Brian Clark heads Radiation, a software company offering LinkTrakker software. Drawing on a strong technological background, and offering his products to WebMasters and Web Development companies, he taps into a natural and huge market on the Internet; offering software. He has an affiliate program he runs, as well as participating in his "competitor's" program. Here's how he approaches the affiliate market.

"We've been doing CGI web development since 1994, mostly from the entertainment industry. We needed to be able to track promotionally what was working and what wasn't. We really want to be able to see the results coming from search engines, links, banner banners, and get a feel for how our techniques were working online.

We decided to build the tools because we need them ourselves. LinkTrakker has been around since March 1995 with 16 point version upgrades since then. Now it is the centerpiece of our well tested, well deployed products under the Radiation brand.

In my mind, the most beautiful affiliate's system requires the affiliate to do the minimum amount of special things. Amazon and Barnes & Noble use their cgi program, making you link to a particular book, which is not the easiest thing to do for an affiliate.

In the ideal world, the affiliate would just make a link, and it would count towards their sales, friction-less. It is not about managing the sign up process of affiliates, calculating the percentage they should be paid, and setting up all these systems. Affiliate programs have extreme customization needs on the front end and the back end. On the front end, what info do you want to collect, and how much do you want them to track real time?

Linktrakker fills the middle, connecting each visitor to the Web Site with the outside Web Site that led them in from lead to sale, just by reading a cookie on a browser. It's simple to customize shopping carts to read that cookie and store it as an extra field of the order.

Our affiliate program for LinkTrakker has allowed us to dedicate support resources to everyone who's installing before they bought. Affiliate programs are becoming accepted and free up resources for support, for customer service. We launched our affiliate program 3 months ago and have over 220 affiliates already, providing them the technology without requiring having a direct relationship with their clients; we are thinking like an outsourcer."

"I discovered WebPosition software, which is a great match for RankThis's services, so close that a business person who is more narrow minded might see them as competition. I signed up for their affiliates program, and dedicated 40 CPM of banners for WebPosition, generating $1500 in commissions a month. I get $37.50 per CPM for my banner advertising with this affiliate program, measured in commissions.

Compare that to my other options; if I sell the banner ads, the book rate is $15 CPM. If I can't sell the banner bars via that method, and put that into the hands of a broker, I earn about $1.40 to $5 CPM...compare that to the money ($37.50) from WebPosition. Plus I don't have to convince WebPosition to buy advertising every month, like I would if I was simply selling banner ads at my Web Site.

The problem with banner ad CPM is that it doesn't provide enough accountability to advertisers. Clickthrough doesn't provide enough accountability to publishers. Affiliate programs protect both."

Brian looks to the SellThrough, instead of the clickthrough. He finds that certain sites related to his product line generate much more sales than others through his affiliate program.