Article
About the Author
Peter T Davis and Georgina Laidlaw
Peter T. Davis has been working online for more than eight years as a webmaster, community builder, domainer, and Search Engine Optimizer. His first successful web site came from his passion for hobbies. It was a community for coin collectors, called CoinTalk. Peter specializes in link building and keyword analysis, which he believes are the two keys to a successful search marketing strategy. Georgina Laidlaw has viewed the Web from just about every conceivable angle since she entered the industry in 1998. She plays a crucial editorial role in virtually every SitePoint publication, including SitePoint's extremely popular newsletters, articles, books and kits and, of course, its online Marketplace.
Make Your Mark with Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing provides a different take on the concept of online advertising. The rewards from affiliate marketing can be great, but the work can be hard! However, affiliate marketing isn't, as the saying goes, rocket science. Become an affiliate of a given merchant, place that business's advertisements on your site, and you'll receive a commission for every paying customer you refer to the merchant's site.
This chapter aims to help you cut some corners on the journey to affiliate marketing success. It's excerpted from The Web Site Revenue Maximizer, which contains ten chapters in total. You can, of course, download this chapter, along with two others, to read at your leisure.
We start by investigating exactly what's involved in being an online affiliate, and how you can access a variety of affiliate programs. Next, we walk step by step through the process of monetizing your site with affiliate programs. The advice we'll uncover here applies just as well to an existing site as it would to a site you decided to build specifically for affiliate marketing purposes. The latter parts of the chapter give us the chance to investigate the details of some of the techniques you can use to optimize your site for affiliate sales, and to preempt the pitfalls into which the unwary affiliate marketer may plunge
Are you ready to earn more from your content site? Well, let's get started.
Affiliate Marketing 101
Being an affiliate is like being a very good friend of a business -- such a good friend, in fact, that when you refer paying customers to that business, that company pays you a percentage of the sale -- a commission. Say you're SitePoint, for example, and you've just released a fantastic new kit on ... well, let's say it's on maximizing web site revenues. As part of your marketing plan, you decide you want to encourage all those webmaster business sites out there to promote your kit to their readers. Now, those site owners know the value of money, so you decide to offer them a direct payment -- let's say it's $25 -- every time a visitor to their sites clicks their affiliate ad for the kit, arrives at sitepoint.com, and makes a purchase. That's what being an affiliate is all about.
The difference between joining an affiliate program and joining an advertising network is that affiliate revenues are generated through sales, or action, while, as we saw in Chapter 6, Monetizing Your Content, you can earn revenue through online advertising just by showing ads to your site's visitors. If you think that makes online advertising seem more appealing, keep in mind the fact that affiliate merchants, or advertisers, pay per sale (that's where the acronym CPA -- cost per action -- originated). So while you won't make any money from showing the ads themselves, affiliate ads give you the chance to make more money from fewer, more targeted visitors who want the products or services with which you're affiliated. Of course, the merchants are able to reach more broadly for customers, obtaining qualified leads from a wide range of other sites.
How Affiliate Networks Operate
Affiliate networks differ slightly from ad networks in that most give you, the publisher, the choice of programs. You can choose which affiliate programs you want to join, and know up front what kind of commission you'll generate per sale
Among the more popular affiliate networks are:
- Commission Junction, at http://www.commissionjunction.com/
- clixGalore, at http://www.clixgalore.com/
- Shareasale, at http://www.shareasale.com/
- Linkshare, at http://www.linkshare.com/
- CX Digital Media (formerly Incentaclick), at http://www.incentaclick.com/
Once you sign up for an affiliate service, and choose an affiliate program or two that interest you, you may have to wait to see whether you've been accepted. The merchants' criteria vary, of course, but once you hear you've been accepted you'll receive a special affiliate code, or affiliate link, that you can use in all the ads you place on your site for that advertiser's affiliate products. Usually, merchants will provide a number of ads of various formats that you can drop straight into your site, but you'll also often have the option to create ads of your own, in formats that suit your site, content, and audience.
The other thing that most affiliate networks and programs do is cookie users you send to their site: they place a small file, or cookie, on the user's computer that lets the merchant's site know that you referred that user to the site. The cookie ensures that if that user returns and make a purchase within a given time frame -- 30, 60, or 90 days are common time frames, though it depends on the product in question -- you will earn a commission on the sale.
Affiliate networks are obviously more flexible than straight-up ad networks, but remember, you must generate a sale to gain revenue. What does that mean in real terms? It means you'll need to take a slightly different approach to using affiliate networks than you do CPC or CPM ad networks. If you want to make money from CPA advertising, your site will need to serve a strong niche and attract a targeted audience. We'll look at the process of establishing your affiliate marketing site in a little more detail in the section titled Monetizing a Site with Affiliate Marketing.
Beyond Affiliate Networks
Affiliate networks don't have a monopoly on affiliate programs. Many sites -- including Amazon, Google, and others -- offer their own affiliate programs, which publishers can join by filling in a form on the advertiser's site.
Going straight to the advertiser provides a number of potential bonuses: you have direct access to the advertiser, so if you want to tweak ad formats or use different promotional text, for example, you may be able to ask them directly. You can also receive a greater percentage of each sale you generate, as there's no middleman (or network) that needs to slice a percentage from each transaction.
The potential pitfalls abound, though. The advertiser's site may not offer an interface through which you can track your impressions, clickthroughs, and actions. It may not have the reputation of some of the larger networks -- so you don't have the assurance, for instance, of payment. Individual sites are often much less likely than networks to create detailed terms of service, so though you may have followed all the guidelines the advertiser's written down, he or she may still ban you from the affiliate program for what could be a completely unexpected reason. And even if everything's going well, it can be more difficult to reach the payout minimum with independent affiliate programs than with affiliate networks, where the earnings you generate from a number of programs combine to help you reach the base payout level faster.
At the end of the day, you'll need to assess the potential of an independent affiliate arrangement on your site, and weigh the risks against the possible gains. Make sure you feel comfortable with the agreement. Keep in mind also that you may want to avoid basing your entire site's revenue on a given advertiser. Initially, you may not be certain that the company is genuine and reliable; even once you become comfortable with a merchant, there's always the chance that the business could go bankrupt or be acquired, that customers' confidence in the retailer could decline, or that the market could suffer a downturn. An approach that involves spreading the risk among multiple merchants and affiliate networks is probably the safest one.