Affiliate marketing

What is Affiliate Marketing?

In short, an affiliate program is a popular advertising / sales model in which a web publisher markets, via their web site(s), a given product, such as software or books, on behalf of another company. In other words, affiliate marketing helps maximise the earning potential of the involved websites by establishing a mutually beneficial (usually financial) arrangement between an online merchant, who wants to locate customers, and affiliates, who offer non-competing product ranges or provide some value-added service to the same target audience.

In essence the arrangement tends to be along the lines of: If you (the affiliate) send me (the merchant) someone who performs an agreed key action on my site (e.g. registers or, even better, buys something) I (the merchant) will reward you (the affiliate) as agreed. One of the largest affiliate programs, Amazon.com, provides affiliates with between 5 and 15% of the proceeds of all goods sold via their affiliate program. Sounds straightforward enough doesn't it? For the most part it is however there are lots of considerations. For example, affiliate programs may be constructed with multiple tiers. A two-tier affiliate program reimburses webmaster for goods sold directly via their web site, plus a percentage of all goods sold by other affiliates who have joined the program via a link on the primary publishers' site. Some affiliate programs may have up to five or six tiers.

Affiliate Merchants (Advertisers)

As an online merchant looking to gain affiliates there are literally millions of potential affiliates out there, and it's an effective, low-cost way to drive endorsed traffic to your site. Your challenge isn't just to find suitable affiliates who, as well as sticking to your brand guidelines, will send you the right sort of visitor - it's also how to manage them all. You could always set up your own solution but if you want to avoid re-inventing the wheel why not go for one of the many off-the-shelf solutions offered by the established Affiliate Networks listed below.

Affiliates (Publishers)

Operating as an affiliate can be very lucrative. As a potential affiliate there are literally thousands of affiliate programs available all over the Internet, what you'll need to do is locate those that best suit you. There are affiliate programs in virtually every business sector including, among others, finance, gambling, technology, books, software and entertainment. If you have a website with a topic such as product reviews that may be of interest to others, then choosing affiliate programs which closely fit the theme of your site will work well. Try to blend your affiliate links into the site using text links and, if possible, write about the products from first-hand knowledge, so that you become a respected, credible source of reliable information. Remember: the more targeted your traffic, the more likely it is that people will buy!

Affiliate Networks

There are a huge variety of Affiliate Programs to choose from but to get things moving as an advertiser or a publisher why not checkout the following ready-made networks:

• AffiliateFuture (www.affiliatefuture.co.uk)
  
• Affiliate Window (www.affiliatewindow.com)
  
• Brand Conversions (www.brandconversions.com)
  
• Buy.at (Perfiliate Technologies) (http://buy.at)
  
• Commission Junction (www.cj.com)
  
• dgm (www.dealgroupmedia.com)
  
• Online Media Group (OMG) (www.onlinemediagroup.co.uk)
  
• Paid On Results (www.paidonresults.com)
  
• Silvertap (www.silvertap.com)
  
• TradeDoubler (www.tradedoubler.com)
  
• Webgains (www.webgains.com)