Affiliate Programs — The Basics
If you've been anywhere near the web of late I'm certain that you've seen advertisements for various affiliate programs promising to make you outrageous amounts of money for little or no work on your part. Or perhaps you've been to a commercial site and seen a likt to their affiliate programme. If you have your own website then these affiliate programs can actually be a way you can make money from the web. This guide will tell you everything about affiliate programmes, what they are, how to register for them and how to make the most of them on your own website.
What are Affiliate Programs?
An affiliate is defined as: 'a commercial entity with a relationship with a peer or a larger entity'. Whilst accurate, this definition isn't particularly illuminating. In effect an affiliate is a partner of a parent company. The parent company handles the gereration of the product as well as all the financial transactions and the shipping of the product. You act as a shop window and an advertising area where customers are made aware of the product and are introduced to the parent company. If a sale results the affiliate gains a percentage of the fee paid to the parent company. Depending on the product and who you're representing this fee can range from 5% to as much as 75% of the final sale.
As an affiliate you're using the reputation of your site (and hopefully it's high ranking in the various search engines) to pull-in visitors. The more visitors you have coming to the site the more people will see your pages, will click on your ads and visit the companies you're partnering with as an affiliate. If one of these visitors decides to buy a product from that company you will gain a percentage of that sale — everyone benefits!
How Affiliate Programs Work
To join an affiliate program you will generally need a website that has some reasonable content on it (most programs perform some checking to ensure that your webiste exists and that it has some kind of fairly reasonable content and that some of this content matches the products being sold. If all is well you will be given some kind of affiliate ID that you can embed in URLs and which identifies visitors as originating from your site. Most affiliate programs will aslo provide you with a number of 'creatives'. These are advertisements that you can copy from them (and which already have your affiliate ID built into them).
These creatives can take many forms, but the commonest types are banner adverts such as the one below:
As well as being hoirizontal these can also be vertical in aspect ratio so that you can lie them along the side of your main page.
After the large-format 'banner' advertisement the next most common advertisement type is the small banner as below:
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Probably the least common form of affiliate advertising is the plain text advertisement probably because it looks boring; though you will find out in a later article that dismissing this type of advertisement out of hand may well be a very costly mistake on your part.