The webmasters who contacted me, operate sites that generate anywhere from zero to thousands of dollars in weekly sales. For this reason I've decided to present affiliate program solutions for both ends of the spectrum.

What is an affiliate program?

Simple. They all provide workathome income opportunities. The idea behind an affiliate, or associate program is to recruit other webmasters to help you sell your wares by paying them for each visitor or sale they bring you.

Before you decide NOT to offer an affiliate program at your website, read the following...

"By 2002, 25 percent of the expected $37.5 billion in Internet retail sales, not including autos, will have originated on affiliate sites" -- Nicole Vanderbilt, Jupiter Communications

Now you are up to speed. If you're considering starting an affiliate program at your site, read on....

An affiliate program is really not as difficult to set up as you may think. Thanks to the high demand for affiliate systems recently, there are now lots of ways to set up your own program.

Here's what you need to set one up...

1. A web site with your own domain name.

2. At least one product or service that you own completely.

3. A system to handle commission tracking and payment.

Sounds easy enough, right? Well, actually it is! And it's getting easier all the time.

The first two items listed above are pretty much self-explanatory. Naturally, you need your own website and your own product or service. You can't very well set up an associate program if you don't own the site or the product(s) you will be promoting. If you have not taken these two steps, you'll need to do this first. Once you've managed to get by these two steps, you can move right to step three, setting up your program.

The next few paragraphs will explain exactly how I set up my program. If your business is tiny with a limited budget, this plan may work well for you. If you have a little more capital to work with, you may decide to use one of the many associate management systems available today. I'll cover those a little later. First, I'd like to give you the details on how I designed my own associate program.

Step one: Defining my objectives.

I decided that the key to an effective associate program would be to allow my associates to promote a URL, or web page and let the program process sales and track orders automatically.

I saw many "home-made" tracking systems failing at this. These other systems required customers to enter a number that identified the associate. In my opinion, this does not work. Customers are not interested in remembering a code so that an associate gets credit for the sale. Many customers have no idea there is as associate involved at all. When they see this they are.