In my last post I had mentioned about starting your own affiliate program. For running an affiliate program efficiently, you need to have sufficient tools. I have been using different tools for my affiliate program which makes things automated and as the affiliate program grows, we can manage without facing much problems.

Affiliate managing software

The first tool that is needed is to manage your affiliate. You can either for a custom made program or a ready made program and modify it according to your need.

Custom Made affiliate managing software

The disadvantage for a custom made tool is that you need to test, debug and its time consuming. More over it will be very costly if you are going for a custom made affiliate managing program.

Ready made affiliate managing software

There are many affiliate managing programs available online which you can test before buying it. The advantage of ready made software is that there are less chances of bugs as it will be used and tested by many. I have been using Post Affiliate Pro for my affiliate program which is very robust and the support given by the vendors are excellent.

Support Software

Providing support for your affiliates is very important and you need a very efficient tool for this. I tried using Gmail for this, but the finally I switched over to Support Centre which is an excellent tool.

News Letter Software

If you have an affiliate program, then its good to have newsletter. To manage your newsletter, you will find an option in the Affiliate Managing software, but the drawback of built-in mailing software is that when the number of subscribers are very high, you may have problem sending bulk email as there may be some restriction in your hosting package or you will have to go for a dedicated server hosting.

I would recommend a third party news letter service for this like aweber or getresponse for this. This is a paid service. You can create unlimited campaign’s and subscriber list with these News letter services

These are the basic tools that you need to manage a affiliate program. There are other topics to be discussed related to running an affiliate program like marketing your affiliate program, Payment tools, etc, which will be coming up soon, So stay tuned in.