I haven’t had heard of a similar startup / product on the market up until now, and I’m pretty excited to find out about it. Tapfiliate is a cloud based platform that allows you to create your own affiliate marketing programs. It works very much in a way that a standard affiliate marketing software would. (iDevAffilliate comes to mind)
The difference is that you’re managing everything from the Tapfiliate dashboard, and it allows you to save a ton of money by not having to purchase licenses, or pay yearly fees for servers and setup work. Getting started is as easy as creating a program and setting the commission rates – then you can invite affiliates through the special link you’re given and kick back.
I’m pretty sure it’s not going to be a replacement for large business owners and networks that need to have something that can scale and provide very detailed information and reports about the affiliate statistics, but I do think that many bloggers and writers might find this platform appealing.
In fact, when it becomes more widely available and has a proper launch party, I might consider using it for one of my blogging books, not only to help me promote it but also to give the chance for my fellow community members to earn some money through my work.
The pricing can turn out to be a downside for many, in order to have your own custom domain name you’ll have to shell out 99$ per month, but I hardly find it as a problem – most of the big affiliate networks these days don’t give you the ability to use a custom domain name, and for the most part you’re stuck with a WordPress plugin that does the URL masking for you.
I think that putting that aside, the prices are fair and offer quite a bit of space even for intermediate and faster growing businesses. I’ve checked out @Tapfiliate and they appear to be putting together a Knowledge Base page, which I’ll update the post with once it has been released. I’m sure it will answer more questions than I could account for.
