Affiliates' Frequently Asked Questions

All you webmasters out there who are reading and finding out about PaqRat for the first time probably have questions about the program.  Here we will attempt to answer as many of them as we can.  Of course, if you have others, you can email us and we'll get back to you quickly.  If your questions are really about the application and not the affiliate program, click here.

How do I get paid?

When you signup, you supply us with your mailing address and your social security number.  At the end of every month, we go through all the affiliate statements, write checks to all the affiliates who have balances over $50 and mail them out.  For this reason, it is important that you supply your real name and address.  We will never share any of the information you give us with anyone else for any reason.

How much am I going to make?

This is really hard to predict.  It all depends on how much traffic your website gets, how many and how good are your affiliates under you, etc.  There are some example calculations at the bottom of the page here, but just to calculate your direct sales commissions, we can make a guesstimate right here:

• Assume you get 1,000 unique visitors a day.
• Approximately 2% of the people visiting your site download PaqRat, or 20 people.
• Of those 10, probably 10% of those people will actually buy the software, or 2 people.
• Your commission on 2 people is $10.
• $10 per day for a month is about $300/month.  Not too shabby.
• Remember, this is $300/month per thousand daily visitors.  Some of you big guys are getting upwards of 20,000 unique visitors a day, which according to this math would translate to $6,000 in a month, not including sub-affiliate income!
• Gee, maybe our math is too optimistic.  Anyway, as we get going we will keep track of all these percentages and update this calculation with better guesses.

Can I check my account during the month?

Yes you can.  If you are a registered affiliate, simply login to the website and you will be taken to your account page.  It will show you all sorts of things, including:

• How many affiliates you have at each level below you
• How many sales you have made
• How many times the program has been downloaded under your name
• How many sales each of your affiliate levels have made
• What the dollar value of each level is
• What your current account balance is (the total of all the levels).

Isn't this program just going to take away from my banners and cost me more bandwidth?

First of all, you don't have to take off any of your advertising to talk about PaqRat on your website.  Secondly, all you are doing is linking to our site so it won't cost you hardly any extra bandwidth to put up a plug for it.  In the long run, other PaqRat users may come to your site and spider through your website in a hurry, but that will happen whether you're an affiliate or not.  This is a way to make money off that trend.

But guess what?  The bandwidth for your site really isn't going to change just because of PaqRat.  There are 100 million Internet users out there (probably more now).  Most of you have a LOT of traffic to your site from these 100 million users.  Let's say we are wildly successful with PaqRat and sell 500,000 copies.  That's still only 0.5% of users out there.  You will never notice the difference.

I haven't sold anything.  What's wrong?

The problem could be that you are just not getting people to click through and download PaqRat.  Make sure your hit statistics are optimal and work on where you have your PaqRat banners and what you say about it to encourage people to try it out.

Another problem could be that you have your links wrong.  At the time you signed up as an affiliate, we sent you an email with the exact link you should use, which contains your affiliate id number as part of the url.  If you didn't get that number right in your link, someone else is probably getting credit for your sales!  Check your account and then double check your links if your click-throughs are zero.

We are anticipating getting pretty high conversion rates (i.e. we think most people who download the program will end up buying it), so it's really all about getting people to download it.  Getting people to download it is going to be most successful if people who respect your opinion hear your personal endorsement of PaqRat.  Of course, cool banners can't hurt.  ;-)

How do I get credit for selling PaqRat if there's a 7 day trial period?

At the time a visitor downloads the software, having clicked through from your website link, we set a cookie on the visitor's machine to remember the affiliate who referred them.  That cookie is detected when the visitor returns to actually buy the software, whether they come back just by surfing here, or by choosing "Purchase" from the Help menu from within the program, so you get credit for the sale.  (To account for people who have their cookies disabled, we distribute out the earnings from the "no-cookie" sales on a pro rata basis to all the other affiliates.)

Furthermore, if they ever become an affiliate themselves, either by just surfing here on their own, or by choosing "Become an affiliate" from the PaqRat Help menu, the cookie will be detected again (it never expires), and you will get credit for signing up that affiliate.  It should be easy to see that you could gather a whole lot of 2nd level affiliates without even really trying.  We don't want to end up with our affiliates working harder to sign up affiliates than to sell software, so we make it easy to accomplish both objectives at once!

How do I sign up others as affiliates?

First of all, anyone who purchases the software from you, then becomes an affiliate on their own will be "hooked up" under you, so you will magically accumulate affiliates as you go, even if all you do is sell the software.

Secondly, you have the option of using your website or just talking to people about it.  Tell your story on your website, about the advantages of the program, how much money you're making--whatever you think will get affiliates to join.  Explain to your web buddies how it works.  Send out emails.  Whatever you think is most appropriate.  The key is to make sure that those people use your affiliate id on the signup form when they sign up to be affiliates.  You can either tell them what it is, or use it as a parameter in the link on your website.  (The exact URL to link to should have been in your signup email.)