums.

T J
 
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