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What is an affiliate program?

Affiliate programs are revenue sharing arrangements set up by companies selling products and services. As a website owner you are rewarded for sending customers to the company.

Merchants love having affiliates because they're making money but you're doing all the hard work! For example, by February 1998, Amazon.com, one of the largest affiliates, had more than 30,000 webmasters giving Amazon publicity in exchange for a small commission on sales. In 2004, they had reached more than 900,000 affiliates!

It works like this. You place a special link (with your unique affiliate tracking code) from your site or newsletter to the merchant. When someone clicks on the link and buys a product or service from the business, you earn a commission.

How do I join an affiliate program?

Joining an affiliate program is very easy, it's very rare to be declined. Sometimes affiliates require you have a working website or meet specific criteria (such as recieve a certain number of visitors) but this is always outlined in their terms before you apply for the program.

Below I have listed the major affiliate networks, you can think of an affiliate network as a directory of affiliates, you simply register your details with the network and from here you can join thousands of different affiliate programs, promoting different products, from gardening tools to weight loss pills. Usually there is a dedicated affiliate manager, who you can ask questions to and they will help you with your program. You don't even have to worry about getting any banners made, most programs provide an array of marketing material for you!

TradeDoubler - The European Affiliate Network (I would recommend this)
Commission Junction - A Global Leader in Affiliate Marketing, Online Advertising and Search Engine Marketing
Digital Products Retailer: Affiliate Program & Sell Online - ClickBank
Affiliate Network - Webgains
Affiliate Network - Affiliate Window
AzoogleAds - Home - The leading performance based marketplace

How do I choose an affiliate program?

The first thing you should decide isn't the product you're selling but who you're going to be selling the product to. Quite alot of people decide on the product first and then have difficulties marketing it. If you already have a website with thousands of unique visitors per day then it should be fairly easy to decide on a suitable program. E.g. If you run a music blog, you could join an affiliate for HMV or Virgin and recieve commission everytime someone buys a CD or DVD through your website.

If you're starting this from scratch then be precise. You need to target a group of people with a particular interest. Once you have decided on a niche, research it, find out where these people hang out, what websites they visit, what forums they post on, what newsletters they subscribe to, what magazines they read.

Not all programs require your visitor to make a purchase. Some affiliates pay per lead, this is when a customer submits their information, E.g. they take part in a survey, download software or subscribe to a free trial.

I did mention 10 things to be aware of when choosing an affiliate program in another thread, but i'll go over them again here. It's worth mentioning that several of these points are irrelevent if you join through a network like tradedoubler, generally speaking any affiliate approved to be in a network has decent support and pays on time.

1) Choose a new program

The older affiliate programs are much more difficult to market. Simply because they've been promoted to death and recruiting new members or generating sales is hard. New programs are released every week, so my advice to you is to keep your eyes open and look for an exciting new opportunity.

2) Competition of keywords

Links in with my first point, over saturated markets will mean it's alot harder and more expensive to generate leads/sales. Your best bet is to find a niche with minimal competition and then look for a program in this market. Just goto Google and type in a keyword/phrase and you should be able to tell how much competition there is for a particular product/service.

3) Commission

Obviously this is a very important factor. Unless you already have an existing website that generates organic traffic or you run a ezine/mailing list with thousands of members it's going to cost money to make money. Higher commissions the better, obviously if you're promoting a product that can make $150 per sale then you know you can spend $149 and still make profit (Just an example). I was reading Tyler Cruz's blog the other day and he started doing affiliate marketing, was shocked to see he was promoting a product on Adwords that ONLY makes $6 commission per sale....considering he was bidding on keywords for $1/click, it made absolutly no sense financially.

4) Recurring commission

This isn't really something I'm too bothered about but always look out for this as it's a nice bonus. Some affiliate programs (mainly membership websites) offer recurring commission every month, usually a % of the initial commission. Although there are other products that offer a similar pay scale but this is crossing over more into mlm and that's another thread altogether.

5) Real time stats

Essential. If the affiliate program doesn't give you the ability to check your clicks, leads, sales, commissions then don't join it. As i'm sure you are aware, constant monitoring of statistics and campaign refinement is crucial to a successful affiliate campaign. Most likely, sites that cannot provide this are scams.

6) Cookie time

Another vital element of any affiliate program is the length of the cookie. When a visitor clicks your ad and visits the site you're promoting a cookie is stored on their computer, if the user doesn't make a sale immediatly, they can still visit the site the next day, week or even month later and make a purchase and you will still receive the commission. So obviously here the longer the cookie time the better, some offer 30 day and 90 day cookies.

7) Minimum payout level

Another big factor to consider, programs that only payout after you've made $500 are usually scams, stay well away! What will most likely happen here is, you will reach $490 or something and then they will cancel your account for violating one of their terms of service or something ridiculous.

8) Payment methods

Make sure you can accept the payment method the affiliate offers, quite alot are bank transfer, but don't assume they will provide paypal because quite alot don't. Nothing worse than joining a program, promoting a product for a few months, earning several hundred bucks and then realising you can't even get the money out!

9) Support

Like with any company, support is crucial. I would contact the affiliate you're thinking about joining first with some questions or what not and just see the sort of response you get. You will always encounter some form of problem along the way, whether it's payment being late, stats not working properly....so a good dedicated support team is a must.

10) Contact methods

Always check for a phone number and physical address.

Types of publisher websites

To give you an idea of the types of websites users create to promote these offers I have outlined the main ones below and given some examples where possible.

1) Comparison shopping sites

You've probably all visited a website where you can compare offers on a variety of products, if you goto Google and type in "Widescreen Television" the first link you find is for a comparison site kelkoo.com, this site lists thousands of products, with each product linking to the merchant through their affiliate link.

2) Content and niche sites

These are getting more popular, typically blog based, focusing on product reviews with a link to the product through your affiliate link. Often these are high quality content sites on a niche subject E.g. Fishing rods.

3) E-mail lists

People who run large newsletters or ezines have access to thousands of targeted users. This only really works if you already have an existing database. I would imagine if you tried to create a list and started shoving affiliate ads down their throats they would quickly unsubscribe.

4) Registration affiliates

Typically used during registration, you may have seen this on MSN/Hotmail when signing up for an e-mail account.

5) PPC to affiliate

This type of affiliate marketing doesn't require a website at all. Affiliates simply bid on keywords and phrases in Google/MSN etc and link directly to the affiliate offer.

Marketing an affiliate website

Quite alot of affiliate offers are promoted using PPC (Pay per click) using Google/MSN. If you haven't had any experience with PPC advertising when I would definitly suggest reading up on it, a book I have and I recommend is called "Winning results with Google Adwords", you can grab a copy from here Amazon.com: Winning Results with Google AdWords: Andrew Goodman: Books

The basic principle for PPC advertising is, you bid on specific keywords or phrases related to your offer E.g. If you're promoting a page selling 40" Sony plasma televisions then you would probably want the following keywords in your campaign.

"Where to buy a 40" sony plasma tv"
"Where to buy a 40" sony plasma television"

Now, you're probably wondering why I haven't just listed "40" sony plasma tv", the reason is, someone searching for that might not actually be interested or in the position to buy one! Always make sure your keywords/phrases have "doing" words in front of them, "Where to buy", says to me that the customer is actually interested in making a purchase.

A good campaign needs to have hundreds, if not thousands of keywords and phrases, long tail keywords such as the ones above will cost less money (because they're searched less) but will deliver far less traffic, so it's important to keep adding new keywords on a daily basis. There are many tools out there that can help you with your keywords/phases but be aware that alot of people are using the same tools, there is no substitute for the human brain!

Another important point to mention is that of landing pages. A landing page is the page your visitor first arrives on, ideally you want a different landing page for every offer you promote. Don't send your visitors to your index page and make them navigate your website to find what they were looking for, they've already searched once!

If you don't plan on doing the PPC route there are other ways to promote your website. One of the best ways is using signatures and posting on forums related to the niche, E.g. If you're promoting a sewing machine, then head over to a sewing community, don't spam your link whatever you do! Start by making several worthwhile and informative posts and you will soon find people taking notice.

I think that's about it for now, if you have any questions or would like to add anything to this thread just let me know. I'm no expert at all, I've just done alot of reading and research into this area