You've spent tons of time (and money) on your website and created a strong presence on the web. Now you start to wonder when the site that you've poured your heart and soul into is going to start paying off. Joining affiliate programs and selling ad space is a great way to bring in some cash. The key is to run these programs properly.
Common Mistakes
All too often people that are new to the web game think that they can throw together a simple webpage that is light on content, put it up on a free server, place a bunch of banner ads and pop-ups on it and the cash will just start pouring in. This couldn't be further from the truth. Starting to advertise via affiliate programs takes a lot of time, work, and experimentation. There is no easy formula to make it work. If you come across a program making promises that seem far fetched, it is probably a scam.
When first placing ads on their sites many people choose the programs with the highest payouts. While a high payout is good, it is not the most important thing to look for. You must also take into account click thru rates, click to lead conversion ratios, and most importantly, whether or not the ad's target audience is the same as that of your site.
All too often when people design their websites they do not reserve an exclusive space that they plan to use for advertising. Do this beforehand! This way the ads will look like they belong on the site and not just something that was simply added as an afterthought.
When first starting out many people believe that more banners is better. It is far more important to show one or two ads that convert well for you site than twenty different ones that pollute your site.
DO NOT SPAM! Sending out mass unsolicited e-mails featuring your adds is one of the quickest ways to get kicked from the program. Opt-in newsletters are acceptable and convert very well if you have a strong e-mail base.
What Type of Program to Choose
There are so many different types of programs out there that it can be quite overwhelming when it comes to choosing what is best for you. Also, as with most things in affiliate marketing there is no key formula for success. The best thing is to experiment with different ones and find which one converts best for you. Below are a few general rules that you should follow:
If you have a very targeted audience, CPA (Cost Per Action) programs will probably work best for you. Since you already have a known demographic to whom you are showing your site, it will be easy to find high conversion programs to complement your site theme.
Sites with low traffic levels will have a hard time trying to earn money off of pay per impression or pay per click programs; these programs rely on high traffic levels. If you don't have high traffic, they won't be very successful.
If you are just starting out, it is very difficult to find advertisers on your own. The best thing to do is to go thru an affiliate network that acts like a broker or liaison between you and the advertisers.
Affiliate Marketing Tips
If you don't have a site that is well designed, features quality content, and has a decent amount of traffic, chances are you won't be successful selling advertising. Instead of initially spending all your time on revenue schemes, invest some solid time in developing your site!
When initially designing and laying out your site, try to plan in advance where you are going to place ads. Always make sure that your site's content has priority over the ads you display.
Use ads that fit well within your given audience. If you put an ad for online dating services on a website targeted at young children, I can guarantee that success rates will be low, if any.
Whenever possible, make your ads not seem like ads...turn them into another feature on your site. Text ads can work particularly well for this and are not as annoying as large graphic ads.
Before working on your advertising scheme, invest time in search engine placement and optimization.
Experiment with different programs! Don't be discouraged when one does not work as well as you hoped. A key process in affiliate marketing is placing the ad and then evaluating how well it has done based on real world statistics. These stats are very easy to obtain as most affiliate networks feature very in-depth statistics.
Do not plaster your site with banner ads. This will not work. All it will do is make your user leave and never come back. One or two banners should be the maximum.
Use a banner ad rotation system so that you are not showing your users the same banners over and over again. Many affiliate networks feature these or if you are fairly web savvy you can create your own system.
I hope that this article has helped. Please do not get discouraged and have fun! Affiliate marketing is a great way to make cash off of your site. Just realize that it takes time and commitment to run a successful program.
Nick Ladd,Webmaster-Affiliates.net
Sunday, October 12, 2008
Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization
Good search engine optimization is key to getting your website indexed properly with a good ranking. You may find it surprising, but there are a few small things you can do to really boost the rank of your site. Below we've outlined some key strategies to get you started.
Meta TagsIn the past this is one of the most important things that you needed to add to your site if you wanted any chance of getting a good ranking. Some search engines still use these to determine how your site is displayed in the search results. The most important of the meta tags are the title, description, and keyword tags.
Title Tag: This should be no more than 60 characters in length. Somewhere within the title text you should have the primary keyword that you are targeting as a description for your site.
Description Tag: This tag should be no more than 150 characters in length. It should be rich with the keywords that you are targeting and contain a well-written general description of your site.
Keyword Tag: This tag should be no more than 874 characters in length and not repeat the same word more than 3 times. The keywords should be separated with commas. Include common misspellings of keywords. Never use keywords that do not fit with your site, search engines will consider this spam and ban you. Instead of using individual keywords try instead to use keyphrases. Try to think of phrases that people will actually search for. Example:
Instead Of Using:web, design, tutorial, webmaster, tools, resources
Use:web design tutorial, webmaster resources, webmaster tools
Be sure to check out our easy-to-use online meta tag generator for help creating your meta tags. Click Here.
Other Tags: There are a variety of other tags that you can use on your site. The only other one that I recommend is the robots tag. This tells the robots indexing your site to index your pages and follow your links. The format for this tag is:
Keyword Density
Keyword density is one factor with which many search engines rank your site. They index your entire page and then look at how frequently keywords appear. There is a fine line to be drawn when putting the keywords on your site. You want to put enough keywords on your site, but don't want to simply just list them as many search engines will consider this spamming and ban you. Do not write text on the same color background to try to increase density without your viewers being able to see it. This is blatant spamming and you will not be indexed and probably blacklisted.
Link Popularity
It has been a recent trend for search engines to rate your site based primarily on its link popularity. Link popularity is basically how many different sites contain links to you. I really recommend that you write other websites that cover similar topics as yours and ask for a reciprocal link exchange or possibly even start a special section on your site for these type of links. Google's Pagerank is a statistic that is derived primarily from your page rank. It takes into account both your incoming and outgoing links. In addition it is much more important to get few links from other sites with high page ranks than many with low page ranks. Keep in mind that it is very difficult and takes a lot of hard work to get a good page rank. Also be very weary when trying to 'trick' search engines. This is a very easy way to get banned for life!
Site Map
While often overlooked, having a site map on your site can really help to get your entire site indexed. Your goal is to get the search engine spider to your site map page. Since the site map is essentially a simple list of links, the spider can easily find and follow them, thus, indexing your entire site. Make sure the site map link is easy for the spider to find!
Robots.txt
This is a simple text file placed within the root directory of your website that spiders first look for prior to indexing your site. It basically tells them what to index and what not to index. Click here for a sample of a robots.txt file allowing the engine to index all pages.
Alt Tag
All of your images should have alt tags. This will help search engine spiders find images that are links and follow them. In addition, if you put a short description in the alt tag you can use them to help beef up your keyword density.
Search Engine SubmissionsThere are literally hundreds of companies out there that will give you incredible claims of being able to cheaply submit your page to thousands of search engines. These companies are a waste of time. They typically use scripts to submit your page and most of the thousands of engines to which they submit are FFA (Free For All) link directories that will generally bring in little, if any, traffic for your site. Also, the real engines they submit to will generally ignore your submission. The best and most fail proof method is to submit the sites yourself. Most engines are free to submit to and have a special page where you can submit. See the list below that gives you direct links to the submission pages.
Note: This list is current as of 8/4/02.
Yahoo
Go to directory under which you want to submit a site.
Click the "Suggest a Site" link.
Non-business categories are free to submit to, but it can take awhile to get listed. Business categories will cost you $299 a year.
Open Directory Project (dmoz)
Go to http://www.dmoz.org
Browse to the directory where you think your site belongs.
Click the "Add Url" link at the top of the page.
This is a key directory to get into as a graet deal of search engines use their database to show results.
Google
Go to: http://www.google.com/addurl.html
They will generally find your site to index for their database, even if you don't manually submit it.
They use the dmoz results as part of their database.
Lycos
Go to: http://searchservices.lycos.com
They allow you to submit one page for free and additional pages for a charge.
Free submission takes 4-6 weeks and is not guaranteed.
They use alltheweb for a portion of their results.
alltheweb
Go to: http://www.alltheweb.com/add_url.php3
NorthernLight
Go to: http://www.northernlight.com/docs/regurl_help.html
Altavista
Offers a variety of paid submission services as well as a free basic submit.
Go to: http://www.altavista.com/sites/search/addurl
Inktomi
A good pay for submission service. Cheap to do and very effective. They provide their site database to many major search engines.
More info: http://www.inktomi.com/services/web_search/submit.html
First URL is $39/year; additional URLs are $25/year
Excite
Uses multiple providers for their search results including: alltheweb, Ask Jeeves, Inktomi, About, Looksmart, FindWhat, and Overture.
Testing and ResubmissionOnce you submit your website, it is important to follow-up and see if you actually get indexed. If you are not indexed within a month of submission, you should go ahead and resubmit. In addition, it is important to test your rankings and massage your meta tags to ensure you get optimal placement.
With some time and work you can really improve your site's rankings in the search engines. Just remember that it takes months on end in order to get listed. Don't give up and keep at it! We hope you've enjoyed this article and found it useful.
----------------------------
Nick Ladd,Webmaster-Affiliates.net
Good search engine optimization is key to getting your website indexed properly with a good ranking. You may find it surprising, but there are a few small things you can do to really boost the rank of your site. Below we've outlined some key strategies to get you started.
Meta TagsIn the past this is one of the most important things that you needed to add to your site if you wanted any chance of getting a good ranking. Some search engines still use these to determine how your site is displayed in the search results. The most important of the meta tags are the title, description, and keyword tags.
Title Tag: This should be no more than 60 characters in length. Somewhere within the title text you should have the primary keyword that you are targeting as a description for your site.
Description Tag: This tag should be no more than 150 characters in length. It should be rich with the keywords that you are targeting and contain a well-written general description of your site.
Keyword Tag: This tag should be no more than 874 characters in length and not repeat the same word more than 3 times. The keywords should be separated with commas. Include common misspellings of keywords. Never use keywords that do not fit with your site, search engines will consider this spam and ban you. Instead of using individual keywords try instead to use keyphrases. Try to think of phrases that people will actually search for. Example:
Instead Of Using:web, design, tutorial, webmaster, tools, resources
Use:web design tutorial, webmaster resources, webmaster tools
Be sure to check out our easy-to-use online meta tag generator for help creating your meta tags. Click Here.
Other Tags: There are a variety of other tags that you can use on your site. The only other one that I recommend is the robots tag. This tells the robots indexing your site to index your pages and follow your links. The format for this tag is:
<meta name="robots" content="INDEX, FOLLOW">
Keyword Density
Keyword density is one factor with which many search engines rank your site. They index your entire page and then look at how frequently keywords appear. There is a fine line to be drawn when putting the keywords on your site. You want to put enough keywords on your site, but don't want to simply just list them as many search engines will consider this spamming and ban you. Do not write text on the same color background to try to increase density without your viewers being able to see it. This is blatant spamming and you will not be indexed and probably blacklisted.
Link Popularity
It has been a recent trend for search engines to rate your site based primarily on its link popularity. Link popularity is basically how many different sites contain links to you. I really recommend that you write other websites that cover similar topics as yours and ask for a reciprocal link exchange or possibly even start a special section on your site for these type of links. Google's Pagerank is a statistic that is derived primarily from your page rank. It takes into account both your incoming and outgoing links. In addition it is much more important to get few links from other sites with high page ranks than many with low page ranks. Keep in mind that it is very difficult and takes a lot of hard work to get a good page rank. Also be very weary when trying to 'trick' search engines. This is a very easy way to get banned for life!
Site Map
While often overlooked, having a site map on your site can really help to get your entire site indexed. Your goal is to get the search engine spider to your site map page. Since the site map is essentially a simple list of links, the spider can easily find and follow them, thus, indexing your entire site. Make sure the site map link is easy for the spider to find!
Robots.txt
This is a simple text file placed within the root directory of your website that spiders first look for prior to indexing your site. It basically tells them what to index and what not to index. Click here for a sample of a robots.txt file allowing the engine to index all pages.
Alt Tag
All of your images should have alt tags. This will help search engine spiders find images that are links and follow them. In addition, if you put a short description in the alt tag you can use them to help beef up your keyword density.
Search Engine SubmissionsThere are literally hundreds of companies out there that will give you incredible claims of being able to cheaply submit your page to thousands of search engines. These companies are a waste of time. They typically use scripts to submit your page and most of the thousands of engines to which they submit are FFA (Free For All) link directories that will generally bring in little, if any, traffic for your site. Also, the real engines they submit to will generally ignore your submission. The best and most fail proof method is to submit the sites yourself. Most engines are free to submit to and have a special page where you can submit. See the list below that gives you direct links to the submission pages.
Note: This list is current as of 8/4/02.
Yahoo
Go to directory under which you want to submit a site.
Click the "Suggest a Site" link.
Non-business categories are free to submit to, but it can take awhile to get listed. Business categories will cost you $299 a year.
Open Directory Project (dmoz)
Go to http://www.dmoz.org
Browse to the directory where you think your site belongs.
Click the "Add Url" link at the top of the page.
This is a key directory to get into as a graet deal of search engines use their database to show results.
Go to: http://www.google.com/addurl.html
They will generally find your site to index for their database, even if you don't manually submit it.
They use the dmoz results as part of their database.
Lycos
Go to: http://searchservices.lycos.com
They allow you to submit one page for free and additional pages for a charge.
Free submission takes 4-6 weeks and is not guaranteed.
They use alltheweb for a portion of their results.
alltheweb
Go to: http://www.alltheweb.com/add_url.php3
NorthernLight
Go to: http://www.northernlight.com/docs/regurl_help.html
Altavista
Offers a variety of paid submission services as well as a free basic submit.
Go to: http://www.altavista.com/sites/search/addurl
Inktomi
A good pay for submission service. Cheap to do and very effective. They provide their site database to many major search engines.
More info: http://www.inktomi.com/services/web_search/submit.html
First URL is $39/year; additional URLs are $25/year
Excite
Uses multiple providers for their search results including: alltheweb, Ask Jeeves, Inktomi, About, Looksmart, FindWhat, and Overture.
Testing and ResubmissionOnce you submit your website, it is important to follow-up and see if you actually get indexed. If you are not indexed within a month of submission, you should go ahead and resubmit. In addition, it is important to test your rankings and massage your meta tags to ensure you get optimal placement.
With some time and work you can really improve your site's rankings in the search engines. Just remember that it takes months on end in order to get listed. Don't give up and keep at it! We hope you've enjoyed this article and found it useful.
----------------------------
Nick Ladd,Webmaster-Affiliates.net
Friday, October 10, 2008
Is Pay-Per-Click Advertising Still Profitable?
Not long ago it was very easy to profit from pay-per-click advertising. In fact, I used to spend 99% of my advertising budget on pay-per-click search engine advertising since it was so easy just to post up an ad, add funds to one of the popular pay-per-click providers and sit back and watch the orders food in.
It was that easy.
Using simple tracking software, the source for each sale could be determined. It was then a simple calculation to determine how much I could bid on popular keywords, by dividing the gross amount in sales by the number of visitors to my website.
This scientific marketing approach produced a real healthy return on my investment. So I continued to top-up my pay-per-click account and watch my profits grow!
However, over time my results began to change...unfortunately for the worse! As more and more advertisers took advantage of the fast and easy access to niche markets by PPC advertising, the competition for those popular keywords to gain pole position became more fierce. Everyone wanted to be at the top to gain the most traffic. The result was a bidding war!
The battle to reach the top became detrimental to the advertiser. As the bids increased, these popular terms which previously used to attract large chunks of profit became too expensive. Instead of providing a return on my investment, the campaign began to cost more than the amount that was returned in sales. I tried lowering my bids but the amount of traffic that was delivered rendered my campaign ineffective.
Up until a few weeks ago, this was my position concerning pay-per-click advertising and if you have been advertising online using ppc methods then this story will probably seem very familiar...
So when I released my latest ebook, as you can imagine, I was a little wary of committing all my advertising to one popular pay-per-click source. I needed to promote my product but at the same time I didn't need to simply throw money away for the sake of getting a listing in the search engine results.
Instead, I decided to perform a comparison test between a few providers to test the market. My starting budget was $200 committed to 3 different traffic sources promoting my latest ebook product 'Cash From Your Camera'
The first was the most popular of the PPC systems -
Google Adwords
The second was another fairly popular source of pay-per-click traffic - Kanoodle at http://www.kanoodle.com
Finally, I tested a new kind of traffic source - Have Traffic at http://www.havetraffic.com. This isn't a pay-per-click search engine but it is a type of PPC advertising. They say that their traffic is achieved through a network of related sites instead of a direct result from a search engine.
Here are the results....
First, for the Google traffic, my average cost per click was 45 cents for the range of different keywords I was bidding on. I received a total of 449 visitors and 1 order.
I also received 20 sign-ups to my newsletter providing a sign-up conversion rate of around 4.4% and ROI of 43% Kanoodle provided much more traffic for my dollars. I actually received 1523 visitors at around 8 cents a visitor. Unfortunately, the results were very disappointing. The campaign did not achieve a single sale and I got only 2 confirmed sign-ups to my newsletter....not good!
Have Traffic was the real surprise package.
I received 1,000 visitors for my $200 and actually received 3 sales and 46 subscribers to my newsletter.
The return on my investment was a 135% plus I received 46 leads with which to follow-up.
Only one of my three campaigns even broke even and that one only earned 135% ROI. I obviously need to work on my text and ad copy and then I could at least get a profitable return from both Google and Have Traffic. It really looks like Kanoodle is a bust no matter what I do. It's a shame. In the distant past, I could count on decent traffic from them.
I guess that if I had used different keywords then it may have been possible to achieve different results for the campaigns
Overall, this test shows that it is still possible to find cost effective pay-per-click advertising. You just have to look harder (sometimes at unexpected sources) and optimize your ad copy quite a bit more than was necessary in the past. This is true, even for solid and known sources of traffic like Google.
-----------------------------------
An article by Robert Hartness, successful freelancer and writer of Cash From Your Camera which offers a step-by-step guide to those on the threshold of freelance photography and is illustrated with 40+ published photographs.
It was that easy.
Using simple tracking software, the source for each sale could be determined. It was then a simple calculation to determine how much I could bid on popular keywords, by dividing the gross amount in sales by the number of visitors to my website.
This scientific marketing approach produced a real healthy return on my investment. So I continued to top-up my pay-per-click account and watch my profits grow!
However, over time my results began to change...unfortunately for the worse! As more and more advertisers took advantage of the fast and easy access to niche markets by PPC advertising, the competition for those popular keywords to gain pole position became more fierce. Everyone wanted to be at the top to gain the most traffic. The result was a bidding war!
The battle to reach the top became detrimental to the advertiser. As the bids increased, these popular terms which previously used to attract large chunks of profit became too expensive. Instead of providing a return on my investment, the campaign began to cost more than the amount that was returned in sales. I tried lowering my bids but the amount of traffic that was delivered rendered my campaign ineffective.
Up until a few weeks ago, this was my position concerning pay-per-click advertising and if you have been advertising online using ppc methods then this story will probably seem very familiar...
So when I released my latest ebook, as you can imagine, I was a little wary of committing all my advertising to one popular pay-per-click source. I needed to promote my product but at the same time I didn't need to simply throw money away for the sake of getting a listing in the search engine results.
Instead, I decided to perform a comparison test between a few providers to test the market. My starting budget was $200 committed to 3 different traffic sources promoting my latest ebook product 'Cash From Your Camera'
The first was the most popular of the PPC systems -
Google Adwords
The second was another fairly popular source of pay-per-click traffic - Kanoodle at http://www.kanoodle.com
Finally, I tested a new kind of traffic source - Have Traffic at http://www.havetraffic.com. This isn't a pay-per-click search engine but it is a type of PPC advertising. They say that their traffic is achieved through a network of related sites instead of a direct result from a search engine.
Here are the results....
First, for the Google traffic, my average cost per click was 45 cents for the range of different keywords I was bidding on. I received a total of 449 visitors and 1 order.
I also received 20 sign-ups to my newsletter providing a sign-up conversion rate of around 4.4% and ROI of 43% Kanoodle provided much more traffic for my dollars. I actually received 1523 visitors at around 8 cents a visitor. Unfortunately, the results were very disappointing. The campaign did not achieve a single sale and I got only 2 confirmed sign-ups to my newsletter....not good!
Have Traffic was the real surprise package.
I received 1,000 visitors for my $200 and actually received 3 sales and 46 subscribers to my newsletter.
The return on my investment was a 135% plus I received 46 leads with which to follow-up.
Only one of my three campaigns even broke even and that one only earned 135% ROI. I obviously need to work on my text and ad copy and then I could at least get a profitable return from both Google and Have Traffic. It really looks like Kanoodle is a bust no matter what I do. It's a shame. In the distant past, I could count on decent traffic from them.
I guess that if I had used different keywords then it may have been possible to achieve different results for the campaigns
Overall, this test shows that it is still possible to find cost effective pay-per-click advertising. You just have to look harder (sometimes at unexpected sources) and optimize your ad copy quite a bit more than was necessary in the past. This is true, even for solid and known sources of traffic like Google.
-----------------------------------
An article by Robert Hartness, successful freelancer and writer of Cash From Your Camera which offers a step-by-step guide to those on the threshold of freelance photography and is illustrated with 40+ published photographs.
What to look for when choosing Affiliate Programs
by Jonathan KraftSo
you've decided you want to become an Internet Marketer? Will you sell someone else's products or sell your own? If you choose to sell someone else's products, how will you know what to look for? After all, this is a new venture for you. Or maybe it's not. Maybe you have been trying out some affiliate programs which have not brought you any money, or, worse, have not paid you for the affiliate traffic you have sent them. If you are the new person, or the person who is floundering in Internet Marketing, this article will offer you some simple tips for choosing an affiliate program. This article doesn't cover getting traffic to your site, which is another huge piece of the puzzle, and is covered in thousands of articles on the Internet, so let's just start with choosing affiliate programs. You should find affiliate programs that: a) are relatively easy to set up (code is either created for you or easy to create) b) will pay you well. This depends on your definition of what being paid well means, but generally, for most beginners, and some novices, if you can see yourself being able to make more than $250/month, the program is at least worth looking at c) give you products which people actually use. There are lots of products in the market which will sell, but do you really want to be selling pet rocks? If you do, please don't take offense. Most legitimate affiliate advice sites won't feature affiliate programs that are exclusively selling something like 8-Track players and tapes. While there are probably collectors out there who would love an 8-track player and cassettes, the fact is that the market is done with 8-tracks. The point is, there should be a genuine need for, or interest in, what you are selling/reselling. So you find a program which meets the above criteria. Now what? Do a Google search on the company. Find out what people are saying about them. You may have to dig a bit, but the combined experience of the professionals (and not-so-professionals) who develop and contribute to the Internet on a regular basis is, collectively, the best source of advice you will find on making money, or affiliate programs, anywhere. If you want advice on some great affiliate programs, you can visit sites which have already reviewed the information about companies and present it to you in a straightforward way. If you are ready to find some great affiliate programs, then you will be able to find categories of affiliate programs on these sites, which will generally represent the type of products you would like to sell. Search engines love content, and so do your site visitors. Content is one of the most important aspects of getting people to your web site, and helping them to see the value in what you're selling. You should strive to choose programs with products which are related to your web site. In other words, if you have a site which features information about the Toyota Camry, you're going to be pretty hard pressed to be able to get your page content matched up so that you could sell, say... baby rattles. Find affiliate programs which relate to what you already do, and then promote those products. Finally, see if you can find someone to actually talk to (ok, email would be okay) who has received regular checks or payments from marketing products. We think that this is, perhaps, the most important part of any affiliate program, because the main reason you promote their products is to receive a check for your efforts. So there you have it, some simple tips for choosing great affiliate programs! Hope this helps you to reach your income goals, and also helps you to develop a long-term plan for on and off-line financial and personal success.
-------------------------------------
article by Jonathan Kraft, has been an online marketer for many years, and now helps others understand affiliate programs at http://www.affiliateadvice.us. He is currently working to help people find the best phone and calling card affiliate programs at www.affiliateadvice.us/phone-calling-card-affiliate-programs.html
you've decided you want to become an Internet Marketer? Will you sell someone else's products or sell your own? If you choose to sell someone else's products, how will you know what to look for? After all, this is a new venture for you. Or maybe it's not. Maybe you have been trying out some affiliate programs which have not brought you any money, or, worse, have not paid you for the affiliate traffic you have sent them. If you are the new person, or the person who is floundering in Internet Marketing, this article will offer you some simple tips for choosing an affiliate program. This article doesn't cover getting traffic to your site, which is another huge piece of the puzzle, and is covered in thousands of articles on the Internet, so let's just start with choosing affiliate programs. You should find affiliate programs that: a) are relatively easy to set up (code is either created for you or easy to create) b) will pay you well. This depends on your definition of what being paid well means, but generally, for most beginners, and some novices, if you can see yourself being able to make more than $250/month, the program is at least worth looking at c) give you products which people actually use. There are lots of products in the market which will sell, but do you really want to be selling pet rocks? If you do, please don't take offense. Most legitimate affiliate advice sites won't feature affiliate programs that are exclusively selling something like 8-Track players and tapes. While there are probably collectors out there who would love an 8-track player and cassettes, the fact is that the market is done with 8-tracks. The point is, there should be a genuine need for, or interest in, what you are selling/reselling. So you find a program which meets the above criteria. Now what? Do a Google search on the company. Find out what people are saying about them. You may have to dig a bit, but the combined experience of the professionals (and not-so-professionals) who develop and contribute to the Internet on a regular basis is, collectively, the best source of advice you will find on making money, or affiliate programs, anywhere. If you want advice on some great affiliate programs, you can visit sites which have already reviewed the information about companies and present it to you in a straightforward way. If you are ready to find some great affiliate programs, then you will be able to find categories of affiliate programs on these sites, which will generally represent the type of products you would like to sell. Search engines love content, and so do your site visitors. Content is one of the most important aspects of getting people to your web site, and helping them to see the value in what you're selling. You should strive to choose programs with products which are related to your web site. In other words, if you have a site which features information about the Toyota Camry, you're going to be pretty hard pressed to be able to get your page content matched up so that you could sell, say... baby rattles. Find affiliate programs which relate to what you already do, and then promote those products. Finally, see if you can find someone to actually talk to (ok, email would be okay) who has received regular checks or payments from marketing products. We think that this is, perhaps, the most important part of any affiliate program, because the main reason you promote their products is to receive a check for your efforts. So there you have it, some simple tips for choosing great affiliate programs! Hope this helps you to reach your income goals, and also helps you to develop a long-term plan for on and off-line financial and personal success.
-------------------------------------
article by Jonathan Kraft, has been an online marketer for many years, and now helps others understand affiliate programs at http://www.affiliateadvice.us. He is currently working to help people find the best phone and calling card affiliate programs at www.affiliateadvice.us/phone-calling-card-affiliate-programs.html
What do top affiliates earn?
This page is a glance at what some of the top affiliates earn from affiliate programs. Find out which programs earn the most money.
AllPosters.com affiliate program - Top affiliate earns over $5,000 per month by being a reseller of posters!
Ebay.com affiliate program, handled through Commission Junction - top affiliates regularly earn $50,000.00+, and much more, in just one month. Success breeds success, right? Ebay is one of the most successful sites on the Internet, and because of this, there are affiliates who capitalize on the success. You can become a publisher at Commission Junction and learn how the program works, and you will discover that there are a lot of people who earn money from the ebay affiliate program.
Internet Marketing Affiliate Programs
http://affiliates.sitesell.com/affiliatemarketing.html" - The top affiliate earns over $5,000 per month. This is a program with information and software products to help people to successfully sell on the Internet. This is one of, if not the best Internet marketing affiliate programs, because they pay lifetime commission. There is potential to get commissions for customers that signed up ages ago.
Adult and Viagra Affiliate Programs
You might be shocked to find out how much these guys are making. This is on a separate page because some people are offended by these type of products. http://www.profitpuppy.com/casino-and-adult.htm
Web Hosting Affiliate Programs
Web hosting affiliate programs can also be highly profitable with some affiliates earning residual commissions of over $5,000 per month.
http://www.profitpuppy.com/web-hosting-affiliate-programs.htm
About this page
These are figures from various sites on the Internet. It is hard to get this information, because people do not want to say how much they are earning. The figures have not all been confirmed by affiliateadvice.us, but they give you a general indication.
Also keep in mind that people earning $10,000 per month or more are serious about this, and treat it as a business. If you want to match their income, or beat it, you need to treat it seriously.
There are many other affiliate programs with big earners. These are the ones that we could find who posted information on affiliate incomes.
AllPosters.com affiliate program - Top affiliate earns over $5,000 per month by being a reseller of posters!
Ebay.com affiliate program, handled through Commission Junction - top affiliates regularly earn $50,000.00+, and much more, in just one month. Success breeds success, right? Ebay is one of the most successful sites on the Internet, and because of this, there are affiliates who capitalize on the success. You can become a publisher at Commission Junction and learn how the program works, and you will discover that there are a lot of people who earn money from the ebay affiliate program.
Internet Marketing Affiliate Programs
http://affiliates.sitesell.com/affiliatemarketing.html" - The top affiliate earns over $5,000 per month. This is a program with information and software products to help people to successfully sell on the Internet. This is one of, if not the best Internet marketing affiliate programs, because they pay lifetime commission. There is potential to get commissions for customers that signed up ages ago.
Adult and Viagra Affiliate Programs
You might be shocked to find out how much these guys are making. This is on a separate page because some people are offended by these type of products. http://www.profitpuppy.com/casino-and-adult.htm
Web Hosting Affiliate Programs
Web hosting affiliate programs can also be highly profitable with some affiliates earning residual commissions of over $5,000 per month.
http://www.profitpuppy.com/web-hosting-affiliate-programs.htm
About this page
These are figures from various sites on the Internet. It is hard to get this information, because people do not want to say how much they are earning. The figures have not all been confirmed by affiliateadvice.us, but they give you a general indication.
Also keep in mind that people earning $10,000 per month or more are serious about this, and treat it as a business. If you want to match their income, or beat it, you need to treat it seriously.
There are many other affiliate programs with big earners. These are the ones that we could find who posted information on affiliate incomes.
Affiliate Program Directories
CommissionSoup.com affiliate program
One of the newcomers on the scene, CommissionSoup.com has established itself as a strong and worthwhile affiliate program. Through this affiliate program you can offer your site visitors great credit cards, loans, legal advice, debt consolidation, and more, from a variety of credit and loan related companies. You can earn commissions by helping other people to find great products and deals.
Commission Junction CJ Affiliate Program
This is the best affiliate program, or top affiliate program (whatever you want to call it) online right now. Commission Junction's affiliate program is the best because they have such a comprehensive collection of high quality pay-per-performance affiliates/advertisers. CJ also offers incredible ecommerce tools for tracking the traffic you have sent to the programs you're an affiliate for, and the money you have earned from those programs.
Become a LinkShare Affiliate
LinkShare is an ecommerce business solution. They have an affiliate program which has numbers that are staggering (over 3.5 million online relationships). When you become an affiliate of the LinkShare Network, you can earn revenue by linking to over 500 premier online merchants.
icommissions.com offers affiliates training
The products you can resell through their program are in the areas of financial services and business solutions. When you are a part of their program, you have the company's marketing software, RAPS® (Reseller Affiliate Program Software). They teach you how to market primarily through search engines. This means that you won't get just website hits. Your visitors will be consumers actively "seeking" that particular product or service. This website "seeker" traffic is 4-20 times more likely to purchase than the banner surfer. Although they don't offer that many programs, they offer good programs and awesome training, for those who are willing to spend the time to learn.
Affiliatewindow.com
AffiliateWindow.com has a lot of cool programs and a set up that is nice and easy to use. An affiliate program based out of the United Kingdom, this directory has many sites and products which are different than those featured in many of the directories based out of the U.S. Check them out!
VIP Profits
offers some of the best sports affiliate programs available online today. Here are the actual earnings for their top affiliates in December, 2003.
$75,274.95
$33,456.13
$3,724.76
$3,225.60
$2,808.70
$2,741.59
$2,727.32
$2,585.04
$2,053.17
$1,941.37
(As you can see from the numbers, their sports affiliate program works, if you do the work to make it happen. These are ACTUAL AMOUNTS paid out.)
You may or not find their sports programs interesting, but AffiliateAdvice thinks anyone can get excited about monthly affiliate income like that which is listed above. Visit VIP Profits
Clickbank.com affiliate program
Clickbank.com has many thousands of affiliates who promote products. How many products? More than we can count. Like LinkShare and Commission Junction,Clickbank has many, many programs. This is a great affiliate program directory and is very easy to use to generate income from your site. Also, if you have a product to sell, Clickbank lets you sign up and accept credit cards on your site so that you can sell that product to the masses.
Clickxchange's affiliate program Commission Junction's affiliate web site, in our opinion, is easier to use than Clickxchange. However, Clickxchange has many different advertisers than CJ, so check this one out too!
ClixGalore offers you access to a variety of affiliate programs, including some featured elsewhere in affiliateadvice.us. If you are interested in more than one affiliate program, or would like to see more about what's available, check out the ClixGalore Affiliate Program
Affiliateshowcase.com affiliate program manager
Affiliate Showcase is a good affiliate program manager. You can use pre-existing affiliate listings to generate income. They build you a web site which allows your affiliate programs (ones you've already signed up for, or will sign up for,) to be listed as you want them on the page. It's like a directory for your affiliate programs. We would consider it to be an affiliate program manager, which allows you to have control over how well your affiliate programs perform. The only possible downside we can see to affiliateshowcase is that you have to pay for more control, but if you are someone who already knows how affiliate programs work, and you can handle spending a little for getting a lot in return, affiliate showcase can be very beneficial for you.
myaffiliateprogram.com
Offers you the ability to build and promote products for some great merchants! There is a cost associated with getting started in myaffiliateprogram.
One of the newcomers on the scene, CommissionSoup.com has established itself as a strong and worthwhile affiliate program. Through this affiliate program you can offer your site visitors great credit cards, loans, legal advice, debt consolidation, and more, from a variety of credit and loan related companies. You can earn commissions by helping other people to find great products and deals.
Commission Junction CJ Affiliate Program
This is the best affiliate program, or top affiliate program (whatever you want to call it) online right now. Commission Junction's affiliate program is the best because they have such a comprehensive collection of high quality pay-per-performance affiliates/advertisers. CJ also offers incredible ecommerce tools for tracking the traffic you have sent to the programs you're an affiliate for, and the money you have earned from those programs.
Become a LinkShare Affiliate
LinkShare is an ecommerce business solution. They have an affiliate program which has numbers that are staggering (over 3.5 million online relationships). When you become an affiliate of the LinkShare Network, you can earn revenue by linking to over 500 premier online merchants.
icommissions.com offers affiliates training
The products you can resell through their program are in the areas of financial services and business solutions. When you are a part of their program, you have the company's marketing software, RAPS® (Reseller Affiliate Program Software). They teach you how to market primarily through search engines. This means that you won't get just website hits. Your visitors will be consumers actively "seeking" that particular product or service. This website "seeker" traffic is 4-20 times more likely to purchase than the banner surfer. Although they don't offer that many programs, they offer good programs and awesome training, for those who are willing to spend the time to learn.
Affiliatewindow.com
AffiliateWindow.com has a lot of cool programs and a set up that is nice and easy to use. An affiliate program based out of the United Kingdom, this directory has many sites and products which are different than those featured in many of the directories based out of the U.S. Check them out!
VIP Profits
offers some of the best sports affiliate programs available online today. Here are the actual earnings for their top affiliates in December, 2003.
$75,274.95
$33,456.13
$3,724.76
$3,225.60
$2,808.70
$2,741.59
$2,727.32
$2,585.04
$2,053.17
$1,941.37
(As you can see from the numbers, their sports affiliate program works, if you do the work to make it happen. These are ACTUAL AMOUNTS paid out.)
You may or not find their sports programs interesting, but AffiliateAdvice thinks anyone can get excited about monthly affiliate income like that which is listed above. Visit VIP Profits
Clickbank.com affiliate program
Clickbank.com has many thousands of affiliates who promote products. How many products? More than we can count. Like LinkShare and Commission Junction,Clickbank has many, many programs. This is a great affiliate program directory and is very easy to use to generate income from your site. Also, if you have a product to sell, Clickbank lets you sign up and accept credit cards on your site so that you can sell that product to the masses.
Clickxchange's affiliate program Commission Junction's affiliate web site, in our opinion, is easier to use than Clickxchange. However, Clickxchange has many different advertisers than CJ, so check this one out too!
ClixGalore offers you access to a variety of affiliate programs, including some featured elsewhere in affiliateadvice.us. If you are interested in more than one affiliate program, or would like to see more about what's available, check out the ClixGalore Affiliate Program
Affiliateshowcase.com affiliate program manager
Affiliate Showcase is a good affiliate program manager. You can use pre-existing affiliate listings to generate income. They build you a web site which allows your affiliate programs (ones you've already signed up for, or will sign up for,) to be listed as you want them on the page. It's like a directory for your affiliate programs. We would consider it to be an affiliate program manager, which allows you to have control over how well your affiliate programs perform. The only possible downside we can see to affiliateshowcase is that you have to pay for more control, but if you are someone who already knows how affiliate programs work, and you can handle spending a little for getting a lot in return, affiliate showcase can be very beneficial for you.
myaffiliateprogram.com
Offers you the ability to build and promote products for some great merchants! There is a cost associated with getting started in myaffiliateprogram.
Choosing affiliate programs that make you lots of $$$$.
Certain affiliate programs have a very high profit potential. Others have about a snowball's chance in... well, don't have much chance of making an income at all.
So how do you choose? It depends upon the content of your site. It doesn't work to promote dog medicine to people if your site is about trips to Jamaica. While you might be able to relate the two, your site visitor probably will not relate their trip to Jamaica with getting cheap medicine for their dog. And when it comes to affiliate marketing, it's not about you. It's about your visitor. Affiliate income is about you, but you only earn the income by doing the marketing.
There are affiliate programs on just about anything, but only some programs are highly profitable. If you are working with a very profitable affiliate program, then you can actually build your entire site around the affiliate program itself.
So, which affiliate programs make the most money?If you have a high traffic site (100,000 visitors per month), then you can make money with any affiliate program as long as it is related to the content of your site. However if you have a low traffic site, you need to be more selective to make money. Look for the following characteristics of a good affiliate program:
1. Lifetime commissions. Certain affiliate programs give you commissions on every product that is sold to the customer, forever. A great example of this is SpeedyPin. One of the designers of this site earns residual commissions from people purchasing calling cards, and these people signed up months ago through SpeedyPin.
2. Affiliate programs that have high profit for each sale will help you grow more quickly. However, simple logic will tell you that $2 is better than $0. It's better to make a profit of $30 per sale than $2 per sale, but if you stick and stay, you can get your pay. What this means is that patience and persistence are huge when it comes to affiliate marketing.
3. The product needs to be of great quality - something that you can actually vouch for. Why sell something that is poor in quality?
4. Information products can be the best type of affiliate products because they do have high profits. Many people will give you 50% commissions or more for selling their information product. Why? It costs virtually nothing to reproduce an information product. Stamping a CD costs 25 cents, or emailng the information costs less. If it's a good product, it can be resold for $9.95 (or more), and because the product designer doesn't have to market it, they will pay generously for your efforts.
If you REALLY want to know what the highest commission products are, here are a few examples. But please remember that these areas are highly competitive, and it is hard to get search engine traffic for them
Information products - online newsletters and ebooks.Credit Cards.Online Gambling, sportsbooks etc.Mortgages/loan companiesSoftware productsWeb Hosting (very competitive area)Office Supplies (such as inkjet cartridges)
This is not a definitive list. There are plenty of other products as well. These, however, are all very high profit areas.
So how do you choose? It depends upon the content of your site. It doesn't work to promote dog medicine to people if your site is about trips to Jamaica. While you might be able to relate the two, your site visitor probably will not relate their trip to Jamaica with getting cheap medicine for their dog. And when it comes to affiliate marketing, it's not about you. It's about your visitor. Affiliate income is about you, but you only earn the income by doing the marketing.
There are affiliate programs on just about anything, but only some programs are highly profitable. If you are working with a very profitable affiliate program, then you can actually build your entire site around the affiliate program itself.
So, which affiliate programs make the most money?If you have a high traffic site (100,000 visitors per month), then you can make money with any affiliate program as long as it is related to the content of your site. However if you have a low traffic site, you need to be more selective to make money. Look for the following characteristics of a good affiliate program:
1. Lifetime commissions. Certain affiliate programs give you commissions on every product that is sold to the customer, forever. A great example of this is SpeedyPin. One of the designers of this site earns residual commissions from people purchasing calling cards, and these people signed up months ago through SpeedyPin.
2. Affiliate programs that have high profit for each sale will help you grow more quickly. However, simple logic will tell you that $2 is better than $0. It's better to make a profit of $30 per sale than $2 per sale, but if you stick and stay, you can get your pay. What this means is that patience and persistence are huge when it comes to affiliate marketing.
3. The product needs to be of great quality - something that you can actually vouch for. Why sell something that is poor in quality?
4. Information products can be the best type of affiliate products because they do have high profits. Many people will give you 50% commissions or more for selling their information product. Why? It costs virtually nothing to reproduce an information product. Stamping a CD costs 25 cents, or emailng the information costs less. If it's a good product, it can be resold for $9.95 (or more), and because the product designer doesn't have to market it, they will pay generously for your efforts.
If you REALLY want to know what the highest commission products are, here are a few examples. But please remember that these areas are highly competitive, and it is hard to get search engine traffic for them
Information products - online newsletters and ebooks.Credit Cards.Online Gambling, sportsbooks etc.Mortgages/loan companiesSoftware productsWeb Hosting (very competitive area)Office Supplies (such as inkjet cartridges)
This is not a definitive list. There are plenty of other products as well. These, however, are all very high profit areas.
Choosing the Right Affiliate Program
Quick Guide to Maximizing Your Site’s Profit Potential
With all of the various options out there for placing advertising on your website, it can quickly become an arduous task to choose the right one for your site. While there is no out of the box solution that is going to work for all sites, you can ask yourself a key questions to help determine what type of advertising is going to work best for your site.
What type of programs will convert best for my visitors?This is definitely not an easy question to answer, and is probably best figured out by describing the various types of programs, and giving examples of sites that they will work well on.
Pay per Sale (PPS) ProgramsThese types of offers are probably the closest thing that you can find to the standard brick and mortar retail tradition of a salesman getting a commission to sale a product. Many online retailers such as Bestbuy.com, Buy.com, Amazon, and many others offer pay per sale affiliate programs giving their affiliates typically 2-15% commissions on sales. These types of offers work well on informational sites, provided that the products you are trying to sale are closely tied into the demographic of your site.
Example #1: Site Dedicated to Mountain BikingThis site features information about trails and reviews about new bikes and biking products. As you review a new product you could place a specific affiliate link to that product on an online retailer’s store, and expect a decent conversion and click-through rate.
Example #2: Affiliate Based Site Selling CamerasMany pay per sale affiliates offer data feeds for all of their products available through their online retail store. Using these feeds, you can build your own affiliate based online store selling their products. There are many software packages that will help you automate the process of building affiliate sites around data feeds.
While in many instances online retail stores run their own independent affiliate programs, typically the best places to find these types of programs are through the following affiliate networks:
Commission Junction
LinkShare
Pay per Lead (PPL) ProgramsThese types of programs generally pay you for sending lead information (data) to an online company. Leads can vary greatly from only being one field such as an e-mail address or zip code, to being an extensive form on in-depth financial information (such as that required for loan or credit card leads). Obviously, the best converting programs are the ones that require the least amount of personal information. These types of programs work well if your site’s audience isn’t necessarily prepared to by something online. They tend to convert well on ‘freebie type sites’ (example) as well as informational sites.
Some of the best affiliate networks to get pay per lead programs are:
PrimaryAds
AzoogleAds
AffiliateFuel
BulletAds
Pay per Impressions (CPM) ProgramsThese programs are great for sites that have very high traffic levels. I generally don’t recommend using them on their own, because PPS and PPL programs tend to be more profitable. CPM programs do however offer a wonderful opportunity to increase your site’s cash flow when used in conjunction with PPS and PPL programs. In addition, they are a great way to diversify your site’s income stream.
One of the best CPM affiliate networks is FastClick.
Contextual AdvertisingPretty much all sites can profit to some degree or another from contextual advertising. It is a wonderful, non-intrusive, way to complement your current advertising (PPS & PPL), and to provide an additional source of income. In addition, they are a great way to diversify your site’s income stream.
The best contextual advertising network is Google AdSense.
Most sites will achieve their best potential by using a combination of these various types of advertising. It is important to experiment with not only the different types of programs, but also with individual offers to figure out the best combination for you. To get a good overview of the various networks that are available to you, please check out our Affiliate Network section.
------------------------------------------------
Nick Ladd,Webmaster-Affiliates.net
About The AuthorNick Ladd is the owner, creator, and publisher of Webmaster-Affiliates.net as well as numerous other large web sites. He works as a consultant for high-end web sites and specializes in web marketing and the creation of high dollar revenue plans. For more articles and information please visit www.Webmater-Affiliates.net.
With all of the various options out there for placing advertising on your website, it can quickly become an arduous task to choose the right one for your site. While there is no out of the box solution that is going to work for all sites, you can ask yourself a key questions to help determine what type of advertising is going to work best for your site.
What type of programs will convert best for my visitors?This is definitely not an easy question to answer, and is probably best figured out by describing the various types of programs, and giving examples of sites that they will work well on.
Pay per Sale (PPS) ProgramsThese types of offers are probably the closest thing that you can find to the standard brick and mortar retail tradition of a salesman getting a commission to sale a product. Many online retailers such as Bestbuy.com, Buy.com, Amazon, and many others offer pay per sale affiliate programs giving their affiliates typically 2-15% commissions on sales. These types of offers work well on informational sites, provided that the products you are trying to sale are closely tied into the demographic of your site.
Example #1: Site Dedicated to Mountain BikingThis site features information about trails and reviews about new bikes and biking products. As you review a new product you could place a specific affiliate link to that product on an online retailer’s store, and expect a decent conversion and click-through rate.
Example #2: Affiliate Based Site Selling CamerasMany pay per sale affiliates offer data feeds for all of their products available through their online retail store. Using these feeds, you can build your own affiliate based online store selling their products. There are many software packages that will help you automate the process of building affiliate sites around data feeds.
While in many instances online retail stores run their own independent affiliate programs, typically the best places to find these types of programs are through the following affiliate networks:
Commission Junction
LinkShare
Pay per Lead (PPL) ProgramsThese types of programs generally pay you for sending lead information (data) to an online company. Leads can vary greatly from only being one field such as an e-mail address or zip code, to being an extensive form on in-depth financial information (such as that required for loan or credit card leads). Obviously, the best converting programs are the ones that require the least amount of personal information. These types of programs work well if your site’s audience isn’t necessarily prepared to by something online. They tend to convert well on ‘freebie type sites’ (example) as well as informational sites.
Some of the best affiliate networks to get pay per lead programs are:
PrimaryAds
AzoogleAds
AffiliateFuel
BulletAds
Pay per Impressions (CPM) ProgramsThese programs are great for sites that have very high traffic levels. I generally don’t recommend using them on their own, because PPS and PPL programs tend to be more profitable. CPM programs do however offer a wonderful opportunity to increase your site’s cash flow when used in conjunction with PPS and PPL programs. In addition, they are a great way to diversify your site’s income stream.
One of the best CPM affiliate networks is FastClick.
Contextual AdvertisingPretty much all sites can profit to some degree or another from contextual advertising. It is a wonderful, non-intrusive, way to complement your current advertising (PPS & PPL), and to provide an additional source of income. In addition, they are a great way to diversify your site’s income stream.
The best contextual advertising network is Google AdSense.
Most sites will achieve their best potential by using a combination of these various types of advertising. It is important to experiment with not only the different types of programs, but also with individual offers to figure out the best combination for you. To get a good overview of the various networks that are available to you, please check out our Affiliate Network section.
------------------------------------------------
Nick Ladd,Webmaster-Affiliates.net
About The AuthorNick Ladd is the owner, creator, and publisher of Webmaster-Affiliates.net as well as numerous other large web sites. He works as a consultant for high-end web sites and specializes in web marketing and the creation of high dollar revenue plans. For more articles and information please visit www.Webmater-Affiliates.net.
Past and Current Issues
Since the emergence of affiliate marketing, there has been little control over affiliate activity. Unscrupulous affiliates have used spam, false advertising, forced clicks (to get tracking cookies set on users' computers), adware, and other methods to drive traffic to their sponsors. Although many affiliate programs have terms of service that contain rules against spam, this marketing method has historically proven to attract abuse from spammers.
E-mail Spam
In the infancy of affiliate marketing, many Internet users held negative opinions due to the tendency of affiliates to use spam to promote the programs in which they were enrolled.[19] As affiliate marketing matured, many affiliate merchants have refined their terms and conditions to prohibit affiliates from spamming.
Search Engine Spam
As search engines have become more prominent, some affiliate marketers have shifted from sending e-mail spam to creating automatically-generated webpages that often contain product data feeds provided by merchants. The goal of such webpages is to manipulate the relevancy or prominence of resources indexed by a search engine, also known as spamdexing. Each page can be targeted to a different niche market through the use of specific keywords, with the result being a skewed form of search engine optimization.
Spam is the biggest threat to organic search engines, whose goal is to provide quality search results for keywords or phrases entered by their users. Google's PageRank algorithm update ("BigDaddy") in February 2006—the final stage of Google's major update ("Jagger") that began in mid-summer 2005—specifically targeted spamdexing with great success. This update thus enabled Google to remove a large amount of mostly computer-generated duplicate content from its index.[20]
Websites consisting mostly of affiliate links are regarded negatively as they do not offer quality content. In 2005 there were active changes made by Google, where certain websites were labeled as "thin affiliates".[21] Such websites were either removed from Google's index or were relocated within the results page (i.e., moved from the top-most results to a lower position). To avoid this categorization, affiliate marketer webmasters must create quality content on their websites that distinguishes their work from the work of spammers or banner farms, which only contain links leading to merchant sites.
Affiliate links work best in the context of the information contained within the website itself. For instance, if a website contains information pertaining to publishing a website, an affiliate link leading to a merchant's Internet service provider (ISP) within that website's content would be appropriate. If a website contains information pertaining to sports, an affiliate link leading to a sporting goods website may work well within the context of the articles and information about sports. The goal is to publish quality information within the website and provide context-oriented links to related merchant's websites.
Adware
Although it differs from spyware, adware often uses the same methods and technologies. Merchants initially were uninformed about adware, what impact it had, and how it could damage their brands. Affiliate marketers became aware of the issue much more quickly, especially because they noticed that adware often overwrites tracking cookies, thus resulting in a decline of commissions. Affiliates not employing adware felt that it was stealing commission from them. Adware often has no valuable purpose and rarely provides any useful content to the user, who is typically unaware that such software is installed on his/her computer.
Affiliates discussed the issues in Internet forums and began to organize their efforts. They believed that the best way to address the problem was to discourage merchants from advertising via adware. Merchants that were either indifferent to or supportive of adware were exposed by affiliates, thus damaging those merchants' reputations and tarnishing their general affiliate marketing efforts. Many affiliates either terminated the use of such merchants or switched to a competitor's affiliate program. Eventually, affiliate networks were also forced by merchants and affiliates to take a stand and ban certain adware publishers from their network. The result was Code of Conduct by Commission Junction/BeFree and Performics,[22] LinkShare's Anti-Predatory Advertising Addendum,[23] and ShareASale's complete ban of software applications as a medium for affiliates to promote advertiser offers.[24] Regardless of the progress made, adware continues to be an issue, as demonstrated by the class action lawsuit against ValueClick and its daughter company Commission Junction filed on April 20, 2007.[25]
Trademark Bidding
Affiliates were among the earliest adopters of pay per click advertising when the first pay per click search engines such as Goto.com (which later became Overture.com after being acquired by Yahoo! in 2003) emerged during the end of the 1990s. Later in 2000 Google launched its pay per click service, Google AdWords, which is responsible for the widespread use and acceptance of pay per click as an advertising channel. An increasing number of merchants engaged in pay per click advertising, either directly or via a search marketing agency, and realized that this space was already well-occupied by their affiliates. Although this situation alone created advertising channel conflicts and debates between advertisers and affiliates, the largest issue concerned affiliates bidding on advertisers names, brands, and trademarks. Several advertisers began to adjust their affiliate program terms to prohibit their affiliates from bidding on those type of keywords. Some advertisers, however, did and still do embrace this behavior, going so far as to allow, or even encourage, affiliates to bid on any term, including the advertiser's trademarks.
Lack of Self-Regulation and Collaboration
Affiliate marketing is driven by entrepreneurs who are working at the forefront of Internet marketing.[citation needed] Affiliates are often the first to take advantage of emerging trends and technologies. The "trial and error" approach is probably the best way to describe the operation methods for affiliate marketers. This risky approach is one of the reasons why most affiliates fail or give up before they become successful "super affiliates", capable of generating US$10,000 or more per month in commission. This "frontier" life combined with the attitude found in such communities is likely the main reason why the affiliate marketing industry is unable to self-regulate beyond individual contracts between advertisers and affiliates. Affiliate marketing has experienced numerous failed attempts to create an industry organization or association of some kind that could be the initiator of regulations, standards, and guidelines for the industry.[26] Some examples of failed regulation efforts are the Affiliate Union and iAfma.
Online forums and industry trade shows are the only means for the different members from the industry—affiliates/publishers, merchants/advertisers, affiliate networks, third-party vendors, and service providers such as outsourced program managers—to congregate at one location. Online forums are free, enable small affiliates to have a larger say, and provide anonymity. Trade shows are cost-prohibitive to small affiliates because of the high price for event passes. Larger affiliates may even be sponsored by an advertiser they promote.
Because of the anonymity of online forums, the quantitative majority of industry members are unable to create any form of legally binding rule or regulation that must be followed throughout the industry. Online forums have had very few successes as representing the majority of the affiliate marketing industry. The most recent example of such a success was the halt of the "Commission Junction Link Management Initiative" (CJ LMI) in June/July 2006, when a single network tried to impose the use of a Javascript tracking code as a replacement for common HTML links on its affiliates.
Lack of Industry Standards
Certification and Training
Affiliate marketing currently lacks industry standards for training and certification. There are some training courses and seminars that result in certifications; however, the acceptance of such certifications is mostly due to the reputation of the individual or company issuing the certification. Affiliate marketing is not commonly taught in universities, and only a few college instructors work with Internet marketers to introduce the subject to students majoring in marketing.
Education occurs most often in "real life" by becoming involved and learning the details as time progresses. Although there are several books on the topic, some so-called "how-to" or "silver bullet" books instruct readers to manipulate holes in the Google algorithm, which can quickly become out of date, [28] or suggest strategies no longer endorsed or permitted by advertisers.
Outsourced Program Management companies typically combine formal and informal training, providing much of their training through group collaboration and brainstorming. Such companies also try to send each marketing employee to the industry conference of their choice.[30]
Other training resources used include online forums, weblogs, podcasts, video seminars, and specialty websites.
Affiliate Summit is the largest conference in the industry, and many other affiliate networks host their own annual events.
Code of Conduct
Main article: Code of Conduct (affiliate marketing)
A Code of Conduct was released by the affiliate networks Commission Junction/BeFree and Performics on December 10, 2002. It was created to guide practices and adherence to ethical standards for online advertising.
Threat to Traditional Affiliate Networks
Cost per action networks can be viewed as a threat to "classic" affiliate marketing networks. Traditional affiliate marketing is resource-intensive and requires continual maintenance. Most of the maintenance includes managing, monitoring, and supporting affiliates. The goal of affiliate marketing is directed toward long-term and mutual beneficial partnerships between advertisers and affiliates. Cost per action networks, however, eliminate the need for the advertiser to build and maintain relationships to affiliates, as that task is performed for the advertiser by the cost per action network. The advertiser makes an offer, almost always CPA-based, and the cost per action networks handle the remainder of the process by mobilizing their affiliates to promote that offer. Cost per sale and revenue sharing are the primary compensation models for classic affiliate marketing, and are rarely found in cost per action networks. Affiliate marketers typically avoid the topic of cost per action networks; however, if it is being discussed, the debates can become heated and explosive.
Marketing Term
Members of the marketing industry are recommending that "affiliate marketing" be substituted with an alternative name.[34] Affiliate marketing is often confused with either network marketing or multi-level marketing. Performance marketing is a common alternative, but other recommendations have been made as well.
Sales Tax Vulnerability
In April 2008 the State of New York inserted an item in the state budget asserting sales tax jurisdiction over Amazon.com sales to residents of New York, based on the existence of affiliate links from New York-based websites to Amazon.[36] The state asserts that even one such affiliate constitutes Amazon having a business presence in the state, and is sufficient to allow New York to tax all Amazon sales to state residents. It is expected that Amazon will challenge this issue in court.
Cookie Stuffing
Cookie stuffing involves placing an affiliate tracking cookie on a website visitor's computer without their knowledge, which will then generate revenue for the person doing the cookie stuffing. This not only generates fraudulent affiliate sales, but also has the potential to overwrite other affiliates' cookies, essentially stealing their legitimately earned commissions.
E-mail Spam
In the infancy of affiliate marketing, many Internet users held negative opinions due to the tendency of affiliates to use spam to promote the programs in which they were enrolled.[19] As affiliate marketing matured, many affiliate merchants have refined their terms and conditions to prohibit affiliates from spamming.
Search Engine Spam
As search engines have become more prominent, some affiliate marketers have shifted from sending e-mail spam to creating automatically-generated webpages that often contain product data feeds provided by merchants. The goal of such webpages is to manipulate the relevancy or prominence of resources indexed by a search engine, also known as spamdexing. Each page can be targeted to a different niche market through the use of specific keywords, with the result being a skewed form of search engine optimization.
Spam is the biggest threat to organic search engines, whose goal is to provide quality search results for keywords or phrases entered by their users. Google's PageRank algorithm update ("BigDaddy") in February 2006—the final stage of Google's major update ("Jagger") that began in mid-summer 2005—specifically targeted spamdexing with great success. This update thus enabled Google to remove a large amount of mostly computer-generated duplicate content from its index.[20]
Websites consisting mostly of affiliate links are regarded negatively as they do not offer quality content. In 2005 there were active changes made by Google, where certain websites were labeled as "thin affiliates".[21] Such websites were either removed from Google's index or were relocated within the results page (i.e., moved from the top-most results to a lower position). To avoid this categorization, affiliate marketer webmasters must create quality content on their websites that distinguishes their work from the work of spammers or banner farms, which only contain links leading to merchant sites.
Affiliate links work best in the context of the information contained within the website itself. For instance, if a website contains information pertaining to publishing a website, an affiliate link leading to a merchant's Internet service provider (ISP) within that website's content would be appropriate. If a website contains information pertaining to sports, an affiliate link leading to a sporting goods website may work well within the context of the articles and information about sports. The goal is to publish quality information within the website and provide context-oriented links to related merchant's websites.
Adware
Although it differs from spyware, adware often uses the same methods and technologies. Merchants initially were uninformed about adware, what impact it had, and how it could damage their brands. Affiliate marketers became aware of the issue much more quickly, especially because they noticed that adware often overwrites tracking cookies, thus resulting in a decline of commissions. Affiliates not employing adware felt that it was stealing commission from them. Adware often has no valuable purpose and rarely provides any useful content to the user, who is typically unaware that such software is installed on his/her computer.
Affiliates discussed the issues in Internet forums and began to organize their efforts. They believed that the best way to address the problem was to discourage merchants from advertising via adware. Merchants that were either indifferent to or supportive of adware were exposed by affiliates, thus damaging those merchants' reputations and tarnishing their general affiliate marketing efforts. Many affiliates either terminated the use of such merchants or switched to a competitor's affiliate program. Eventually, affiliate networks were also forced by merchants and affiliates to take a stand and ban certain adware publishers from their network. The result was Code of Conduct by Commission Junction/BeFree and Performics,[22] LinkShare's Anti-Predatory Advertising Addendum,[23] and ShareASale's complete ban of software applications as a medium for affiliates to promote advertiser offers.[24] Regardless of the progress made, adware continues to be an issue, as demonstrated by the class action lawsuit against ValueClick and its daughter company Commission Junction filed on April 20, 2007.[25]
Trademark Bidding
Affiliates were among the earliest adopters of pay per click advertising when the first pay per click search engines such as Goto.com (which later became Overture.com after being acquired by Yahoo! in 2003) emerged during the end of the 1990s. Later in 2000 Google launched its pay per click service, Google AdWords, which is responsible for the widespread use and acceptance of pay per click as an advertising channel. An increasing number of merchants engaged in pay per click advertising, either directly or via a search marketing agency, and realized that this space was already well-occupied by their affiliates. Although this situation alone created advertising channel conflicts and debates between advertisers and affiliates, the largest issue concerned affiliates bidding on advertisers names, brands, and trademarks. Several advertisers began to adjust their affiliate program terms to prohibit their affiliates from bidding on those type of keywords. Some advertisers, however, did and still do embrace this behavior, going so far as to allow, or even encourage, affiliates to bid on any term, including the advertiser's trademarks.
Lack of Self-Regulation and Collaboration
Affiliate marketing is driven by entrepreneurs who are working at the forefront of Internet marketing.[citation needed] Affiliates are often the first to take advantage of emerging trends and technologies. The "trial and error" approach is probably the best way to describe the operation methods for affiliate marketers. This risky approach is one of the reasons why most affiliates fail or give up before they become successful "super affiliates", capable of generating US$10,000 or more per month in commission. This "frontier" life combined with the attitude found in such communities is likely the main reason why the affiliate marketing industry is unable to self-regulate beyond individual contracts between advertisers and affiliates. Affiliate marketing has experienced numerous failed attempts to create an industry organization or association of some kind that could be the initiator of regulations, standards, and guidelines for the industry.[26] Some examples of failed regulation efforts are the Affiliate Union and iAfma.
Online forums and industry trade shows are the only means for the different members from the industry—affiliates/publishers, merchants/advertisers, affiliate networks, third-party vendors, and service providers such as outsourced program managers—to congregate at one location. Online forums are free, enable small affiliates to have a larger say, and provide anonymity. Trade shows are cost-prohibitive to small affiliates because of the high price for event passes. Larger affiliates may even be sponsored by an advertiser they promote.
Because of the anonymity of online forums, the quantitative majority of industry members are unable to create any form of legally binding rule or regulation that must be followed throughout the industry. Online forums have had very few successes as representing the majority of the affiliate marketing industry. The most recent example of such a success was the halt of the "Commission Junction Link Management Initiative" (CJ LMI) in June/July 2006, when a single network tried to impose the use of a Javascript tracking code as a replacement for common HTML links on its affiliates.
Lack of Industry Standards
Certification and Training
Affiliate marketing currently lacks industry standards for training and certification. There are some training courses and seminars that result in certifications; however, the acceptance of such certifications is mostly due to the reputation of the individual or company issuing the certification. Affiliate marketing is not commonly taught in universities, and only a few college instructors work with Internet marketers to introduce the subject to students majoring in marketing.
Education occurs most often in "real life" by becoming involved and learning the details as time progresses. Although there are several books on the topic, some so-called "how-to" or "silver bullet" books instruct readers to manipulate holes in the Google algorithm, which can quickly become out of date, [28] or suggest strategies no longer endorsed or permitted by advertisers.
Outsourced Program Management companies typically combine formal and informal training, providing much of their training through group collaboration and brainstorming. Such companies also try to send each marketing employee to the industry conference of their choice.[30]
Other training resources used include online forums, weblogs, podcasts, video seminars, and specialty websites.
Affiliate Summit is the largest conference in the industry, and many other affiliate networks host their own annual events.
Code of Conduct
Main article: Code of Conduct (affiliate marketing)
A Code of Conduct was released by the affiliate networks Commission Junction/BeFree and Performics on December 10, 2002. It was created to guide practices and adherence to ethical standards for online advertising.
Threat to Traditional Affiliate Networks
Cost per action networks can be viewed as a threat to "classic" affiliate marketing networks. Traditional affiliate marketing is resource-intensive and requires continual maintenance. Most of the maintenance includes managing, monitoring, and supporting affiliates. The goal of affiliate marketing is directed toward long-term and mutual beneficial partnerships between advertisers and affiliates. Cost per action networks, however, eliminate the need for the advertiser to build and maintain relationships to affiliates, as that task is performed for the advertiser by the cost per action network. The advertiser makes an offer, almost always CPA-based, and the cost per action networks handle the remainder of the process by mobilizing their affiliates to promote that offer. Cost per sale and revenue sharing are the primary compensation models for classic affiliate marketing, and are rarely found in cost per action networks. Affiliate marketers typically avoid the topic of cost per action networks; however, if it is being discussed, the debates can become heated and explosive.
Marketing Term
Members of the marketing industry are recommending that "affiliate marketing" be substituted with an alternative name.[34] Affiliate marketing is often confused with either network marketing or multi-level marketing. Performance marketing is a common alternative, but other recommendations have been made as well.
Sales Tax Vulnerability
In April 2008 the State of New York inserted an item in the state budget asserting sales tax jurisdiction over Amazon.com sales to residents of New York, based on the existence of affiliate links from New York-based websites to Amazon.[36] The state asserts that even one such affiliate constitutes Amazon having a business presence in the state, and is sufficient to allow New York to tax all Amazon sales to state residents. It is expected that Amazon will challenge this issue in court.
Cookie Stuffing
Cookie stuffing involves placing an affiliate tracking cookie on a website visitor's computer without their knowledge, which will then generate revenue for the person doing the cookie stuffing. This not only generates fraudulent affiliate sales, but also has the potential to overwrite other affiliates' cookies, essentially stealing their legitimately earned commissions.
Locating Afiliate Pograms
There are three primary ways to locate affiliate programs for a target website:
1. liate programs directories,
2. large affiliate networks that provide the platform for dozens or even hundreds of advertisers, and
3. the target website itself. (Websites that offer an affiliate program often have a link titled "affiliate program", "affiliates", "referral program", or "webmasters"—usually in the footer or "About" section of the website.)
If the above locations do not yield information pertaining to affiliates, it may be the case that there exists a non-public affiliate program. The most definitive method for finding this information is to contact the website owner directly.
1. liate programs directories,
2. large affiliate networks that provide the platform for dozens or even hundreds of advertisers, and
3. the target website itself. (Websites that offer an affiliate program often have a link titled "affiliate program", "affiliates", "referral program", or "webmasters"—usually in the footer or "About" section of the website.)
If the above locations do not yield information pertaining to affiliates, it may be the case that there exists a non-public affiliate program. The most definitive method for finding this information is to contact the website owner directly.
Affiliate Marketing From The Advertiser Perspective
Pros and Contra
Merchants favor affiliate marketing because in most cases it uses a "pay for performance" model, meaning that the merchant does not incur a marketing expense unless results are accrued (excluding any initial setup cost).[13] Some businesses owe much of their success to this marketing technique, a notable example being Amazon.com. Unlike display advertising, however, affiliate marketing is not easily scalable.[14]
Implementation Options
Some merchants run their own (i.e., in-house) affiliate programs using popular software while others use third-party services provided by intermediaries to track traffic or sales that are referred from affiliates (see outsourced program management). Merchants can choose from two different types of affiliate management solutions: standalone software or hosted services, typically called affiliate networks. Payouts to affiliates or publishers is typically made by 3rd party payment aggregation companies.
Affiliate Management and Program Management Outsourcing
Successful affiliate programs require significant work and maintenance. Having a successful affiliate program is more difficult than when such programs were just emerging. With the exception of some vertical markets, it is rare for an affiliate program to generate considerable revenue with poor management or no management (i.e., "auto-drive").
Uncontrolled affiliate programs did—and continue to do so today—aid rogue affiliates, who use spamming,[15] trademark infringement, false advertising, "cookie cutting", typosquatting,[16] and other unethical methods that have given affiliate marketing a negative reputation.
The increased number of Internet businesses and the increased number of people that trust the current technology enough to shop and do business online allows further maturation of affiliate marketing. The opportunity to generate a considerable amount of profit combined with a crowded marketplace filled with competitors of equal quality and size makes it more difficult for merchants to be noticed. In this environment, however, being noticed can yield greater rewards.
Recently, the Internet marketing industry has become more advanced. In some areas online media has been rising to the sophistication of offline media, in which advertising has been largely professional and competitive. There are significantly more requirements that merchants must meet to be successful, and those requirements are becoming too burdensome for the merchant to manage successfully in-house. An increasing number of merchants are seeking alternative options found in relatively new outsourced (affiliate) program management (OPM) companies, which are often founded by veteran affiliate managers and network program managers.OPM companies perform affiliate program management for the merchants as a service, similar to advertising agencies promoting a brand or product as done in offline marketing.
Types of Affiliate Websites
Affiliate websites are often categorized by merchants (i.e., advertisers) and affiliate networks. There are currently no industry-wide accepted standards for the categorization. The following types of websites are generic, yet are commonly understood and used by affiliate marketers.
Search affiliates that utilize pay per click search engines to promote the advertisers' offers (i.e., search arbitrage)
Comparison shopping websites and directories
Loyalty websites, typically characterized by providing a reward system for purchases via points back, cash back, or charitable donations
Coupon and rebate websites that focus on sales promotions
Content and niche market websites, including product review sites
Personal websites (This type of website was the reason for the birth of affiliate marketing; however, such websites are almost reduced to complete irrelevance compared to the other types of affiliate websites.)
Weblogs and website syndication feeds
E-mail list affiliates (i.e., owners of large opt-in -mail lists that typically employ e-mail drip marketing) and newsletter list affiliates, which are typically more content-heavy
Registration path or co-registration affiliates who include offers from other merchants during the registration process on their own website
Shopping directories that list merchants by categories without providing coupons, price comparisons, or other features based on information that changes frequently, thus requiring continual updates
Cost per action networks (i.e., top-tier affiliates) that expose offers from the advertiser with which they are affiliated to their own network of affiliates
Publisher Recruitment
Affiliate networks that already have several advertisers typically also have a large pool of publishers. These publishers could be potentially recruited, and there is also an increased chance that publishers in the network apply to the program on their own, without the need for recruitment efforts by the advertiser.
Relevant websites that attract the same target audiences as the advertiser but without competing with it are potential affiliate partners as well. Vendors or existing customers can also become recruits if doing so makes sense and does not violate any laws or regulations.
Almost any website could be recruited as an affiliate publisher, although high-traffic websites are more likely interested in (for their own sake) low-risk cost per mille or medium-risk cost per click deals rather than higher-risk cost per action or revenue share deals.[18]
Merchants favor affiliate marketing because in most cases it uses a "pay for performance" model, meaning that the merchant does not incur a marketing expense unless results are accrued (excluding any initial setup cost).[13] Some businesses owe much of their success to this marketing technique, a notable example being Amazon.com. Unlike display advertising, however, affiliate marketing is not easily scalable.[14]
Implementation Options
Some merchants run their own (i.e., in-house) affiliate programs using popular software while others use third-party services provided by intermediaries to track traffic or sales that are referred from affiliates (see outsourced program management). Merchants can choose from two different types of affiliate management solutions: standalone software or hosted services, typically called affiliate networks. Payouts to affiliates or publishers is typically made by 3rd party payment aggregation companies.
Affiliate Management and Program Management Outsourcing
Successful affiliate programs require significant work and maintenance. Having a successful affiliate program is more difficult than when such programs were just emerging. With the exception of some vertical markets, it is rare for an affiliate program to generate considerable revenue with poor management or no management (i.e., "auto-drive").
Uncontrolled affiliate programs did—and continue to do so today—aid rogue affiliates, who use spamming,[15] trademark infringement, false advertising, "cookie cutting", typosquatting,[16] and other unethical methods that have given affiliate marketing a negative reputation.
The increased number of Internet businesses and the increased number of people that trust the current technology enough to shop and do business online allows further maturation of affiliate marketing. The opportunity to generate a considerable amount of profit combined with a crowded marketplace filled with competitors of equal quality and size makes it more difficult for merchants to be noticed. In this environment, however, being noticed can yield greater rewards.
Recently, the Internet marketing industry has become more advanced. In some areas online media has been rising to the sophistication of offline media, in which advertising has been largely professional and competitive. There are significantly more requirements that merchants must meet to be successful, and those requirements are becoming too burdensome for the merchant to manage successfully in-house. An increasing number of merchants are seeking alternative options found in relatively new outsourced (affiliate) program management (OPM) companies, which are often founded by veteran affiliate managers and network program managers.OPM companies perform affiliate program management for the merchants as a service, similar to advertising agencies promoting a brand or product as done in offline marketing.
Types of Affiliate Websites
Affiliate websites are often categorized by merchants (i.e., advertisers) and affiliate networks. There are currently no industry-wide accepted standards for the categorization. The following types of websites are generic, yet are commonly understood and used by affiliate marketers.
Search affiliates that utilize pay per click search engines to promote the advertisers' offers (i.e., search arbitrage)
Comparison shopping websites and directories
Loyalty websites, typically characterized by providing a reward system for purchases via points back, cash back, or charitable donations
Coupon and rebate websites that focus on sales promotions
Content and niche market websites, including product review sites
Personal websites (This type of website was the reason for the birth of affiliate marketing; however, such websites are almost reduced to complete irrelevance compared to the other types of affiliate websites.)
Weblogs and website syndication feeds
E-mail list affiliates (i.e., owners of large opt-in -mail lists that typically employ e-mail drip marketing) and newsletter list affiliates, which are typically more content-heavy
Registration path or co-registration affiliates who include offers from other merchants during the registration process on their own website
Shopping directories that list merchants by categories without providing coupons, price comparisons, or other features based on information that changes frequently, thus requiring continual updates
Cost per action networks (i.e., top-tier affiliates) that expose offers from the advertiser with which they are affiliated to their own network of affiliates
Publisher Recruitment
Affiliate networks that already have several advertisers typically also have a large pool of publishers. These publishers could be potentially recruited, and there is also an increased chance that publishers in the network apply to the program on their own, without the need for recruitment efforts by the advertiser.
Relevant websites that attract the same target audiences as the advertiser but without competing with it are potential affiliate partners as well. Vendors or existing customers can also become recruits if doing so makes sense and does not violate any laws or regulations.
Almost any website could be recruited as an affiliate publisher, although high-traffic websites are more likely interested in (for their own sake) low-risk cost per mille or medium-risk cost per click deals rather than higher-risk cost per action or revenue share deals.[18]
Basic of Multi-tier Programs
Multi-tier Programs
Some advertisers offer multi-tier programs that distribute commission into a hierarchical referral network of sign-ups and sub-partners. In practical terms, publisher "A" signs up to the program with an advertiser and gets rewarded for the agreed activity conducted by a referred visitor. If publisher "A" attracts publishers "B" and "C" to sign up for the same program using his sign-up code, all future activities performed by publishers "B" and "C" will result in additional commission (at a lower rate) for publisher "A".
This system rewards a chain of hierarchical publishers who may or may not know of each others' existence, yet generate income for the higher level sign-up. This sort of structure has been implemented successfully by a company called Quixtar, a division of Alticor, the parent company of Amway.[citation needed] Quixtar has implemented a network marketing structure to implement its marketing program for major corporations such as Barnes & Noble, Office Depot, Sony Music, and hundreds more.
Two-tier programs exist in the minority of affiliate programs; most are simply one-tier. Referral programs beyond two-tier involve multi-level marketing (MLM) or network marketing.
Even though Quixtar's compensation plan involves network marketing that may not be considered to be affiliate marketing, the leading partners in the company are considered to be and call themselves affiliates. Therefore, one may argue that Quixtar is the affiliate marketer for its partner corporation.
Some advertisers offer multi-tier programs that distribute commission into a hierarchical referral network of sign-ups and sub-partners. In practical terms, publisher "A" signs up to the program with an advertiser and gets rewarded for the agreed activity conducted by a referred visitor. If publisher "A" attracts publishers "B" and "C" to sign up for the same program using his sign-up code, all future activities performed by publishers "B" and "C" will result in additional commission (at a lower rate) for publisher "A".
This system rewards a chain of hierarchical publishers who may or may not know of each others' existence, yet generate income for the higher level sign-up. This sort of structure has been implemented successfully by a company called Quixtar, a division of Alticor, the parent company of Amway.[citation needed] Quixtar has implemented a network marketing structure to implement its marketing program for major corporations such as Barnes & Noble, Office Depot, Sony Music, and hundreds more.
Two-tier programs exist in the minority of affiliate programs; most are simply one-tier. Referral programs beyond two-tier involve multi-level marketing (MLM) or network marketing.
Even though Quixtar's compensation plan involves network marketing that may not be considered to be affiliate marketing, the leading partners in the company are considered to be and call themselves affiliates. Therefore, one may argue that Quixtar is the affiliate marketer for its partner corporation.
Compensation Methods of Affiliate Marketing
Predominant Compensation Methods
Eighty percent of affiliate programs today use revenue sharing or cost per sale (CPS) as a compensation method, nineteen percent use cost per action (CPA), and the remaining programs use other methods such as cost per click (CPC) or cost per mille (CPM)
Diminished Compensation Methods
Less than one percent of traditional affiliate marketing programs today use cost per click and cost per mille. However, these compensation methods are used heavily in display advertising and paid search.
Cost per mille requires only that the publisher make the advertising available on his website and display it to his visitors in order to receive a commission. Pay per click requires one additional step in the conversion process to generate revenue for the publisher: A visitor must not only be made aware of the advertisement, but must also click on the advertisement to visit the advertiser's website.
Cost per click was more common in the early days of affiliate marketing, but has diminished in use over time due to click fraud issues very similar to the click fraud issues modern search engines are facing today. Contextual advertising programs such as Google AdSense are not considered in the statistic pertaining to diminished use of cost per click, as it is uncertain if contextual advertising can be considered affiliate marketing.
Performance Marketing
In the case of cost per mile/click, the publisher is not concerned about a visitor being a member of the audience that the advertiser tries to attract and is able to convert, because at this point the publisher has already earned his commission. This leaves the greater, and, in case of cost per mille, the full risk and loss (if the visitor can not be converted) to the advertiser.
Cost per action/sale methods require that referred visitors do more than visit the advertiser's website before the affiliate receives commission. The advertiser must convert that visitor first. It is in the best interest for the affiliate to send the most closely-targeted traffic to the advertiser as possible to increase the chance of a conversion. The risk and loss is shared between the affiliate and the advertiser.
Affiliate marketing is also called "performance marketing", in reference to how sales employees are typically being compensated. Such employees are typically paid a commission for each sale they close, and sometimes are paid performance incentives for exceeding targeted baselines.[12] Affiliates are not employed by the advertiser whose products or services they promote, but the compensation models applied to affiliate marketing are very similar to the ones used for people in the advertisers' internal sales department.
The phrase, "Affiliates are an extended sales force for your business", which is often used to explain affiliate marketing, is not completely accurate. The primary difference between the two is that affiliate marketers provide little if any influence on a possible prospect in the conversion process once that prospect is directed to the advertiser's website. The sales team of the advertiser, however, does have the control and influence up to the point where the prospect signs the contract or completes the purchase.
Eighty percent of affiliate programs today use revenue sharing or cost per sale (CPS) as a compensation method, nineteen percent use cost per action (CPA), and the remaining programs use other methods such as cost per click (CPC) or cost per mille (CPM)
Diminished Compensation Methods
Less than one percent of traditional affiliate marketing programs today use cost per click and cost per mille. However, these compensation methods are used heavily in display advertising and paid search.
Cost per mille requires only that the publisher make the advertising available on his website and display it to his visitors in order to receive a commission. Pay per click requires one additional step in the conversion process to generate revenue for the publisher: A visitor must not only be made aware of the advertisement, but must also click on the advertisement to visit the advertiser's website.
Cost per click was more common in the early days of affiliate marketing, but has diminished in use over time due to click fraud issues very similar to the click fraud issues modern search engines are facing today. Contextual advertising programs such as Google AdSense are not considered in the statistic pertaining to diminished use of cost per click, as it is uncertain if contextual advertising can be considered affiliate marketing.
Performance Marketing
In the case of cost per mile/click, the publisher is not concerned about a visitor being a member of the audience that the advertiser tries to attract and is able to convert, because at this point the publisher has already earned his commission. This leaves the greater, and, in case of cost per mille, the full risk and loss (if the visitor can not be converted) to the advertiser.
Cost per action/sale methods require that referred visitors do more than visit the advertiser's website before the affiliate receives commission. The advertiser must convert that visitor first. It is in the best interest for the affiliate to send the most closely-targeted traffic to the advertiser as possible to increase the chance of a conversion. The risk and loss is shared between the affiliate and the advertiser.
Affiliate marketing is also called "performance marketing", in reference to how sales employees are typically being compensated. Such employees are typically paid a commission for each sale they close, and sometimes are paid performance incentives for exceeding targeted baselines.[12] Affiliates are not employed by the advertiser whose products or services they promote, but the compensation models applied to affiliate marketing are very similar to the ones used for people in the advertisers' internal sales department.
The phrase, "Affiliates are an extended sales force for your business", which is often used to explain affiliate marketing, is not completely accurate. The primary difference between the two is that affiliate marketers provide little if any influence on a possible prospect in the conversion process once that prospect is directed to the advertiser's website. The sales team of the advertiser, however, does have the control and influence up to the point where the prospect signs the contract or completes the purchase.
Affiliate Marketing History
Origin
The concept of revenue sharing—paying commission for referred business—predates affiliate marketing and the Internet. The translation of the revenue share principles to mainstream e-commerce happened almost four years after the origination of the World Wide Web in November 1994.
The consensus of marketers and adult industry insiders is that Cybererotica was either the first or among the early innovators in affiliate marketing with a cost per click program.[2]
During November 1994, CDNOW launched its BuyWeb program. With this program CDNOW was the first non-adult website to introduce the concept of an affiliate or associate program with its idea of click-through purchasing. CDNOW had the idea that music-oriented websites could review or list albums on their pages that their visitors may be interested in purchasing. These websites could also offer a link that would take the visitor directly to CDNOW to purchase the albums. The idea for remote purchasing originally arose because of conversations with music label Geffen Records in the fall of 1994. The management at Geffen wanted to sell its artists' CDs directly from its website, but did not want to implement this capability itself. Geffen asked CDNOW if it could design a program where CDNOW would handle the order fulfillment. Geffen realized that CDNOW could link directly from the artist on its website to Geffen's website, bypassing the CDNOW home page and going directly to an artist's music page.[3]
Amazon.com (Amazon) launched its associate program in July 1996. Amazon associates could place banner or text links on their site for individual books, or link directly to the Amazon home page.
When visitors clicked from the associate's website through to Amazon and purchased a book, the associate received a commission. Amazon was not the first merchant to offer an affiliate program, but its program was the first to become widely-known and serve as a model for subsequent programs.
In February 2000, Amazon announced that it had been granted a patent (6,029,141) on all the essential components of an affiliate program. The patent application was submitted in June 1997, which predates most affiliate programs, but not PC Flowers & Gifts.com (October 1994), AutoWeb.com (October 1995), Kbkids.com/BrainPlay.com (January 1996), EPage (April 1996), and several others.
Historic development
Affiliate marketing has grown quickly since its inception. The e-commerce website, viewed as a marketing toy in the early days of the Internet, became an integrated part of the overall business plan and in some cases grew to a bigger business than the existing offline business. According to one report, the total sales amount generated through affiliate networks in 2006 was £2.16 billion in the United Kingdom alone. The estimates were £1.35 billion in sales in 2005.MarketingSherpa's research team estimated that, in 2006, affiliates worldwide earned US$6.5 billion in bounty and commissions from a variety of sources in retail, personal finance, gaming and gambling, travel, telecom, education, publishing, and forms of lead generation other than contextual advertising programs such as Google AdSense.Currently the most active sectors for affiliate marketing are the adult, gambling, and retail industries.[8] The three sectors expected to experience the greatest growth are the mobile phone, finance, and travel sectors Soon after these sectors came the entertainment (particularly gaming) and Internet-related services (particularly broadband) sectors. Also several of the affiliate solution providers expect to see increased interest from business-to-business marketers and advertisers in using affiliate marketing as part of their mix
Web 2.0
Websites and services based on Web 2.0 concepts—blogging and interactive online communities, for example—have impacted the affiliate marketing world as well. The new media allowed merchants to become closer to their affiliates and improved the communication between them.[
New developments have made it more difficult for unscrupulous affiliates to make money. Emerging black sheep are detected and made known to the affiliate marketing community with much greater speed and efficiency.
The concept of revenue sharing—paying commission for referred business—predates affiliate marketing and the Internet. The translation of the revenue share principles to mainstream e-commerce happened almost four years after the origination of the World Wide Web in November 1994.
The consensus of marketers and adult industry insiders is that Cybererotica was either the first or among the early innovators in affiliate marketing with a cost per click program.[2]
During November 1994, CDNOW launched its BuyWeb program. With this program CDNOW was the first non-adult website to introduce the concept of an affiliate or associate program with its idea of click-through purchasing. CDNOW had the idea that music-oriented websites could review or list albums on their pages that their visitors may be interested in purchasing. These websites could also offer a link that would take the visitor directly to CDNOW to purchase the albums. The idea for remote purchasing originally arose because of conversations with music label Geffen Records in the fall of 1994. The management at Geffen wanted to sell its artists' CDs directly from its website, but did not want to implement this capability itself. Geffen asked CDNOW if it could design a program where CDNOW would handle the order fulfillment. Geffen realized that CDNOW could link directly from the artist on its website to Geffen's website, bypassing the CDNOW home page and going directly to an artist's music page.[3]
Amazon.com (Amazon) launched its associate program in July 1996. Amazon associates could place banner or text links on their site for individual books, or link directly to the Amazon home page.
When visitors clicked from the associate's website through to Amazon and purchased a book, the associate received a commission. Amazon was not the first merchant to offer an affiliate program, but its program was the first to become widely-known and serve as a model for subsequent programs.
In February 2000, Amazon announced that it had been granted a patent (6,029,141) on all the essential components of an affiliate program. The patent application was submitted in June 1997, which predates most affiliate programs, but not PC Flowers & Gifts.com (October 1994), AutoWeb.com (October 1995), Kbkids.com/BrainPlay.com (January 1996), EPage (April 1996), and several others.
Historic development
Affiliate marketing has grown quickly since its inception. The e-commerce website, viewed as a marketing toy in the early days of the Internet, became an integrated part of the overall business plan and in some cases grew to a bigger business than the existing offline business. According to one report, the total sales amount generated through affiliate networks in 2006 was £2.16 billion in the United Kingdom alone. The estimates were £1.35 billion in sales in 2005.MarketingSherpa's research team estimated that, in 2006, affiliates worldwide earned US$6.5 billion in bounty and commissions from a variety of sources in retail, personal finance, gaming and gambling, travel, telecom, education, publishing, and forms of lead generation other than contextual advertising programs such as Google AdSense.Currently the most active sectors for affiliate marketing are the adult, gambling, and retail industries.[8] The three sectors expected to experience the greatest growth are the mobile phone, finance, and travel sectors Soon after these sectors came the entertainment (particularly gaming) and Internet-related services (particularly broadband) sectors. Also several of the affiliate solution providers expect to see increased interest from business-to-business marketers and advertisers in using affiliate marketing as part of their mix
Web 2.0
Websites and services based on Web 2.0 concepts—blogging and interactive online communities, for example—have impacted the affiliate marketing world as well. The new media allowed merchants to become closer to their affiliates and improved the communication between them.[
New developments have made it more difficult for unscrupulous affiliates to make money. Emerging black sheep are detected and made known to the affiliate marketing community with much greater speed and efficiency.
What is Defenition of Affiliate Marketing ??
Affiliate marketing is an Internet-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate's marketing efforts.
Affiliate marketing is also the name of the industry where a number of different types of companies and individuals are performing this form of Internet marketing, including affiliate networks, affiliate management companies, and in-house affiliate managers, specialized third party vendors, and various types of affiliates/publishers who promote the products and services of their partners.
Affiliate marketing overlaps with other Internet marketing methods to some degree, because affiliates often use regular advertising methods. Those methods include organic search engine optimization, paid search engine marketing, e-mail marketing, and in some sense display advertising. On the other hand, affiliates sometimes use less orthodox techniques, such as publishing reviews of products or services offered by a partner.
Affiliate marketing—using one website to drive traffic to another—is a form of online marketing, which is frequently overlooked by advertisers. While search engines, e-mail, and website syndication capture much of the attention of online retailers, affiliate marketing carries a much lower profile. Still, affiliates continue to play a significant role in e-retailers' marketing strategies.
Affiliate marketing is also the name of the industry where a number of different types of companies and individuals are performing this form of Internet marketing, including affiliate networks, affiliate management companies, and in-house affiliate managers, specialized third party vendors, and various types of affiliates/publishers who promote the products and services of their partners.
Affiliate marketing overlaps with other Internet marketing methods to some degree, because affiliates often use regular advertising methods. Those methods include organic search engine optimization, paid search engine marketing, e-mail marketing, and in some sense display advertising. On the other hand, affiliates sometimes use less orthodox techniques, such as publishing reviews of products or services offered by a partner.
Affiliate marketing—using one website to drive traffic to another—is a form of online marketing, which is frequently overlooked by advertisers. While search engines, e-mail, and website syndication capture much of the attention of online retailers, affiliate marketing carries a much lower profile. Still, affiliates continue to play a significant role in e-retailers' marketing strategies.
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