Some well-known internet millionaires, making fortunes cross-promoting 3rd party products may truly support idea of "easy income with affiliate programs", but they tend to forget that all their profits were possible due to huge subscriber databases, thousand of affiliates and customers a newcomer does not have!

That is why start wise by creating your own product, grow your credibility, circle of loyal customers and then join and promote as much 3rd party products as you consider necessary.

Setting up partner program

Every partner program you will create or setup should have, at least, basic must-have features: 1. Database driven registration of affiliates. 2. Tracking affiliate sales in order to count commission. 3. Admin control panel to support affiliates and track their sales.

There are 3 basic methods of having fully functional partner programs application, not going far into science, they are "do it yourself", "setup 3rd party application", "use 3rd party service".

The first method is for those, who are knowledgeable programmers and fortunate enough to invest a lot of time in creating such a solution for personal needs or those, who are lucky to have a lot of money and hire those knowledgeable programmers. Responsibility for taking under control all support and function-related issues would lie on your shoulders.

Setting up 3rd party affiliate program solution requires much less time or money, if any. The result will be same as above - fully functional partner program and inevitable support problems. The only difference is that you won't be able to develop that partner application way you need and like.

The main advantage of 3rd party service is ability to stay unaware of how your partners sign up, track sales, receive checks and so forth, because in this case servicing your partners or affiliates will be headache of independent company, not yours. For such "reluctance" 3rd party affiliate program provider would charge you on monthly or per sale basis, slightly decreasing your net profit at each sale.

Having your own affiliate program in place enables you to expand your market boundaries exponentially.

Before we get into that, you'll want to join "Top Rated" communities in business sections. Doing this will allow you to familiarize yourself with what's "the norm" with these communities. Also, after you've made necessary adjustments and you've prepared your own community, you'll be using all top communities to promote your own.

I must appoligize to those who have never joined and msn or yahoo community. You'll need to sign up for a user passport which is simply an msn or yahoo e-mail and password.

For an msn passport click below: http://register.passport.net/default.srf?sl=1

For a yahoo passport click below: http://edit.yahoo.com/config/eval_register?.intl=us&new=1&.done=http%3a//www.yahoo.com&.src=www&.v=0&.u=0f49rckvhg06m&partner=&.p=&promo=&.last=

When signing up for an msn community, you'll want to click option "READ ALL MESSAGES ONLINE". This way you won't fill your e-mail account with countless messages that are posted everyday... Also, click on "KEEP MY E-MAIL PRIVATE" so that you don't get any junk this way either.

And now you have basics of communities, please look for sequel to this article titled:

"Building & Managing your own community"

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About The Author:

Martin R. Lemieux Smartads - President

Affordable Web Design & Web Site Marketing Tips http://www.smartads.info