Part 1 -- Affiliate Mastermind:
The Price of Admission is Participation

Dear Friend,

I invite you this month to temporarily suspend the belief that you know everything about affiliate programs.

Join the Affiliate Mastermind we are putting together here at ActiveMarketplace. We know that the affiliate industry is so young, that we are all newbies....

That's the best thing, the opportunity...the chance.

Think of it this way...if I have a penny and you have a penny, and we exchange them, we both end up with the same thing we had in the beginning...one penny.

Now imagine that you and I each have a customer, and we exchange them...now I have two customers and you have two customers. If we exchange ideas, the power is exponential.

What I do with my two customers, and what you do with yours, determines the long term value of that customer. What we do together, to help each other grow, develops the long term value of the affiliate.

Add these two long term values up and you have the core of the affiliate mastermind. Two doing what one cannot do alone. Add more people to that equation and the power expands exponentially.

The best thing is, most companies are trying to own their affiliate channel. They are competing when they should be spreading the word and cooperating.

Everyone is a competitor, and everyone is a partner...that's the rule of the Internet.

Let's start doing it now. You are also invited to join our two affiliate programs and study what is happening at:

• Insider's Guide: http://www.linkstosales.com/signup.html

• Winning the Affiliate Game: http://www.activemarketplace.com/signup.html

It includes a complete, affiliate training system, the tools I have designed, and the promise of a mastermind. Model yourself after this program if you like; tell us what works and what doesn't.

The Price of Admission is Participation; are you ready?

Peace

Declan

How to Immediately Impact Your Market Through Affiliate Programs and Email

Case Study: The ActiveMarketPlace Breakthrough Called "Winning the Affiliate Game"

In the beginning of February we began the preliminary launch of a new training system called "Winning the Affiliate Game." In fact, that is why this newsletter is delayed. The results have been fantastic, quickly showing that the real power in affiliate networks, the salespeople themselves, are being ignored by virtually every major merchant.

Look when you sign up at an affiliate program; you get a thank you, a page of banner ads, and maybe an ezine after a month. There is little motivation or guidance, and from what affiliates tell me, little if any communication with them.

The roll out of the "Winning the Affiliate Game" book came after extensive research in the industry. Virtually every site studied the merchants, their programs, recommended what worked and what didn't, and basically catered to the industry.

Everyone was wrapped up in "Amazon-envy", wanting to be the biggest affiliate network on the block...no matter if their affiliates were doing anything or not.

What we have found are the foolproof ways to launch your affiliate campaign. Here's the latest.

1. Email and ezine lists are two of the best ways to promote a product. Face it; people will visit your Web Site once or twice; they will check their email every day. When you find affiliates who have developed a good email list, an opt-in forum where their opinions are respected, you gain an endorsement. This moves your program from being a stranger to a recommended resource. We have found that sales increase literally 10 times via good email lists than banner ads.

2. Banner ads lead to slow, impulse sales. Enough said. They are the weakest part of our marketing efforts, although certain sites that specialize in banner ads have done well. The problem is a banner interrupts the Web Page, like an ad in a magazine. It is also advertising a separate entity from the site, an unknown. People have to get to know you to buy from you. Email does this more efficiently.

3. Two tier programs are an essential benefit of an affiliate program. We allow our affiliates to sign up other affiliates; they then make a 10% residual income on every sale their affiliates make. It is a good way to spread the word and really help your affiliates, and an excellent, added bonus.

4. Set up a training program for your affiliates and automate it; if you want to see one in action, visit my affiliate programs:

   • http://www.activemarketplace.com/signup.html and

   • http://www.linkstosales.com/signup.html

   Sign up and you will see the process in action; love to hear your feedback as it develops.

5. Answer your email and telephone inquiries; the first few weeks are when you spend the quality time building your affiliates. If you ignore this, approximately 10-50% of your affiliates will do nothing.

6. Get people excited to join your program; most affiliate programs sign up people, give them a banner ad, and do little if anything to motivate them.

7. Treat this as your sales force. You need to determine who will sell and who won't; be sure that you count those who don't as possible customers.

The Winning the Affiliate Game program is one of the hottest on the market, because it teaches your affiliates how to succeed. If you would like to learn more on how to offer this to your network and help your affiliates sell more, please email declan@activemarketplace.com

What You Must Know About Two Tier Programs: It's Not Network Marketing -- It Is A Mastermind

One of the latest moves in the affiliate industry is towards two tier programs that actually reward affiliates for helping you sign up affiliates.

I used to manage a sales force by setting up sales managers, who profited from the results generated by their salespeople. Two tier programs are the EXACT same thing.

A two tier program is simple; you let people sign up as affiliates. Any affiliates that sign up from your affiliates are a second tier of commission. Your affiliate now makes money on each sale, plus each sale that affiliates s/he has signed up make. What better way to encourage your affiliates to help you further your network?

Remember that two tier programs are not necessarily network marketing (not that there's anything wrong with that ;-). You give your affiliates the ability to build their own business.

Done correctly, it can be a great service to them. You give them the ability to get you more affiliates while at the same time making themselves more money.

Instead of network marketing, think of Two Tier programs as online retail. In the retail world, you have a manufacturer, a distributor, and a storefront/retailer. Online, the owner of the affiliate network is the manufacturer, your affiliates are your distributors, and their affiliates are your retailers. Since there is only one level of signing up affiliates, it does not have the complexity of many network marketing structures.

For example, at the ActiveMarketplace we created a two tier affiliate system. It helps smaller affiliates do what we teach, to build your own network. The two tier program is pointed towards a long term relationship with affiliates, instead of just paying them for a few sales.

We took a look at what was out there and built something with all the marketing bells and whistles. Our system was built not in terms of code, but marketing; we have built in follow up tools for customers, for affiliates, along with training systems to help them get going. The result is a fast growing program that benefits all of us.

An affiliate network does not have to simply sign up affiliates. It can build an entire sales force with the tools available. Certain steps should be taken to insure your success. Best of all, you can automate virtually all your initial contacts and personalize the approach.

• First, make sure it is two tier affiliate system, and reward for every action. If your affiliate sends you a customer, pay them per sale...that's obvious.

• If your affiliate sends you another affiliate, give the first affiliate an override commission on the sales of the referred affiliate. At our ActiveMarketplace Affiliate Programs, we also include a 25% per sale commission and 10% per affiliate sale.

• We want our affiliates to reach out and build their own networks; we want to be part of that growth and reward them. In this way, each retailer can also become a distributor. One part is making the sale, and another part is introducing this to other people, sales manager, and sales staff

• Someone who has a large network can get initial sales plus sales of their entire network. When people catch on to what this two tier means, they will advertise for you, introducing you to the key players and getting affiliates for themselves.

• They are building their own affiliate network, while they are building yours.

Most people think affiliate networks are about hardware and software. It's really about relationship building, making your affiliates and customers your close allies. You won't be able to do this as easily in a few years, and frankly few companies are doing a thing about it.

In the two tier system, I am a merchant, building a network of people to refer and resell for me. I'm using all my tools for tracking, testing my ads, and I'm building up a customer list. I take all of that and give it to every one of my affiliates, I give them the ability to do the same thing. They can now do what I'm doing, build a network, build a customer list, and together we can learn more and earn more. Build a sales force instead of a one time lead generator.

It's all about building the lifetime value of customer and the lifetime value of affiliate.

One tier systems don't even have possibility of building loyalty; you can only take customers from others. Two tier will become an increasingly important resource for affiliate networks.

With a two tier program, you can own your network, while building up co-owners who can help coach, teach, and spread the word...it is a marketer's dream.

Whose Affiliates Are They Anyway?
The Controversy Over Building Your Affiliate Network

The competition for affiliates is heating up. Either you create your own network and administer the customer service and software yourself, or you outsource to a service bureau like LinkShare, Commission Junction, or Be Free.

The real trick is knowing that all your work will come back to you. Paying money so someone else owns your salespeople might not be the best solution..

Everyone seems to want thousands of affiliates; they will pay to get them. Yet up to half of these affiliates never do anything. In many networks, they are bought and sold to every merchant that comes through the door.

Get into a system that allows you to keep and control your own affiliate partners. Don't spend time and money building a complete network so your competitors and other merchants can have them too. This is a drawback of service bureaus, unless your transaction volume suffices to make this inconsequential. Your affiliates are offered to every other merchants in some cases.

Why join a service bureau where everybody knows who my affiliates are? Why give my customers away? Your goal is to gain affiliate lockout, so be careful of who owns your affiliates.

The service bureau industry is not a rip-off in any way shape or form; if you have deep enough pockets to allow someone else to manage your whole network, then the whole issue is moot. Big companies who regularly outsource things like payroll and generate thousands of transactions benefit from such a network. They do handle many of the headaches as well.

It is a question that you should think of as you negotiate, not after the fact. At least make sure you have a database of affiliate names who get to know you through your site.

For me, I want to keep my affiliates close and not have my training and loyalty interrupted by other companies. Now I know my affiliates must affiliate with other programs; that is not the issue. Your affiliates should feel that they are not being bought and sold. This could become a big issue soon, as more people seek to set up affiliate networks.

Consider the following tidbits I ran across this month:

1. The 97% - 3% Rule?: One major affiliate network has thousands of affiliates, but only 10 that generate any sort of sales. Up to 50% of their affiliates never act. Is this getting repetitive?

2. Our Insider's Guide and Winning the Affiliate Game affiliate programs are the only ones actively offering training to affiliates, as far as I know. If you want to set people up to succeed, create an automated, follow-up training system that gets them going quickly. When people sign up for our program, we try to show them what works and encourage them to act. Most people send them to a Web Page and forget about them. Training is critical and easy to do.

3. About 10-50% of your affiliates will never take action. Bank on it. Know all those big figures of affiliates? Imagine if 50% of Amazon's affiliates have never done a thing. Sound crazy? I'm have two affiliations with Amazon; one generates good sales, the other has never even posted a link on the Internet. Numbers can be deceiving.

4. ActiveAffiliates: At ActiveMarketplace we have created a term called ActiveAffiliates, how many affiliates are actually making sales for you. These are divided into very active and semi-active affiliates. Our goal is to create a network of 5,000 ActiveAffiliates who we closely support, train, and encourage to continue making money with us. The real question for your network is, how many ActiveAffiliates do you have? How many sales does the average, ActiveAffiliate make?

After looking through the nooks and crannies of the affiliate industry, I find most of us groping with thousands of affiliates, and bragging about them like they are hits. If you remember the early days of the Internet, people used to brag about the number of hits their page got.

In the affiliate industry now, the same thing is happening, because Amazon mania is running rampant. Amazon has something like 185,000 affiliates, which is terrific for them. Few if any care what happens to the affiliates.

Be different. It will make a difference.

Dummies Guide to Selecting Affiliate Software

It seems like everywhere you look on the Internet, someone is coming up with a good, cheap affiliate software program. I've seen them starting at $49 and going all the way up to the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Affiliate programs are effective tracking systems; they should also be training systems for your affiliates and customers. Look at most programs and you will see the same old thing; online stats, minimal tracking, and likely an increased cost to adapt the software to your specific needs. Remember that this is not like buying Microsoft Word or Access software; this stuff doesn't always work out of the box.

What you get out of the box rarely is what you will use, but again it depends on how complex your offer is. To understand the best affiliate software tracking system for you, consider the following:

1. How many transactions do you expect to do per day? Weigh your expectations against the reality of your market. What Barnes & Noble generates per day demands a service bureau like Be Free; a niche book store like RobotBooks.com would hardly need such a fancy system.

2. How many products will you be offering? It is often wise to focus on 1-5 products via your affiliate programs as lead generators, and back end the remaining products once your customer has bought from you once. The affiliate system for this set up is much easier than a shopping cart/affiliate program.

3. What level of sales would you like to generate? Compare this to the cost of the software, and whatever you do, add 15% at least to your initial affiliate cost projections. The software will need to be adapted if it is not designed for a specific use. Is it worth the cost?

4. Can you put your affiliate software on payments or lease? If not, you may spend money on the system, then have little left over to market it. One of the biggest problems of most Web Sites is that they do little if anything to generate traffic. Even with an affiliate program, you are going to have to market.

Once you know the basics, it is time to start picking out the software. As a general market guideline, there are three levels of expenditure:

A. Below $500: this software will do one thing simply. Be sure to pay someone to install it for you unless you know basic Web programming. For the very small Web Site, this is a good solution. For those looking to grow, this software is rarely expandable. You may have to start from scratch if your business does well, upgrading to another piece of software. This takes time.

B. $500-$1,000: In this price range, you can get functional programs installed for you. Commission Junction's service bureau is also available in this range for the start up, but remember that they get a percentage of your transactions. For those with Shopping Carts, Patrick Anderson of ADNet International (770-936-8308, http://www.adnetintl.com) has developed a cookie based tracking system for less than $1,000 that works well, and you keep all the transaction value.

C. $1,000 and up: At this range, you start looking at customized programming, Web Site/Affiliate Site Co-Development, and the service bureaus like Be Free and LinkShare or ClickTrade. Bureaus will gain a piece of each transaction of course, and may have monthly minimum payments associated with their services.

NOTE: We have developed our own proprietary affiliate tracking system, the ActiveAffiliate E-Commerce System. It is also a marketing and follow up system, with complete creative consulting and business plans. If you visit either of my affiliate programs (http://www.linkstosales.com/signup.html or http://www.activemarketplace.com/signup.html) you will see the ideas in action. Sign up and you will also receive our initial, 5 step affiliate training for our program. Use this as inspiration for your own, turnkey, automated affiliate network system. Give me a call if you are interested in installing one for yourself at (530) 873-3637.

Now that you know the pricing, here's some steps to take:

1. The first thing to do is look at how much money you are looking at making and how much you can afford to put into it. If you don't know, be very careful. You can't reach a goal you don't set, and you can't plan your way if you don't know how much is worth investing. If I want to generate $1,000 in total sales is different than $100,000. Although it sounds obvious, look at how often people try to get something for nothing on the Internet. This is business; to really succeed, you have to invest time and money; measure how much by how much you want to generate. For example, if I want to make $50,000, I'm going to have to spend at least 10%, $5,000, for the system, plus more for the marketing.

   (If you don't have to do this, good for you; for most, the investment needs to generate the return...and put a dollar sign in front of the hours you spend. It adds up.)

2. Below $500, there are cheap solutions. AffiliateZone.com has an excellent reputation, if you don't have a budget to do it yourself. It is a trade off in time; this should not be your first programming effort on the Web. It is way beyond HTML. If you don't understand Java and CGI, pay all of them extra money to install it or it will never work.

3. If your budget is below $1,000 you need to look at what you really can afford. Break it out into different price ranges; as you move up on pricing move up on how much you will pay a service bureau per transaction. Having a service bureau control your affiliates is also a question. Service bureaus tend to be great for bigger businesses, who have a cost for outsourcing payroll services and transaction based fees. Smaller businesses may see their profits dwindle by going to a service bureau.

4. $5,000 and up will get you a complete solution; if you go with a service bureau, you will have to pay transaction fees and likely reach minimum amount of guaranteed sales per month. For less than $10,000 you can get a complete Web Site, email follow-up systems, creative ad copy, consulting, a marketing plan, and a proprietary affiliate tracking system. Best of all, you own every piece of the sale, and you own your affiliates.

5. Pick the best solution for you. It is not like buying a piece of working software; you will likely have to adapt it to fit your exact situation. Programming costs can be dramatically increased, so be careful. What you spend initially may not be what you spend in the long run.

6. Look for a complete, turnkey package like our ActiveMarketplace E-Commerce System mentioned above; pay extra for the time you will save and be sure you can pay per transaction fees. If you look at things in the long run, you may find that the best solution is to own your own affiliate system, and your own affiliates.

7. Build your sales force online; create a series of sales managers by installing a Two Tier program. If you don't do this, your competition likely will.

Demystifying Affiliate Programs for Shopping Carts

People love to have shopping carts. They spend so much time, money, and effort making sure their shopping carts work. Suddenly affiliate networks pop up, and what do you do?

Shouldn't it be easy to get a tracking program for your shopping cart? In theory, yes, but as Patrick Anderson shares in this article, the reality of shopping carts is more like a nightmare.

Patrick emphasizes that virtually every shopping cart in existence tries to offer an affiliate program, but few in reality work very well. The following are his solutions to your affiliate software challenge if you are using a shopping cart.

"$1,000: The Cookie Solution:

The simplest thing to is add cookie tracking, on your home page. Write in some Javascript to check the cookie and install one if they don't have one. Include a timer in the cookie so you make sure how long you want it to stay active.

The cookie sits on computer until they get to your order page; another Javascript looks to see if that same cookie, made earlier, is sitting on that browser.

Cookies track everything and Javascript manages it. Installed with your shopping cart, it can provide an easy, effective tracking tool.

Any Java capable browser allows you to read/write the cookies; it is also a way to begin to implement something into an existing shopping cart, depending on the cart.

The big question is whether people turn their cookies off; it is the Web browser's option. That can be a concern, but there is no 100% perfect affiliate program. Some things slip through; when working, cookies can be really effective.

As far as your affiliates are concerned, cookies provide more security than many of the other available programs. They want payments and security; if you generate these, with or without cookies, you'll have happy affiliates and a growing business.

The affiliate programs aren't easy to integrate with an existing shopping cart. It's like having a VW when you really need a truck...you can't do both things. You're not going to be able to take a shopping cart and make an affiliate program out of it.

The One-Five Product Solution For Your Shopping Cart.

The problem with shopping carts is how much you offer; on first contact, this can be overwhelming.

Too many choices leads to confusion, eliminating impulse buying and in effect, creating many buying decisions when there should be just one. It is one of the cases where less is more. It doesn't work. Show me one site that does it; show me a mall that's really successful. Most aren't successful because of multiple products.

Most importantly, the real goal of any Internet marketing program is the first buy. It is crucial. Just because you can put up a bunch of items doesn't mean you should; it's confusing to the consumer.

A solution is to leave your shopping cart as it is and integrate an affiliate program that focuses on your 5 best selling products. The goal is to generate affiliates and sales for these products, to introduce people to your business.

You simply introduce up to 5 entry portals to your site, based on single products. Target these products to specific niches and build your customer list. Get them registered as frequent buyers and get them comfortable with buying from your shopping cart.

The next step is where you listen , focus in on one sale, one pitch, and one order form. Use them as lead items, one thing they can plug in and buy. You can change the products in them, your lead product, and then back end them on everything in your shopping cart.

They are much more likely to buy multiple items after an initial purchase than they are on first contact.

Installing Custom Affiliate Software for your Shopping Cart

Every shopping cart has its own unique approach; it is not like you can simply plug in any affiliate program to the software. Even if you go in under this illusion, prepare for glitches.

I'm not disparaging shopping carts, but in this case it literally putting the cart before the horse. People grabbed up shopping carts before the affiliate industry took off; few if any built in the kind of affiliate tracking software we all take for granted now.

Anyone who has programmed knows that it can be tricky converting an old piece of code to work with a new piece. It is better to design from the ground up and integrate what you need into your Web Site. If you are looking for a shopping cart, see if there is a good affiliate solution

If you already have one, the best suggestions are to:

1. Simply install cookie-based tracking systems,

2. Focus on a 1-5 product lead affiliate program rather than converting your whole shopping cart system to work with your new affiliate software; or

3. Add significant programming costs to update your shopping cart to the software. Expect problems and tricks to pop up; if you budget for it, in a few months you may have a working solution.

Like all things on the Internet, shopping carts can add significantly to the cost and time to roll out your business online. In the affiliate industry, we are just catching up to the demands of shopping carts. It is never good to be a "beta" tester, so be careful. Determine the best solution to work with your shopping cart."

The Best Kept Secret On the Internet is Unleashed: Permission Marketing Separates the Winners From the Losers

If you have read the Insider's Guide, you know how important email is. Recent studies, and my own experience, have shown the dramatic impact effective, email marketing can achieve.

A new term is popping up, called Permission Marketing; it simply means you have to gain permission from people to send email to them. Most often this comes from a free, no sale initial offer; more importantly, Permission Marketing is based on the principles of direct response marketing:

1. People rarely buy on impulse. How many times have you bought the first time you heard about something? You need to get familiar, develop trust, and be able to remember who you are buying from.

2. People most often buy on 3rd or 4th contact. It is simply human nature. You have to follow up to make sales.

How does this impact affiliate marketing? First, most affiliate programs are run by banners, depend on impulse marketing, and do little if anything to invite consumers to give you permission to market to them. A simple gift certificate, discount, or free information is enough, but most affiliate networks think that the customer is so motivated, so energetic, that they will return on their own.

They spend all their time chasing new customers, which actually decreases sales, for you and your affiliates.

The fact is, you have to remind people of who you are...quickly. Most businesses ignore this fact religiously. They should have staff dedicated to monitoring email, follow ups, and improving ad copy.

I've seen most companies literally ignore all email inquiries (to this day, it amazes me; you would answer your phone but you won't answer email!). I've seen multi-million dollar companies actually hire 17 year olds to run their email! The results are frightening.

Email, done correctly, is professional and targeted, with an in-depth knowledge of the principles of direct response marketing. Now think hard for a second; how many 17 year olds would you trust with such an important position? Companies have found their entire lists "CC'd" to customers (meaning every name on the list was given away to possible competitors), and spam has been introduced because the message is so poorly written, not targeted, and simply a waste of time.

It is amazing that people think anyone can write and deliver email. Email/permission marketing is as important a skill as a WebMaster, a programmer, and customer service. Yet it is continually ignored because companies don't understand that the relationship you build with your customers is primarily done via email.

Meanwhile, the companies who treat this like an important part of their business are reaping the rewards; XOOM is an excellent example of a company who built their reputation on their multi-million subscriber list.

eMarketer recently released a study of email (at the request of Fortune Magazine) in 1999 that is stunning:

• "3.4 Trillion E-Mail Messages Were Delivered in the U.S. in 1999

• 9.4 Billion Messages Are Exchanged in America Every Day

• 81 million Americans use e-email

• The average American sends or receives 26.4 e-mail messages every day

• On average, people receive twice as many emails as they send on a given day

• 2.1 Billion e-mails are sent daily by U.S. Internet Users; in addition, another 7.3 billion "commercial" e-mail messages are sent."

The study notes that 107 billion pieces of First Class mail were sent in the U.S. in 1999.as a comparison. This is just the U.S. here, not the whole market!

As you can see, if you are not emailing, you are not in business. Case closed. From XOOM.com to small businesses following up via aweber systems, the figures are staggering.

Unfortunately when you talk about email marketing, many assume you mean spam. So they don't do it. This is your advantage, because the short-sighted nature of many online businesses is literally paving the way for domination by a few companies who build their lists through targeted, effective email.

Refer-It.com Interview with Internet Travel Network

COMPANY BACKGROUND

ITN is the leader and pioneer in developing and marketing online travel reservation systems. In 1996 we were the first company ever to offer consumers a way to research, confirm and purchase their travel reservations online using any common web browser. Today, ITN employs over 100 people and is the back-end booking system for 95% of the web sites who offer real-time travel reservation services on the web. ITN has 4 basic products. Our popular public web sites (www.itn.net) is one of the largest travel sites on the web with over 4 million registered users. ITN also markets and sells ITN Agent, a private label travel booking system for travel agencies who conduct business online. ITN also offers airlines and large corporations a complete solution for automating travel bookings and managing a corporation's travel planning and expense processes. ITN has also partnered with the leading web sites on the Internet to help these companies add transactional revenue to their overall revenue streams and include real-time travel reservation services in their overall content offering.

2. For the overall website, what e-commerce package did you use to build your site? Was it off the shelf, or custom? Are you happy with it?

Although we utilize Netscape Commerce Server, all of ITN's software is built in-house by a great team of engineers who focus entirely on travel transaction processing and development.

3. Who did you use to establish your merchant accounts? Secure transactions, etc.?

The processing of credit cards and payments are physically handled by the airlines themselves through a network called the CRS (Computer Reservation System). All billing is handled and settled through a company called the ARC (Airline Reporting Company)

BUILDING THE PROGRAM

4. Can you tell us how the decision to create a revenue sharing program came about? Who were the decision makers in the process? Did you face resistance from certain departments at the company?

Prior to having a revenue sharing product, ITN simply licensed its product to other travel companies and only worked with them to market our service. We decided that no one knew our product or the Internet better than we did, so we opened a fulfillment center at our headquarters and began fulfilling our own travel requests. Owning our technology, combined with our Internet marketing expertise, gave us a distinct advantage to gain new customers and partners by integrating our product, a transaction system, into a potentially unlimited number of content sites. Travel being the leading Internet industry that it is, meant that hundreds if not thousands of travel sites would have an interest in combining content with a sophisticated travel purchasing system.

5. Can you describe the actual process of building the program. Who was involved in the organization. How long did it take? How did you decide on what it would look like? What other affiliate programs did you look at before designing yours?

The software and company were started by 3 young co-founders who wanted to revolutionize the way consumers purchased their travel online. We operate in a UNIX environment. Our system connects with the networks and data systems owned by airlines and hotel companies. These systems keep fares updated and track inventory. ITN repurposes the data in a user-friendly format and allows the transaction to take place. Customer demand and request have been a primary motivator in the development of our product.

6. What is your distribution strategy for signing-up affiliate partners? Only big sites (min. number of page views)? Only certain content? Only a particular demographic? Do you proactively find them, or do they find you? How does this process happen?

ITN markets directly to web sites and through its own web site. A solid press release strategy and PR-related communications help generate interest, but really this product seems to generate interest and ideas from partners on its own.

7. Can you describe the details of the program? Percentage or flat fee? Just the first purchase, or repeat visits? What does the "fine print" of the contract say?

Since this is a bit more involved than your average Associates or Referral program, we actually charge a minimal set-up fee to cover the cost of customization and the set-up of an entirely customized booking system. ITN then pays its partners 20% of the actual commission received for each reservation finalized through the partner's site. Since we set up an actual web site, partners are paid for all reservations the originate from that site alone. Since ITN has so many partner sites in activity we only pay for the business that the partner is directly able to generate from their site. This also counts for both first and repeat visits, but again, only to the partner's actual site.

8. Describe briefly the tracking mechanism that you use to credit affiliates -- the technology and the process. Was this developed in-house? Who developed your affiliate contract?

The tracking system was developed in-house as with our software. Our contract was developed by our legal department.

9. What mistakes did you make early on that you would now avoid? Any "happy" surprises along the way?

A few mischoices in partners, but in general we've not made a lot of mistakes.

CURRENT AND FUTURE SCENARIO

10. How successful has the program been to date? How many affiliates do you have (can you name some). What percentage of your online revenue do they account for?

Very successful, both as a mechanism for increasing transactions, as well as for extending our brand. Some of our better known partners include CNN Interactive, Rand McNally, CMPNet and CitySearch.

11. What long-term role do you see the affiliate program playing in your company? What role do you think it will have in the Industry - what does it mean for the growth of e-commerce, the impact on retailing offline, and the standard ad impression rates for banners?

It will continue to play a major role in the way we as a company grow our business and reach new users.

12. What value, if any, is there in a site such as Refer-it.com? What other sites/ news information sources do you use to keep abreast of your industry? Are there any conferences you attend that are "must sees"?

We shall see. It's a good idea, comprehensive and has a lot of potential. Certainly there are thousands of affiliate programs on the web, Refer-it does a great job of cataloguing them for the would-be affiliate and entrepreneur interested in achieving success on the web.

--- Copyright (c) 1999. Up-Set. All rights reserved.

Contact: Cynthia A. Aylward
Refer-it.com
V.P. Marketing
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