Affiliate Programs and Online Promotion

Before Google’s immensely popular ADSence program provided a low cost pay per click advertising opportunity for ecommerce websites, there were affiliate programs. Despite the success of ADSense, I believe that an affiliate program is still a powerful way to market your products.

Affiliate Programs

What are affiliate programs? Essentially it’s a commissioned sales program which uses banner advertisements on one websites to sell products on another. Here’s basically how they work.

Let’s suppose you have a product that you want to sell using the internet and a website. Ideally, you would like to have as many other websites linking to yours as possible. Inbound links – and to a lesser degree reciprocal links – are a stable of internet marketing.

One way of convincing other websites to link to yours is to pay them. You could pay them for every click on the link that brings a customer to your site, or you could pay a small commission for every sale that is made as a result of that click.

Affiliate programs are based upon the idea of paying a commission on each sale made. The commission is paid to the website from which the customer came via your link. An affiliate link is usually a banner ad (small image) with a link and the website’s ID code embedded in it. This id code is used to identify from which website the buyer came.

Finding affiliate partners

Success of any affiliate program is based largely on the numbers. You must find a large number of websites willing to show your ad banner. Secondly, a good affiliate program needs to make sure commissions are tracked properly and payouts are made promptly. To facilitate this process, one could utilize a company such as “Commission Junction”.

Commission Junction is an affiliate service company which provides the necessary payment tracking and payout. It also facilitates the process by standardizing the affiliate programs of all its advertisers. If you have a product you want to sell Commission Junction will help you create an affiliate program and then list your website in its directory. On the other end of the process, if you have a website and you are willing to include banner advertisements in exchange for commissions, you can find suitable partners in Commission Junctions directory. Commission junction will also handle all of the tracking and payouts.

Affiliate Websites

A fallout of this process is the emergence of affiliate websites. An affiliate website is a website consisting solely of affiliate ads. The website has no other product to sell other than advertising space on its website. An analogy would be a billboard company. An example of an affiliate site is Bargain Gift Shops (http://www.bargaingiftshops.com)


Mike Tyler