[il]

Best answer here. I used to run traffic to Groupon clones so I know all about their affiliate program. The secret is building high converting landing pages and a strong backend. Then push the offer out to affiliates who can drive lots of traffic and sit back and wait for signups.

[sandGorgon]

care to elaborate about strong backend ? are you referring to the system architecture (DB, site responsiveness, PHP vs Ruby, etc.) ?

[waitingforgodel]

He's using backend in the direct marketing sense... What you do with a customer after you make the initial sale (cross selling, up selling, follow up pitches, customer reactivation, referral drives, special events, etc, etc)

[il]

You got it right :) Specifically, in this case, it's all about how well you can upsell and how effectively you can email your existing customer base to keep them engaged.

[instakill]

I think by strong back-end he means a strong google adwords program with good optimization and conversion rate etc.