As an affiliate advertiser your ultimate goal is to get clicks. As many as you can. But, that’s a real uphill work … Why? Because according to ComScore …

8% of internet users accounts for 85% of clicks - and some of them aren't even human!

In other words: without an extremely efficient marketing strategy, you simply won’t survive as an affiliate advertiser. This is a rock-solid fact … And if you want to start an affiliate program for your business, you can’t neglect it!

Obviously, the very first – and extremely important – question that must be answered is this: is affiliate marketing right for you as an advertiser? The easiest and quickest method to find the correct answer, is to check out your competition. If you can’t find at least one major competitor who is running an affiliate network, you probably should drop the idea of becoming an affiliate advertiser. If you have found a few important competitors who are running an affiliate marketing platform, you’ve got your answer! In this case you definitely must start your own affiliate marketing program.

Once you have made your decision, and the answer is yes, you’ll need to define the core components of your affiliate advertiser strategy. At this point you’ll need to take a big breath and start thinking about a whole set of new, literally critical questions.

I am going to help you with 10 primordial questions you should ask yourself, and I will say it again: these questions are literally vital if you want to start an affiliate program for your business!

• What are the main objectives of your affiliate program? Increasing your sales? Acquiring new customers? Penetrating a new market segment?

• What products or services will you promote using your affiliate network?

• Are you going to use an affiliate network or do you want to run your own self-hosted in-house affiliate platform?

• Who would be potential publishers and how can you find them?

• What would be the perfect incentive for affiliates to promote your products or services?

• What payment models are you going to use?

• What are the essential elements that must be included in your affiliate agreement?

• What are the best creatives for your business? Do you need external professional help to create the needed creatives?

• What are the most important budget considerations?

• How to define, track and measure the major KPIs?

As you can see, there is a lot of work to do. When you’ll try to dig a bit deeper into the above topics, dozens of other questions and details will emerge in front of you, but you don’t need to worry … we are going to cover every single important component.