En 
IT Creating an affiliate program to promote products and services is a strategy that brings significant benefits at very low costs, both in terms of promoting and launching a new product or service.
Yet, affiliate marketing is a very often underestimated strategy because the benefits are not known.
Therefore, before knowing what are the advantages of affiliate marketing and the software to create affiliate programs, it is good to know the players and the mechanism behind this digital marketing strategy.
An affiliate program provides for the payment of a commission, or a percentage of the total cost of the product or service, by the advertiser or merchant (company or freelancer who wants to promote what they sell) to one or more affiliates (also called publishers ) for each product or service sold to an end-user, thanks to the promotion through their websites, blogs and social networks.
By doing so, the affiliate marketing model benefits both parties: on the one hand, the advertiser will pay a percentage, decided by him, which can be fixed or variable, only in the case of a product sale or subscription to a service; on the other hand, the affiliate will earn for each product or service sold and, therefore, will be incentivized to promote and sell as much as possible.
As for the advantages, in addition to the low initial investment cost and the payment of a commission only for sales or for the objectives achieved, creating affiliate programs means generating more traffic on your website or eCommerce and immediately increasing sales.
Another advantage that should not be underestimated is the increase in online reputation. In fact, creating a network of affiliates with a large number of visitors on their online channels translates into the acquisition of new customers and an increase in corporate brand awareness. Therefore, acquisition and retention of new customers.
Having clarified the mechanism behind affiliate marketing, the main players and the advantages, it is good to know which are the best software to start and manage affiliate programs and to monitor the results and sales performance of affiliates.
Software to create and manage affiliate programs
iDevAffiliate and OSI Affiliate are two software (or plugins) ideal for starting and managing an affiliate program.
The main feature of the two plugins is their maximum integration compatibility with CMS and other software, among the most popular Magento, PrestaShop, Shopify, Ecwid, OpenCart, Wix, WordPress and WooCommerce and many others.
The two plugins in addition to being characterized by simplicity of both configuration and use, are complete in terms of functionality.
Through the use of iDevAffiliate or OSI Affiliate, in fact, it is possible to accept or reject the registration requests of the affiliates to their affiliate program, to generate unique links and reference codes for each affiliate, in order to track and monitor each sale made, make payments to affiliates directly from the platform's dashboard, obtain and export statistics and metrics with the results and sales performance of each affiliate, make content easily shareable on affiliates' social networks, create SEO link structures, customize commissions for affiliates, or create a network of sub-affiliates.
The features listed above are just some of the main ones, as the two affiliate software still have many other features to get the most out of your affiliate marketing results.
Affiliate Software Comparison: iDevAffiliate vs OSI Affiliate
