Interview: Post Affiliate Pro Software

I recently came across an affiliate software solution that is used by some top marketers, and I decided to contact one of the co-owners to see if he’d be interested in being interviewed for my blog. We highly recommend the solution that he discusses, below.

Because he was concerned that his English wouldn’t be the greatest during an audio interview (English is his second language), we decided to conduct the interview via text, instead. Enjoy…

Interview: Viktor Zeman
Co-Founder Post Affiliate Pro

Q. How important do you feel it is to have a system for properly managing a company’s affiliate program?

First of all, thank you for your interest in Post Affiliate Pro. It’s an honor for Quality Unit to support your community and readers with information about our product.

Back to your question: An Affiliate Program is a set of logical rules and describes the relationship between you (merchant), your partner (affiliate) and visitors referred by your affiliates.

Affiliate software is just a tool, which helps you to implement your affiliate program with all the rules you need to setup.

Affiliate software itself will not increase your sales but without it you can’t implement any type of affiliate program.

One of the most important aspects in affiliate software is trust. The merchant needs to trust that his affiliate software will track all sales correctly, will protect them against fraudulent orders and offer all the features they need to setup an affiliate program. Affiliates need to be able to trust in the affiliate software as well. Otherwise they will not be motivated to market the merchant’s products.

Another important parameter of every affiliate software is quality of tracking. Post Affiliate Pro implements the most reliable tracking methods, which can be implemented with the current Internet technologies.  Post Affiliate Pro supports Flash cookie tracking with fall-back to First or Third party browser cookies and fall-back to IP tracking. We always select the most reliable tracking method possible for each visitor.

Q. How important do you think it is, then, that I’m using AffiliateManagementInsider to encourage people to maximize their affiliate programs?

Affiliate software without the right management will not generate any revenue. It’s very important to teach people how to constantly develop a successful affiliate program.

This is something that AffiliateManagementInsider.com does a very good job at and I think that without websites like yours people will not realize the advantages of affiliate marketing at all. Affiliate marketing offers various kinds of strategies and your website is the right place for affiliate managers or merchants to learn those strategies.

Q. Why did you create Post Affiliate Pro 4… was there something that you noticed might be missing in other solutions?

The story behind the creation of Post Affiliate Pro is interesting. The project was started by Maros Fric, who was one of the co-founders of Quality Unit. Marcos has since left Quality Unit but he was the man behind initial concept of Post Affiliate Pro.
It was implemented at the beginning as custom project for one customer. Shortly before Maros finished the entire project the customer told him that he was not going to pay for it.

It was maybe good luck for us, that the customer changed his mind and refused to pay. Maros now had in his hands a completed affiliate software program which now belonged entirely to him.

Therefore he put together a small website where he offered the affiliate software for all Internet users. It was year 2004 and none of us expected any income from it but things changed and the first week after launch we received our first sales. Quality Unit was founded a few months later. Post Affiliate Pro was and still is the most important product of Quality Unit.

Q. What does Post Affiliate Pro 4 do?

Post Affiliate Pro is affiliate program software that helps manage tracking and marketing of your affiliate program.
The software is designed to empower or establish your affiliate program quickly and easily. Post Affiliate Pro is easy-to-use and easy to set up to manage your affiliates.

It has all the basic affiliate software functions and also contains tons of other useful features which can save time during the initial implementation of your affiliate program.

Q. Who is Post Affiliate Pro 4 meant for?

Post Affiliate Pro is used by thousands of customers from nearly every type of industry. The most common industries that use Post Affiliate Pro daily are:
•    Stores of any kind (Retail, Product Sales and Wholesales)
•    Advertising, Marketing & Publishing
•    Finance & Insurance
•    Real Estate
•    Consumer & Packed Goods
•    Education
•    Entertainment, Gaming
•    Adult industry
•    Leasure & Recreation
•    Hosting Companies
•    Service oriented industries
•    Software Technology and Communication
•    Travel

Post Affiliate Pro can be used for promoting of any kind of goods or services.

For example: We implemented an affiliate program for Prayers some time ago.Our customer sold the time of a praying person to his visitors. The visitor was able to order different types of Prayers and also different times of praying.

Q. How does Post Affiliate Pro work?

Post Affiliate Pro can be implemented in the most complicated environments but I will try to describe the most simple configuration that fits to most of our customers.

Installation of Post Affiliate Pro is connected with the merchant’s website by two types of integration codes. For the merchant it’s a simple copy and paste of the prepared integration code into his website.

The first integration code is a click tracking code which should be pasted into the footer template of the merchant’s website.
The second integration code is a Sales Tracking Code which should be pasted into the “Thank you page“.

If a visitor enters your website through any affiliate link, Post Affiliate Pro records this action and assigns the visitor to an affiliate.

Later, when same visitor purchases the product or service the commission from the sale is assigned to that affiliate.
The visitor can browse multiple pages on the merchant site or close the browser reopening the web page the next day with a different browser on same computer and than buy your product.

Between the first click and the sale you can be assured that Post Affiliate Pro will track it correctly.

Post Affiliate Pro is not limited to just tracking to sales, it can track basically any action on merchant’s website. You can track and pay your affiliates for different kinds of actions like: lead generation, signup to membership software, signup to newsletter, click on any button on your site or whatever you need to track on your website.

Q. Does a company have to install it on their own servers, or do you have a web-based version, as well?

Yes, we offer a hosted option for Post Affiliate Pro on our servers. The hosted version allows our customers to receive automatic periodical upgrades to latest versions of Post Affiliate Pro as soon as they are released. We also have various levels of our solution for installing on your own servers.

Q. What are some of the benefits to using PAP4 vs. other solutions?

I know a couple reasons, why is our affiliate software better as our competition:

First reason is we have multiple unique features, which has no other affiliate software on market has. Features such as Rebrandable PDF documents (Viral PDF marketing), Split commission feature, Forced matrix, an Unlimited number of tiers for Multi Level Marketing strategies, Unique user interface and many others.

The second reason is, our tracking methods have highest possible quality and we can even track sales made on one computer but in different browsers (cross browser tracking).

Q. What are 2 or 3 of the most popular features of your software?

The average installation includes features like recurring commissions, performance rewards, private campaigns and forced matrix. Since we have a few different types of customers that need different features we offer four editions of Post Affiliate Pro with feature packages of different size.

Q. Is your solution complicated, or is it user-friendly?

According to feedback we’ve received from our customers the software has a pretty short learning curve. In the event that any customer doesn’t understand how to use a feature our support crew will help them for free.

Our goal is to have satisfied customers and to us this means that although affiliate software may be a complicated system, it has to be easily configurable in the user interface for the customer.

Q. What type of support do you provide for those who decide to invest in your software?

We offer phone support, email support, live chat support, forum and an extensive knowledge base.Every day we have eight hard working support agents to answer all support calls from our customers.

Q. Do you have any type of guarantee?

We offer multiple types of guarantees to our customers:

•    30 Days Money Back Guarantee – As I mentioned, we try to satisfy every customer. If customer isn’t satisfied with our product, upon request we will make full refund without any questions.
•    Software Quality Guarantee – If our software contains any bug reported by a customer or a bug is found by our team, we try to deliver a bug fix within shortest possible time. Often it only takes one week until we release a new version with new features and fixed bugs. Our customers have access to the members area where they can always download the latest version of the product they ordered. As mentioned above for Post Affiliate Pro hosted accounts the upgrade is an automatic process and customer doesn’t need to install any upgrades.

Q. How do you recommend people get started with your software?

Most important is to stick with it and don’t give up after few days. Affiliate software is a long term investment and it may take time for you to find good affiliates and start really selling. The installation of our application is really simple with a few steps of the installation wizard.

Right after installation we try to lead merchant through the setup of his affiliate program with the “Getting started wizard”.
We tried to optimize our application so that each merchant will be able to implement their first affiliate program within an hour after ordering.

Q. I notice you have various levels for customers to choose from. Which one is the most popular, or which one would you prefer the majority of people start off with?

Our goal is to offer a full range of pricing models and feature packages. We offer 4 different packages of Post Affiliate Pro. Our most popular package is Post Affiliate Pro Professional Edition (owned), which contains all the most important features.
Most often a customer initially orders just the Starter edition for $49, plays with it few days and later upgrades his installation to Professional edition.

Q. Is there anything else you’d like to add about PAP4 that hasn’t already been mentioned?

I will mention two important features:

1) Tracking Quality and Speed

Post Affiliate Pro has most reliable tracking method compared to our competitors. We use different kinds of tracking methods (Flash Cookie tracking, First party and Third party cookies, IP tracking) and combine them into one reliable mechanism, which will correctly track every visitor on your website.

Standard PHP based affiliate software is capable of tracking about 10 transactions per second. Post Affiliate Pro can track in peaks of more than 150 requests per second on some hardware platforms. If your affiliate program is running the wrong software you may realize it too late and it’s very hard to migrate a running affiliate program into another affiliate software.

2) Splitting commissions -

Split Commissions is a feature that will be a decision making factor in next few years of affiliate marketing.
Until now affiliate software programs assign commissions to only one affiliate (first or last), even if more than one affiliate referred same sale. The latest release of Post Affiliate Pro will be able to split commissions between all affiliates that worked on same sale referral.

You may ask why is splitting commissions so important ?

Every commission assigned to an affiliate motivates them to sell more products. On other hand, each sale you assign to another affiliate may discourage them if they know the visitor came to your site through their affiliate link also. Post Affiliate Pro offers a fair commission mechanism for all your affiliates.

NOTE: By ordering on the links, above, we will most definitely earn an affiliate commission for making you aware of this powerful software solution. If you do NOT wish for us to be compensated for sharing this valuable resource with you, no hard feelings. You may order from here, instead.