To set up an Affiliate program and do it right, you have to properly staff it and implement your shopping cart systems to support the tracking of affiliate referrals. You also have to implement reporting mechanisms for your affiliates and deal with recruiting affiliates, customer service, and payout automation. Just to mention a few. These can be quite costly. You may want to consider the alternatives before you leap.

One of the biggest challenges of setting up an affiliate program is finding the websites who are willing to put your link on their site. Often times, websites are not interested in affiliate programs as they are assuming all the risk. A common complaint voiced is that they may be sending a ton of traffic to their affiliate provider's site but are making next to nothing.

The crux lies in the conflict of interest. Web site operators do not want to bear the risk of putting an affiliate link on their site, driving up brand awareness for their affiliate provider, and driving traffic to their provider's site without getting paid. There are many factors that affect a visitor's decision to buy, oftentimes; these are beyond the control of the web site operators. For this reason, many website operators will never join an affiliate program. Furthermore, there is a factor of trust. Website operators may be weary of the statistics reported to them by their program provider or the likelihood of actually being paid on time.

On the other end of the spectrum, companies are not willing to spend money on banner ads. Often times, web sites that seek advertisers can give no assurance or historical information about click through rates or conversion rates.

Consequently, I predict that there will be a dramatic rise in third party affiliate program providers and click through programs in the next few years.

Click through programs are companies that find websites who will display your banner ads for you but you only pay for true traffic to your site. They take care of a lot of issues associated with affiliate programs. They are a third party and are able to provide honest unbiased statistics on click throughs. They free the affiliate program provider from needing to recruit web site operators. They also take care of the administration, tracking, customer service and pay out worries needed to set up an affiliate program.

Some click through programs I know of include ClickTrade (clicktrade.linkexchange.com) from the Link Exchange and Click2Net (www.click2net.com).

I recently encountered another variation to the click through program theme from a new company called TrafficBrokerage. http://www.trafficbrokerage.com/4

In addition to using click throughs, they claimed to have pioneered a concept called "Endorsement Based Marketing". They use their affiliate websites' Endorsements to drive traffic to their advertisers' site without the use of banners.

For example, if you visited a photography site and they have something like "If you are looking lenses, check out Rob's Lenses. They have the best selections and great prices."...the chances are MUCH higher for Rob's Lenses of getting hits.

As far as I know, this is a pretty unique concept. You can get more information at http://www.trafficbrokerage.com/4

While Affiliate programs do have a number of advantages over banner ads, they do come with their own set of problems. Click through programs certainly offer a number of significant advantages and could save you a lot of headaches and administrative overheads.