When it comes to tracking your affiliates, should you use a manager or do it yourself? To be sure, there are pros and cons to both approaches. If you do it yourself and you have a lot of affiliates you could find yourself spending most of your time managing affiliates and not running your business. On the other hand, if you hire a manager to oversee your affiliate program for you then you could have some out of pocket expenses, which could get expensive if you don't have any affiliates or if you go a long time with only a few affiliates who are producing anything for you.

A good rule of thumb is only spend money when you can justify the expense. In other words, when you first start your affiliate program try doing it yourself for awhile then hire a manager when you have at least one affiliate who is producing enough sales for you to justify hiring a manager. A good affiliate manager will cost you 15%-20% of your total affiliate volume, but some managers charge a flat fee in addition to a percentage of the volume and that's where you could have some unnecessary expenses.

You may have heard of the 80/20 rule. It is a reasonable expectation that 20% of your affiliates will produce 80% of your sales volume. In other words, you will likely have to get 5 affiliates before you find one that really does much for you. Even then, he will likely only produce 80% of your total volume, so if your total average monthly sales volume from your 5 affiliates is $100 then probably $80 of that is coming from one affiliate. That's not a whole lot of business. That's probably where you want to be before you start shelling out $15-$30 per month on an affiliate manager. At any rate, whatever your monthly cost for an affiliate manager, you want at least that much coming in the door from your affiliate sales before you turn over management to a manager.