I need a better understanding of affiliate programs

[iconidpromos]

I own a site that sells promotional products. While I understand what an affiliate program is and roughly how it works, I do have a few questions that I would be elated if someone could answer.

I understand that code is inserted into the shopping cart usually so that purchases are tracked and due credit is given to the site that referred the visitor. My company sells over 500,000 products from thousands of suppliers across the country. Our "product catalog" (found at www.iconidentity.com/productsearch.shtml) is offered to us for free by an industry trade organization. The suppliers pay the org to put the products in their catalog database. While I am some control over the catalog and it's appearance such as adding pages and text, I cannot insert code into the catalog to track these visitors.

The main reason for my interest in the program is not only additional sales, but also for the number of links that it provides pointing to my site, therefore increasing my 1 way link popularity.

What I'm wondering is, is there another way for me to do an affiliate program other than inserting code into the catalog itself? Any additional advice about these programs and possibly even a way to administer would be great! I've checked out commissionjunction.com and others, but they are REALLY expensive to implement.

Any help is welcome and appreciated.

[Linda Buquet]

iconidpromos,

I have dealt with situations like yours before and have had a couple clients that get their inventory from an industry database supplier like you do. In one case they were able to set up an affiliate program and in one they were not. It depends on lots of techy things that cannot be answered in a general way here.

One thing you could do is pay per click, just to get people to send you the traffic. That can be risky if the traffic is not well qualified but is an option and would get you the inbound links. (only if the affiliate software can be configured to do that, many are not set up that way and link pop goes to the adserver domain, not yours.)