Affiliate Programs — Becoming a Successful Affiliate

You've decided you'd like to jump on the affiliate bandwagon but are perplexed as to how to proceed. After all, it can't be a simple matter of joining up and splashing affiliate links all over your pages can it? Unfortunately it isn't that simple. Otherwise thousands of people would be making millions from the Internet. As always one has to be a little 'cannier' to use the available tools and methods appropriately.

Affiliate programmes are great in that you effectively act as an agent for a product, sending traffic either to the product homepage or to an affiliate protal site. Effectively you're acting as an agent for the various companies and products you're promoting. You are their agent. In a very real sense you are the shopkeeper, introducing a customer to a new product. You are the point of contact, and if those prospective customers don't trust you they will never buy from the people you're representing. In effect you're attempting to gain the trust of the customer on behalf of the vendor and it is for this that you're being paid your affiliate fee.

The Psychology of Selling

You may not be aware of it, but by promoting your affiliates you are continuing a very ancient practice of the merchant. I'm using the term here in its ancient sense as the one who facilitates the interaction between the producer and the consumer. The direct analogy is with the silk route, where the caravanserai brought goods from China to sell in the Middle East. The Internet is today's silk rout and you are the caravanserai. It is your function to find the various affiliate schemes and to bring those products to the attention of prospective customers. The fact that the medium of the Internet is a stream of electrons rather than a string of camels is irrelevant. You are still sourcing a product in one place and setting up your stall (your web-page) in your own souk or bazaar elsewhere is still the case.

By creating a website and placing affiliate links on it you have pitched your stall in the marketplace of the internet, but how do you maximize the number of visitors who come to your stall and then get the largest number of people to buy the various wares you're proffering? This is a question that has perplexed a large number of internet entrepeneurs for the better part of a decade and the answer is simple. Though to explain fully I need to delve a little into the history of human societies. But don't worry, this isn't a big dissertation on the nature of good and evil!

How Human Perception affects Buying Strategies

To fully understand humans and their interactions we need to understand that the large-scale urbanization we have in the West today is a by-product of the Industrial Revolution and only really got going two hundred and fifty years ago. Though there have been some large cities in the past, they have been the exception and not the rule. For the vast majority of human history people have lived in small tribal groups where everyone essentially knew everyone else. Strangers were viewed with uncertainty and suspicion though they might be welcomed in the short term. Traders were just such strangers (and we know that traders have been around for the past 8000 years at least). Though they might bring useful goods and services they were still an unknown commodity. All such traders had to establish their credentials as someone trustworthy. They had to communicate with the tribespeople, reach their clients and make them trust them.

Even in the great cities of the ancient world, Babylon, Rome, Athens, Carthage and Beijing traders would set-up stalls in markets and souks and would attempt to entice patrons by engaging with them. It was a personal service based on trust. The same was true after the Industrial Revolution when shops began to establish themselves on our high streets. The shopkeepers catered for their local communities and knew their regulars by name. There was a bond of trust between the merchant and the customer. It is only during the latter half of the twentieth century that this model of trading has been broken with the supermarkets and out-of-town mega-shops where everything is done anonymously. There are obviously economies of scale involved with this stratagem but it flies in the face of how humans do business and this may explain the current backlash against such institutions.

It is undeniable that people are turning towards the internet to do their shopping. 'But surely the internet is even more impersonal than the megachains?' I hear you asking. As an institution this is true of the internet. But prospective client's don't interact with the 'internet'. They deal with specific websites and brands. And this is where your role as the purveyor of that website or brand comes in.

Whilst creating an affiliate website it's all to easy to simply fill each page with advertisements so that you attempt to sell by simply 'splatting' sales pitches at the customer. However, in doing this you are failing at the first marketing hurdle. You are not engaging with your customer and hence he/she has no opportunity to come to know and trust you. If the prospective customer does not trust you then there is no engagement between you and them and few sales will be made. The truth is that the internet is a 'content-rich' medium. People are searching for things of interest to them and if you can engage these people and entice them to your website you're a significant way to making a sale. Even then you still need to engage with your visitors. Make sure you have real content for them to look at. Content related to what you're attempting to sell. That way your visitors encounter your personal style and 'voice'. They encounter you as an individual and come to trust you. If they trust you then they will tend to trust the products you're offereing them. It's not a million miles away from the market trader engaging with the customer by way of banter. You can (and should) make the interaction even more presonal by putting up an e-mail address whereby you can be contacted. That way you are creating a personal relationship and making it more likely that a customer will return again and again.

In internet parlance this is called 'pre-selling'. In fact you're deliberately not attempting to sell the customer anything. You're simply engaging with them and pointing out a number of products they might be interested in. You are giving them a 'warm and fuzzy feeling' and putting them in the right frame of mind to buy something that they're interested in. They then click on the affiliate's link and are immediately sent into the midst of a sales pitch.

As a stallholder on the internet it's also your duty to maintain the trust of your customers. You are their friend and you must be confident in every product that you're inroducing to them. If they encounter a dud product on your site they will not come back and will tell their friends to avoid you as well. Trust is a hard thing to earn and a very easy thing to lose especially as there are so many other voices out there clamouring 'trust me!'.

  
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Conclusion

Of course, you may have the best site in the world, but you will never sell anything from it if you have no traffic. You need as many people as possible to pass by your stall. One of the ways of doing this is by improving your search engine rankings. This can be done by tweaking your keyword list and can also be achieved by enlarging your site so that many people link to it. Another good way of improving traffic is to write articles... Yes, you did hear me correctly. There are a number of websites where you can write articles to be published there (an example being www.shoutwire.com. You write an article, put it somewhere on your site and then submit to a website such as this. If it is accepted then they link to your website and you get an instant (often quite large) increase in traffic. It is then up to you to engage with your visitors and to entice them to visit your affiliates.

An obvious point, but make sure your affiliate links actually relate to the content of the web page they're on. A sufer will never click on a link in a site that's totally irrelevant to the information he's come to your page to see.

Thanks to Nemeton Information for making this information available.