Find solution
How do you create a website?

How do I create a gamified network referral/affiliate marketing website for socially and environmentally conscious products, that keeps affiliate payouts as revenue, and rewards users for their online impact with points and badges?

  • Idea:  I want to create a gamified network marketing website where users promote curated affiliate products and websites.   50% of the monetary payout from the affiliate links would be kept by the website to build the business, and 50% would go to a charity of the users’ choosing.   Instead of the monetary payout for affiliate purchases, users would receive points and badges in recognition of click-throughs and purchases they get others to make. Ideally, the amount of social media interactions (likes, shares, retweets, pins, comments, etc.) would also be measured and rewarded with points and badges.   The library of products and websites that users could promote would be community curated based on a fixed set of criteria evaluating social and environmental impact.      Questions:   1.  Is it legal, ethical, and technically possible to generate custom affiliate links for my website’s users that would track their online influence individually, but deposit the monetary payout for their affiliate purchases in my website’s bank account?   2.  What is the cheapest and easiest way to create a gamified network marketing website like this where users promote curated affiliate products and websites, ideally using open-source solutions?     I really appreciate your time and advice. Thank you. :)

  • Answer:

    Wow, looks like you have a big project in mind! 1. I've worked in a project that involved the research of online shop affiliates systems and I can tell the important ones use them (though that percentage is much lower than a 50%). It is of course legal but the implementation is complex. 2. I don't think the cheapest and the easiest way are the same. The cheaper would be to master every field that you would need for this: design, development and marketing. The easiest is that you hire a qualified development company to do it. You would probably need to consider if you need an e-commerce instead of a Content Management System. Random idea: gamification lies on reward. What if that affiliate percentage starts lower and it raises with their social achievements and sales volume?

Andrés Maeso at Quora Visit the source

Was this solution helpful to you?

Other answers

You are asking a question that already includes your imagined solution. It's like you were asking "How do I create a vehicle that gets me from Paris to New York, and has four wheels, a trunk, and where I can use my drivers license." You do not even understand the real problem yet, and who your users are, but you have already badges and points in mind. How do you even know that this is what you need? How do you know that this is what motivates your users? Do they even care about points and badges? Who are your users? Men, women, how old, which culture, what profession...? My suggestion: go back and reformulate your questions. Read up on intrinsic and extrinsic motivators. Read up on http://enterprise-gamification.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=Category%3AFun_motivator

Mario Herger

We're not talking about a website here. We're talking about several separated systems. Legal? Yes. Technically possible? Sure. Easiest and cheapest? Define cheap. Define easy. You would need at least one team working on the gamification service, one for the banking service and one for your website. Keep these teams apart. Let them play provider-consumer -relationship with each other. The chances are, your website don't succeed but the gamification service gains other clients and becomes the next big thing. You may also find clients for your banking service. And let the teams choose the best technology for their problem domain. If it's easy and makes sense to use Joomla for example the public site, it's probably not the best platform to build your gamification engine in. Also, if your website gets compromised, it doesn't necessarily mean your banking/gamification platforms will. And this is crucial. As soon as you say 'money', you'll have hackers lining up.

Jani 'Jassi' Hyytiäinen

Related Q & A:

Just Added Q & A:

Find solution

For every problem there is a solution! Proved by Solucija.

  • Got an issue and looking for advice?

  • Ask Solucija to search every corner of the Web for help.

  • Get workable solutions and helpful tips in a moment.

Just ask Solucija about an issue you face and immediately get a list of ready solutions, answers and tips from other Internet users. We always provide the most suitable and complete answer to your question at the top, along with a few good alternatives below.