What is an Affiliate Program?
Saturday, March 21st, 2009Basically, an affiliate program allows websites that provide links to your site to receive payments or reciprocal advertising in exchange for promoting your website. It is a form of advertising on the Internet. It rewards the affiliates (self-selected advertisers) for redirecting traffic to the advertiser or for subsequent transactions (CPA).
An affiliate program employs a multi-level marketing concept where consumers (affiliates) draw additional consumers. Some affiliate programs are multi-tiered, thus raising the income earning opportunities for the affiliates. They are rewarded for their traffic and the traffic of affiliates they recruit.
Marketers have the choice of developing their own in-house affiliate program (Amazon.com and bn.com are examples) or signing up with one or more of the large affiliate networks (CommissionJunction, LinkShare, Clickbank and Performics). Affiliates have the makings of earning significant money, if done correctly.
As a marketer, you can choose to have your own in house program. This means you will have to manage all administrative requirements to run an affiliate program, but they would still employ software to use. An example would be AssocTRAC affiliate management solutions, Synergyx, and 1stShopping Cart. The usual process is that someone signs up as an affiliate and advertises your products or services. A customer clicks on this new affiliate’s sales link and places an order. The company processes the order through your real-time credit card payment gateway. When the order is approved, they send an email to you (the administrator), the customer, and the affiliate. If you want, you can set the system up to arrange one or more autoresponder series (via GetResponse, Aweber, or most other autoresponder services) for that customer. You can view reports at any time to verify your commissions owed, conversion rates, sales figures etc. This has a high level of automation that will free up your time, allowing you to concentrate on other things such as your marketing and/or product development efforts rather than the day-to-day tedium.
Other marketers choose to have a large affiliate network take care of nearly everything for you. They’ll handle recruiting (to a certain extent) and administrative functions like sending out, tracking, reporting, checks etc. But usually, you’ll pay a much higher percentage than doing it yourself. If you don’t think you can deal with some of the administrative tasks of running such a program in house, you should consider outsourcing to companies that offer such services.
If you just want to be an affiliate, you choose amongst the websites or companies that offer affiliate programs. You can find companies and websites that have affiliate programs through affiliate networks. The usual process is that you sign up as an affiliate. Usually, you will be given a username and password. During the sign up process, you can choose what kind of affiliate you will be. You probably would have an administrative page where you can choose a number of advertisement formats in the site. You can also get banners and linking code, or update your contact information in this page. You will also be given a unique ID code to know that you are the one who referred any particular visitor. You can also get a linking code for your e-mails and newsletter. They usually download to your computer a cookie that identifies you automatically and it will never expire unless you delete the cookies cache. You earn for every visitors that go through the companies website through your links.
