UNDERSTANDING AFFILIATE PROGRAM

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.

View illustration picture at the right hand side

INTRODUCTION TO AFFILIATE BUSINESS
The simplest way to profit on the Net
Someone else has done the hard work of creating a product, producing sales copy and promotional material, and handling orders, while all you need do is lead customers to their site using advertising.

HOW TO CHOOSE AN AFFILIATE
Some of the below factors should be considered.

1. Can you make money from the product?
Don't be swayed just by high commission figures or multi-tier payments. You need positive answers to both these two questions
Is it a product that people want and will buy? Consider how it will fare alongside the competition.
Is the commission rate sufficient to make your efforts worthwhile?

2. How effective is the sales page?
Visit the sales page of the product to confirm that the sales copy does a good job of selling the product. Be aware of the various ways that can lose out on your commission. (These are explained in the following tip in this section.)

3. Check out the affiliate support
The merchant should provide you with much more than just a link to join the affiliate program. Check for any useful promotional material - sample ads, articles, solo mailings, endorsements/reviews, signatures
Ideally there will be an affiliate mailing list so that the merchant can convey useful news. You want someone reliable who won't disband a program or make rule changes without telling you.

4. How many affiliate programs should you promote?
If you plan to put a number of affiliate products on one page then the more you have the more diluted the effect. The exception being if they all relate to the same topic

Otherwise if you keep them separate you can have as many as you like but do not underestimate the work involved for you on the administration side such as
* Different procedures for signing up
* Different ways of creating affiliate links
* Different methods of payments, at different intervals
* handling ongoing communications from every program.
A good compromise is to use a company which contains many affiliate programs under one umbrella. They consolidate your commissions into one payment and have a standardized format for affiliate links with no individual sign-ups required.
The most popular of these, handling digital products (e-books, software), is ClickBank.

Beware! You can lose your commission
As an affiliate you want the visitor to read through the sales page and hit that “order” button with you getting credit for the sale. There are a number of reasons why this does not happen

1. There is an overt link to an affiliate sign up page. So your potential customer could simply become an affiliate and purchase the product through his own link.
2. There are many external links which distract the visitor from reaching the order page.
3. The merchant captures your commission, for example
There are offers to join a mailing list or claim a free report: you should get credited for any sale ensuing from these leads but an unscrupulous merchant may follow up and make the sale via his own link.
Similarly the merchant may use a pop-up upon exiting a site to convert a leaving visitor into a sale for which you do not get the credit.

4. Your product is just one of many unrelated products on a page – it may be a put-off for the potential customer.
5. Remember ClickBank mentioned previously?
If you are a ClickBank affiliate and the merchant offers multiple payment options (such as Paypal) then if ClickBank is not chosen you do not get the commission.

So you have seen a list of reasons why you are not getting those commission checks.
What can you do about them then?

Never link directly to an affiliate site

You should never openly use the URL that an affiliate program provides for you.
You should link instead to a page on your own site which then leads to the affiliate program.
The reasons?
1. On this page you can provide your own introduction to the product or service you are promoting. This can include, for example:
- Additional detail not available in your posting or advert
- Your own personal experience
- A review of the benefits
2. You can provide links to the rest of your site in case your visitor is not interested in that affiliate product.
3. Your own site traffic statistics will indicate the response to your advert in addition to any stats provided for you by the affiliate company.

4. You can submit the page to search engines.

5. With the real URL visible there is a risk that the reader removes the suffix (agent code) so that you do not get registered as the affiliate agent

6. If the affiliate operation becomes discontinued you can inform and divert visitors at your own website, rather than have them visit a non-existent page.

Why you should conceal affiliate URLs - and how
It's a proven fact that many customers will not click on an affiliate URL at your site.
Maybe they resent seeing commission paid to an affiliate, maybe they feel less security when buying from an affiliate.
So, suppose they see a link looking like this in the browser status bar
http://www.abc.com/123
Where '123' is your affiliate code.
They may decide to bypass the affiliate code and just type in the home page URL
http://www.abc.com
And that means you lose out on the commission.
Here is how to conceal not only the affiliate code but anything about that URL which may indicate it is an affiliate link. Use some Javascript.
Then 'ABC' will show in the browser status bar instead of the URL.
But what about the case where you want to send out that URL in an email ?
That's an easier target, ideal for commission theft as you will see in the next tip.

Watch out for commission theft
Certain affiliate link formats are not 'protected'.
In other words they have a simple format such as http://www.abc.com/123
and if you display that in an email type message, for example in a newsletter, then your reader can substitute his own affiliate code and claim commission on his own purchase.
So you need to protect (or disguise) your link, and there are a few ways to do this:

Use a redirect file
Use a 'short URL' service
Use an ad tracking link A

Getting the edge over rival affiliates

Here are two ways to stay ahead of the competition
1. Your potential customer may have visited several sites, all promoting the same affiliate programs as yours, before deciding to purchase.
So what can you do to convince him to return to your site and buy?
You announce a special offer, stating that you will provide a bonus (give details) if they buy from you. Tell them to send details of the receipt after purchase.
2. As an affiliate, once your visitor clicks on your affiliate link, you have lost him.
If he visits the product site and decides he is not interested there is no way you can get in touch and persuade him.
And even if he does purchase there are some affiliate programs which don't reveal the name of the customer so you would be unable to follow up with further promotions.
So is there a way you can make contact?

Yes - you should offer a free report or free e-book which resells the product, but they may have to signup or register with their contact details. You then have the contact details and can do whatever follow-up is necessary.