so i have a client. now what?

what to do once you have a business that wants you to market them

[iFixSolutions]

hey guys,

question for ya. after reading and participating in a couple of these forums i decided to take a stab at approaching one of my current clients (i'm a computer consultant.)

a little history: i built his website a long while back, but it was purely informational. he sells goods from a warehouse and is well connected in his niche. after some urging from me i got him to scrap the website i built and hire someone to build him an ecommerce site. well that's up and running and doing alright, but in his words "it's just another facet." he's not really pushing it.. he could be doing much much better.

today: so after a meeting with him today he's agreed to let me run an affiliate program for him. i'm in charge of traffic and sales, and i get commissions and leads from the deal. my question is.. how the hell do i track that? i'm not going to rely on someone entering in a referral code on check-out.. we know how people don't like to help other people out. i'll be SEO'ing as well as PPC, and i'm just curious if there's an easy way to implement some sort of cookie/tracking system. he's using BV as his back end, BTW. i haven't checked with BV.. maybe i should try there first, but i wanted to put it out here too.

anyone dealt with this before?

[iFixSolutions]

oh and.. how does it work if they find him through my campaign but they call him directly?

[johnafrid]

I would make a seperate site and get all orders processed through that site.

[iFixSolutions]

ok.. that's one thought. but is there a way to implement tracking through the current one? or is that something that would have to be programmed?

[iFixSolutions]

my client has a warehouse space that he ships his widgets out of. he's in bed very tightly with the company that manufactures these widgets and and has amazing potential to expand with the online side of things. so he now has a pretty nice ecommerce site that was just created, and people are finding him organically. well,i've convinced him to let me be an affiliate for him. i want to start pushing him the traffic, but i want the traffic i push to him to be tracked.

is there a way to do this? i don't want to build a separate site to process orders through.. i just want to have something (similar to cj in that when someone click on my links they're sent to him with an affiliate code in the url) that cookies people.. so when someone makes a purchase on his site it gives me credit.

the more i talk about it the more complicated it sounds ... i doubt there's an easy fix.

[edited by: iFixSolutions at 7:18 pm (utc) on April 15, 2007]

[edited by: eljefe3 at 2:37 am (utc) on April 16, 2007]

[jimbeetle]

Look around for [affiliate management scripts] or [affiliate management software] and similar phrases.

[bmcgee]

Get another phone number and put it on the site. That way anyone coming from the site can be flagged as originating from your marketing.

If they won't give you credit for all sales originating from the site, then you can track the referrers and display a differet phone number based on the referrer (and cookies, to account for repeat visitors from bookmarks and such).

Also, parse the referrers, track them, and eventually store them in the order database so you can tie orders to referrers.

[iFixSolutions]

Look around for [affiliate management scripts] or [affiliate management software] and similar phrases.

i've been searching and reading, but a lot of these companies are kind of spammy. a lot of ebooks out there too. anyone have tracking software they recommend?

side question: about the phone number. is there a way to have one number show up when the site is hit with an affiliate link, and then another number when they find him on their own? is that cloaking?

i'm kinda new at all of this, if you couldn't tell. thanks for putting up with my learnings.

[edited by: iFixSolutions at 7:01 am (utc) on April 17, 2007]