affiliate networks

Primer on Affiliate Network Services

Marketing Fan — Wed, 02 May 2007 15:09:36 +0200

The last century has witnessed invention of new channels of marketing. Telephone (both wired and wireless), Television and lately the Internet has added new dimensions to any organization’s marketing strategy. The initial use of Internet was purely to distribute information to potential customers. Even the websites of Fortune 100 companies had only company profile, contact details and simple product or service brochures. However things have changed drastically in past few years. Internet is now fast emerging as the new platform to directly market and sell your products and services to customers worldwide. Also secured websites on Internet are increasingly used to share information with employees and partners.

Need for affiliates

Various websites are competing among each other to grab the attention of every Internet surfer. Websites are spending millions of dollars to get maximum eyeballs to boost their company and product brand and sales. Not everyone has huge budget to do this. Hence, they are always looking out for ways to increase the popularity of their website without spending a lot of money. Affiliate marketing is one such low cost way.

Affiliate Network Service

Affiliate marketing is now one of the most commonly accepted method to boost online sales. With increased demand, a relatively new type of service called as Affiliate Network Service has emerged. An Affiliate Network Service provider has relationship with hundreds of affiliates. Hence, you can get a ready network of affiliates through these service providers. Additionally, you can get other services like content aggregation, valuable advise on website improvement, campaign performance and tracking, general MIS and even payment processing.

Finding an Affiliate Network Service provider

The affiliate network service is relatively a new Internet concept. There is no exact definition of the term. Also the scope of services provided by different service providers varies. Some networks prefer to call them as Internet marketing service providers. Others use terms like pay for performance network, pay per sale, pay per action and pay per click.
You would need good searching skills to find a good Affiliate Network Service provider. Also these networks don’t offer their services free. Some reputed ones might charge you even before you select your affiliates. Some lesser popular ones might let you see the merchants in their network before you sign up.

Affiliate programs

The biggest advantage of Affiliate network is the access to various affiliate programs. Proven and efficiently designed affiliate programs help you attract more traffic to your website. They help you convert a high percentage of hits into actual sales.

Affiliate Marketing

Once you have identified the affiliate network, the next step would be to identify the various affiliates. Though, it is the responsibility of the affiliates to promote your products, you should too put in efforts to see that your affiliates understand your product and service. An incorrect representation of your product or service by your affiliates can prove disastrous. Also affiliate marketing requires good amount of patience. Very rarely will you find an organization and often a number of reworks. You may need to change your campaign depending upon the feedback from your affiliates on the network. Also decide on how you will pay your affiliates. Pay per sale and pay per lead are two most popular ways of paying the affiliates.

Email marketing service of Affiliate Networks

Many reputed affiliate network service providers offer value added services such as Email Marketing. You can send custom emails to a large number of potential customers. An Affiliate Network service provider has tie-ups with various partners who have identified potential customers for various products. With this handy list of prospective clients, you can cut down your sales cycle by a considerable amount of time.

Lead Generation service

A good Affiliate Network Service will help you generate a huge number of quality leads. With their partnership with thousands of affiliates, you as an advertiser would get key details like name, contact and product preferences of potential customers from their Lead Generation service. You can then have exclusive rights over all these leads and gradually convert them to real customers. Also this list of leads can be used for further marketing like telemarketing or email marketing.

A partnership with an Affiliate Network Service provider can lead your organization to a path of success in real world as well as on the World Wide Web.

LinkShare UK started

Marketing Fan — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 03:28:10 +0200

LinkShare started their UK network – I just got my announcement

LinkShare UK wrote:

...happy to announce that LinkShare has launched an affiliate marketing network in the United Kingdom.

...be among the first affiliates to work with our UK merchants. We will be announcing our new merchants over the next few weeks and adding additional merchants monthly.

...For more information about our new UK Network, please go to www.linkshare.com/uk.

well, I hope they also start doing wire transfers now

Adsense click spam via compromised affiliate network

Marketing Fan — Tue, 22 Aug 2006 20:37:12 +0200

I noticed a lot more spam being received on my gmail accounts,

but what I found today is not a gmail problem… it’s adsense spam sent thru a previously legitimate affiliate network mailing list.

The problem is, that anyone who mails to that list name, send a mail to hundreds or thousands of affiliates of that program!

So what I received today is really the top adsense spam I ever saw…

A mail coming from some really crappy and shitty looking T-Shirt site, asking me to

from that site wrote:

click GOOGLE ADSENSE below to sign up

Not only is that website really shitty, and the pitch to click on adsense to create a signup really stupid – the affiliate network is abused for all that.

I really don’t understand why legit webmasters creating good content are being kicked from Adsense for “invalid clicks” obviously on their own site, when click spam like this or big scraper site networks that people brag about openly get away with it.

Heck probably even this click spam being sent thru a wrong configured affiliate mailing list gets away with it…

Hello dear Adsense-Click-Fraud team – did you notice? :-)

Google’s New Affiliate Network - CPA instead of CPC

Marketing Fan — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 01:53:44 +0200

Now if this is not a bogus message, then it is hot !

Google announced a new product to select publishers today, indicating a move away from their Adsense CPC network.

The new Google advertising program shall be called the Content Referral Network and will pay webmasters when a user completes a specific action – see definition of CPA campaigns

So this differs from Adsense where the only thing necessary for a webmaster to earn money was to have someone click … now they need to buy or fill out a signup form or whatever…

It is easy to fake a click. It is much more difficult to fake a sale.

What does this mean for web publishers?

the average spam scraper webmaster will have a hard time to get people to by stuff with his non-credible sites

those with professional visitors, traffic that might be in buying mood could be winners…

[via Monetize]:

What I am missing currently is ANY link to a google website with this information… be warned… might turn out this is a fake message in a few days…

[img_assist|nid=1010|title=Search results with Google-Co-Op enabled|desc=Search result for the keyword “drupal” with Google Co-Op enabled using the subscribed link example for the technology weblog http://weblog.cemper.com enabled. The above green box links with the free premium result directly to the Good reasons for drupal #2 weblog post Subscribe to My Google Co-Op Profile for testing this.|link=node|align=left|width=640|height=453]

Affiliate Marketing: Easy Money?

Marketing Fan — Thu, 09 Feb 2006 12:12:48 +0100

Is Affiliate Marketing the way to Easy Money?

Web merchants are always looking for good ways to market their products. The best marketing tool right now is high placement on Google with a heavily-searched term. But secondary yet most imporant to that is marketing to customers who are interested in their products on other websites; this is the core of affiliate marketing.

For instance, if you were a seller of discount vitamins and dietary supplements, your website would be perfect for selling diet books or books about natural cures and herbs. But what incentive do you have for selling someone else's products? You would rather have all your customer's money, not take the chance that they'll spend their small budget for your website on someone else's product.

Amazon.com was the first major online business to see the possibilities in this sort of marketing, and they pioneered online affiliate marketing to take advantage of it. Instead of hoping people would come to their website instead of just going down to the bookstore or visiting the new sites Barnes and Noble and Booksamillion put up to compete, they instituted a profit-sharing program.

If you became an affiliate marketer and sold books of your choice from your website, Amazon agreed to give you 15% of the book's selling price.

This had an enormous impact on the small online marketplace back in 1997 and 1998, when they started doing it. Today, affiliate sales are a normal and expected part of doing business online; in fact, many web businesses depend on it.

Affilate Marketing Today

Affiliate marketing today may reward host sites for selling products, or they may reward hosts for sending visitors to the selling site (a practice similar to the custom of finder's fees).

In the broadest sense, much online advertising is affiliate marketing, with compensation or commission paid to the host site for visits (pay per click), for registrants (pay per lead), or sales (pay per sale). It's a win-win; the host gets money he or she would otherwise not have gotten for plugging the same product, while the merchant doesn't have to pay for otherwise free advertising unless there's an actual sale from it.

Besides the famous Amazon affiliate program, third-party intermediary affiliates include ShareASale , Commission Junction, ClickBank , and LinkShare.

Profit Margins from Sex to Books

As you might expect, there are wide variations between the profit affiliates bring in depending on the industry. Sex, as always, drives the Internet; without online porn, many visual and digital technologies may never have been invented, and many of the cutting-edge online technologies and techniques are driven by the needs of pornography sites.

It's not surprising, therefore, to find that pornography sites have long provided the highest profit margin in affiliate sales. Most sites making money from this operate a gateway site with their own free images. They make money by selling subscriptions to other, pay sites, and by running pay-per-impression advertising. Gambling sites also tend to pay out generous affiliate commissions for signups.

The best profits aren't necessarily going to come from those affiliate partners with the highest percentage payout, however. Instead, they'll come from the affiliate programs you can best sell on your website. You can't do much with gambling or sex if you have a website on the language of flowers, but you'll probably sell romance novels and flowers pretty well. Your hardcore sex site will probably do gangbusters as a pornography affiliate.

There are few studies online that talk about how profit margins work on affiliate sales, and most of these work through hearsay. But if you check out http://www.affiliateguide.com/, you can find hundreds of sites that do affiliate sales and a short description of each. The highest paying commission for any website as of this moment is a gambling site that pays 50% for each signup.

A Critical Issue: Tracking Your Sales

If your affiliate sales partners don't know you're the referring site for a new customer, they won't pay you a commission. That's the core of the next problem: how do you track your referrals? There are some complex methods for doing this using session cookies, which are often blocked by spyware and adware. But by using older technologies that predate cookies, you can circumvent this problem.

In most cases, click tracking is based on information stored in your web logs, the data that tells you how much traffic you're getting along with other useful data. If you have it set up properly, one line in web logs gives the referring URL for people visiting your site.

But how do you know that the site you're affiliated to is crediting your referrals properly? It's harder to track from your site than it is from the site you sent traffic to, but you can still do it by installing a script in your cgi-bin; you can find details here: http://www.webtechniques.com/archives/1998/05/perl/.

Once you know how many referrals you sent a site, your analysis of click-through sales becomes intuitive. You don't know how many sales have been completed, just the number of people who have visited the other site from yours. It takes time and tracking, but by comparing data from different affiliates, you can target the ones with lower sales per click-through ratios. If you're suspicious of sales being credited improperly, you can always make a small purchase yourself using your affiliate banner and see whether you are credited for that sale.

If you are being cheated, you have little recourse but to drop that affiliate program, though you can also do a Google search for the banner (using the lines of code specific to the site URL) and notify other webmasters that they should look into their own sales – NEVER accuse, only let them know they should check.. This is tedious, but you may find it worth it.

One-tier Affiliate Programs , two-tiered or even Multi-tiered ?

Many Affiliate programs also come in tiered marketing programs, where if you recruit affiliate marketers to refer sales, you receive your own affiliate sales commissions plus a smaller percentage of your recruit's.

This is potentially very lucrative. If you do get involved with affiliate sales of this sort, you should obviously get in at the lowest tier possible. That means it's actually Multi-level marketing (MLM) which has a bad taste for many - but not necessarly a bad thing for affiliate programs.

The big payment processor PayPal recently even refused to issue payments for affiliate programs that have a multi-tiered marketing structure.

Is it better to get involved in a multi-tier scheme? That's all dependent upon the product you're selling. In fact, the most important consideration in affiliate marketing is whether you are affiliated with products compatible to your web site.

In a small niche market, it can even be detrimental to get involved in a multitier affiliate marketing program. The more people who are referring, the fewer referrals who are likely to come from your site. In large markets, it doesn’t matter so much.

Conclusion

Marketing Affiliate Programs is everything but easy money! But if you are able to combine a multitude of talents from technical, design and business perspectives it can sure pay off... but remember... things that 100,000 others do won't work your you , just like for 99,990 others as well - so find your niche affiliate program !