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Table of Contents

Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 3  

Chapter One ..................................................................................................................... 4  

What is Affiliate Marketing? .......................................................................................... 4  

The Basic Plan .......................................................................................................... 4  

Why an In-house Affiliate Program is Great .............................................................. 5  

Common Terms ............................................................................................................ 5  

Chapter Two ..................................................................................................................... 8  

Ways to Promote Your Affiliate Program ...................................................................... 8  

Search Engine Jargon Clarified ................................................................................. 8  

SEO, PPC and Affiliates ............................................................................................ 9  

Strong Words on Affiliate Networks ........................................................................... 9  

Chapter Three ................................................................................................................ 11  

Helping Affiliates with Business .................................................................................. 11  

Making Life Easier ................................................................................................... 11  

Be Sure to Individualize ........................................................................................... 12  

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Introduction Do you have a website? If you answered yes to that question then you should know that

you can actually generate income and far more profit if you incorporate an affiliate

program into your site. This is among the most modern forms of marketing and it works

in a very simple way.

You create a system that rewards affiliates for electronically encouraging valuable traffic

to visit your website and/or make a purchase of some kind. There are many ways that

affiliate marketing can work, but fundamentally it is a wonderful way to reach an

audience that has a valid interest in what you offer, but which may not automatically find

its way to your site.

The classic example is the affiliate marketing done by Amazon.com. They have more

than five hundred thousand affiliates at the time of this writing and each of them will use

their affiliate tools differently. The one similarity between them all, however, is that they

are all driving extremely valuable internet traffic back to the original merchant site! This

is done without any further input on the part of Amazon.com, and they are paying only

small amounts for all of this fundamentally free traffic.

You can do the same thing if you use affiliate marketing programs and choose the most

appropriate affiliates for your particular message, products, or site. This book is going to

walk you through the basic details and explain the many reasons why you need to

explore affiliate marketing if you want to dramatically increase the size of your bottom

line!

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Chapter One

What is Affiliate Marketing? The most basic possible answer to the question of “what is an affiliate program” is that it

is a method for making far more money from your website than you had originally

intended. It works in the simplest ways possible, but you have to understand a few

things before you can make it really “work” for your business.

What do you need to know? Well, the fundamental structure and “flow” of affiliate

marketing is going to be the first thing to master.

The Basic Plan

You create all of the content on your website…right? Within that content, you can create

links to products available through your site, or from another site too.

For example, let’s say that you are someone with an informational website about

dahlias. These are flowers grown from special “tubers”, but you only make information

available about dahlias through your website.

You decide to earn a bit of income by becoming an “affiliate” of a few businesses

related to your subject. For exa mple, you become an Amazon.com affiliate in order to

profit off of any gardening books recommended through your site. You partner with a

few dahlia selling companies to also make some money off of the sales of dahlia tubers

that begin from the links on your website as well.

Nice, isn’t it? Now, what if you are the business at the other end of those links? What

we mean is what if you are Amazon or the dahlia tuber companies? If you are these

companies then it means you have an existing affiliate program, and THAT is what we

are going to cover in this book.

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Why an In-house Affiliate Program is Great

What makes an affiliate program good for the business who offers it? After all, it means

you will still have to deal with the more difficult work of handling and shipping items if

you are a merchant site. It also means that you have to administrate that affiliate

program too, doesn’t it?

Yes, but it also means that you have the opportunity for dramatically increasing the

traffic to your website and earning a lot more in terms of sales or “conversions” of

visitors into paying customers.

Just consider that affiliate marketing provides two huge solutions:

• It helps a content driven website to make income from all of its traffic

• It helps merchant sites to get more people than ever to purchase products.

They do so in the simplest of ways; they pay commissions to the affiliates for posting

links that lead traffic back to their site. Some give commissions only if a purchase is

made, but some provide compensation only if the affiliate’s link is put to use. Naturally,

this means that affiliate programs all work in different ways, but have the same general

results.

Common Terms

These results include the merchant, the affiliate, and the consumer using the Internet.

The merchant, for this book, is your business and the affiliate is anyone with whom you

cooperate and compensate for delivering traffic, or the consumer, to your site.

You might do this through:

• Pay per purchase agreements – This sends a commission to the affiliate at any

time that a sale results from a consumer using their link to get to the merchant

site.

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• Pay per lead – This is an affiliate program that provides compensation if a link

from an affiliate’s page leads to a consumer providing their contact information

(becoming a “lead).

• Pay per click – This is the type of affiliate program that rewards an affiliate

whenever a consumer clicks on the link embedded in the affiliate site.

What is so interesting about the ways that affiliate programs are structured is that there

can be compensation based on a “one time” event, or things can continue indefinitely

into the future if that benefits the merchant and the affiliate more. For instance, there

can be the:

• Tier system – This allows the affiliate to profit from its own activities AND to

profit from any activities generated by its “recruits”. For instance, the Amway

company is famous for its multiple tiers of affiliates who are continually earning a

small percentage of their own recruited affiliates’ sales.

• Residual system – Yhis is an arrangement that permanently links a consumer to

an affiliate. For instance, someone buys dahlia tubers through a link that you

have embedded at your informational website (this is from our earlier example). If

you remain an affiliate, you will continue to earn a small profit from all future

purchases made by that consumer. This is also the sort of system used in

subscription or service sites that have monthly fees associated with them.

Before choosing the type of rewards and systems to use, you have to understand that

all affiliate programs that are successful tend to be so because they choose companies,

affiliates, products, or sites that partner well with what they have to offer. Let’s go back

to that dahlia site that we used as an example. This is not the sort of informational or

content driven site that would find affiliates interested in dog food. They would be far

better off if they chose to accept affiliate offers from fertilizer sites, flower seed sellers,

etc.

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This takes us into the subject of the next chapter, which is “the best way to market an

affiliate program.” What does the type of affiliate have to do with promoting the

program? Well, just consider some final terms that you will hear a lot when discussing

marketing of any kind – SEO and PPC marketing. These are the two chief ways to

ensure website success, but they are also directly related to properly marketing your

affiliate program.

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Chapter Two

Ways to Promote Your Affiliate Program Though many business and website owners are aghast at the recent changes to the

Google algorithm, known as the infamous “Panda” upgrade, these changes haven’t

really negatively impacted well marketed affiliate programs. This is because a savvy

website owner is going to market their affiliate options to a suitable set of candidates

through things like traditional SEO and PPC advertising, which are always going to

reach the most suitable audience possible.

Search Engine Jargon Clarified

Are these terms a bit over your head? SEO means “Search Engine Optimization,” and it

is usually viewed as an optimal method of affiliate program marketing because it creates

the most “organic” results possible. You will be making an ongoing and persistent effort

to identify the appropriate keywords for your intended audience, and will then integrate

these words and terms into the individual pages of the website.

Doing this means that you will also spend time acquiring back links that are valid and

valuable to SEO and higher search engine results.

PPC means “Pay Per Click” advertising and it is not organic at all. You simply purchase

ad space with the major search engines (currently Google Adwords is the biggest name

in PPC ads) and they ensure that the ads you send them will appear on pages or results

that are directly related to them. When you do a lot of SEO and partner it with PPC ads,

it is likely that your site will appear or “rank” highly in all search engine results.

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SEO, PPC and Affiliates

When you get good placement in relevant searches, you are going to also get attention

from those who work, or have sites, in related fields. If you ensure that you apply this

sort of marketing specifically to your affiliate pages and information, it is also going to

position that information highly in search engine results.

What does this mean? It means that as people who are looking for information or

products directly relating to your site get their results, they are also going to see your

affiliate program!

Naturally, one of the smartest ways to market the affiliate site is to advertise it directly

on your site too. Make sure that your web page design incorporates a very bold and

clear link to the affiliate marketing area of the site and that the tags, headers, and text

utilize the same keywords that function well within the SEO and advertisements.

Strong Words on Affiliate Networks

We also suggest that you checkout options for affiliate networks. These are basically

the classic “middle men” who can manage almost all aspects of your affiliate program,

even directing potential affiliates to your “door”.

The way that they work varies widely, but the ones that seem to be the most

comprehensive and useful will begin with recruiting pages that work like a directory.

This means that a potential affiliate hoping to enhance a website can browse through an

affiliate network’s online directory of opportunities. The network can then handle the

registration process and begin tracking all of the activity done by that affiliate. The

network will even be able to help the affiliates with such things a links and setting up

their sites.

What does this mean to you as the merchant? It means that you have to be willing to

give the network a percentage of the profits from the affiliate program, but it cannot be

overlooked that a good network can save you a huge amount of time, money and

hassle.

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Just consider that traditional affiliate marketing requires:

• The ID number for the affiliate

• A system of links that the affiliates can use without fail

• A website that works with the links given to the affiliates, and which can include:

o Specific product pages

o Affiliates only storefronts

o Special home pages

o Regular pages

All of these things will have to head to the merchant URL, which is going to have to

have some sort of program for managing when an affiliate link has sent a visitor to the

site. It will then have to ensure that the visitor is at the actual merchant site and use

“cookies “of some kind to keep track of the affiliate-generated activities.

The affiliate networks can do all of that, plus they tend to offer even more types of

management options. They can often report on the number of “clicks” that an affiliate’s

links generated, track sales or enrollment that resulted from an affiliate’s various links,

and even keep track of the total number of website visitors to an affiliate’s site who

viewed the merchant’s information. The networks are also great for reporting to the

merchants the amount of money that an affiliate is due on a weekly or monthly basis.

Are we strongly advocating networks? If you can afford setup fees, we believe that

these are usually the simplest and most effective ways of administrating your affiliate

programs.

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Chapter Three

Helping Affiliates with Business You have done the SEO and PPC campaigns meant to give you a strong position in the

search engine results. You have worked with some of the best affiliate networks in order

to appear in their directories and listings. You are also advertising your affiliate program

directly through your website. This all means that you are probably getting some

inquiries about affiliate opportunities, and now is the time to understand what YOU can

do for the affiliates in order to help them to promote your site.

Making Life Easier

If you want to do what the “big boys” do, it will mean providing your affiliates with the

easiest methods possible. This is done through the creation of a series of different links

and/or embeddable text boxes and more.

For instance, the basic list of items would include:

• Text Links – Give your affiliates the tools to incorporate very natural and readable

text links. This means that you will provide the code that works like a hyperlink

(turning black text into another color to distinguish it from the rest), but which

doesn’t jump out from the page in a distracting way. This is one of the ways that

many affiliates really like to promote your site because it is subtle and not

commercial or flashy.

• Search boxes – This is a very clever and contemporary tool because it is actually

a search engine powered by your website. When a visitor searches the affiliate’s

site for information or products, it is actually going to generate results and links

from the merchant (YOUR) website.

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• Banners and Boxes – These are graphics that are “clickable” when the coding is

embedded properly into the affiliate’s page. These are very appealing when they

use an image of an item or the logo of a company.

• Product Links – You can always streamline everything and provide the affiliate

with a link that takes visitors directly to the product page for the item.

• Registration Links – If you are seeking to acquire leads through your affiliates, it

may be a wise idea to give them links that get all of the details after the

consumer has clicked the very first link.

• Storefront Links – These can be a bit of a high maintenance issue because you

as the merchant have to ensure that the links are taking visitors to the most

appropriate and up to date pages. Basically, they send visitors to a fabricated

store page that is connected to the merchant site, but related directly to the

affiliate products or information.

• Shared Page Links – you may have seen these already and not known it. These

are links that drive the visitor to a page that has an identical appearance to the

merchant’s page, but which is actually run by the merchant site. This is a very

common system for affiliate programs for products.

Of course, you can always send all links directly to your website homepage as well. This

is not the most direct approach because it means that some visitors have to navigate to

the area of interest or because it may not get as many leads as desired. If, however, the

only goal of the affiliate program is to get people to that homepage, it is perfectly

acceptable to create a single, universal link.

Be Sure to Individualize

Remember, however, that any and all links provided to your affiliates have to be

generated with their specific ID number and tracking information. This is the main

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reason that we have recommended the use of networks. They often generate all of

these links upon the request of the affiliate, and cannot be incorrect or fail to function.

What IS usually in your hands is the maintenance of the website and all of the pages

related to affiliate marketing and the information or products it is meant to promote. If

you keep things simple, however, it is likely that your affiliates will be able to use the

necessary links in a simple and straightforward manner.

Soon, you will be creating or receiving the reports that you need to see the results of the

affiliate program and to determine just how much traffic and profit it has generated for

your site. Most merchants are astounded to see that they are capable of creating a few

hundred dollars per month almost immediately, and many also see four and five figure

digits very quickly!