Affiliate marketing 101

Today I would like to talk about one of the most powerful online revenue models that exists today: affiliate marketing. It’s really easy to get into and the potential benefits are huge.
How does it work?
Affiliate marketing works on a very simple premise: by sending traffic to a web shop you get a share of the revenue on a sale. Getting rewarded for letting other people buy a product, may seem like a Ponzi scheme, but affiliate marketing is a legitimate and proven online revenue model. Let’s take one of the most popular affiliate programs as an example: the Amazon affiliate program.
Let’s suppose you run a blog that publishes reviews of tech products. When you register your website at Amazon, you can generate special links for Amazon products. Afterwards, you can include these links in your posts. When people click these links and make a sale, you get a % of the revenue. Simple as that!
Under the surface, when people click the link, they are first sent a special page or server that places a cookie saying that they came from your website. The cookie is often valid for a few days and can be overwritten by competitors!
Often the website that was the last to place the cookie, get’s the revenue share. There are proposals to change this. For example, the real attribution system from TradeTracker rewards all sites that the user visited before making a sale, instead of the last one.
This is a really basic example of affiliate marketing. I’ve worked at a company that had dozens of sites where you could compare all sorts of insurance products. It worked the same way as with the Amazon program. Visitors would get a list of different insurance offerings and clicked the one they liked. After they purchased an insurance policy, the insurance company would reward my employer.
Some advertisers even publish XML or CSV feeds with all their products wrapped in affiliate links. You can make a scrapper or bot that downloads this data and create websites with automatic data, such as product comparison websites.
How can I find affiliate programs to join or promote?
Like I said, there are many forms of affiliate marketing. You can check if products or services that you use have an affiliate program. Often software or SAAS products have one. Another way is to check if your favorite online retailer, like Amazon, has an affiliate program. Some affiliate advertisers first review your site, before you can promote their products.
Pro tip: if you are just getting started, use affiliate programs of products and niches that you an affinity with. This helps you make more genuine content.
Constantly looking for affiliate products to promote can be a huge hassle. Luckily, there exists a solution for that called an affiliate network. An affiliate network is like an online exchange where advertisers (companies with products) and publishers (people like you with a website or blog) can find each other. For publishers, it’s often free to join a network. Popular European networks are TradeTracker, TradeDoubler and Awin.
After registering yourself at a network, you choose from a list of advertisers that have interesting products for you and apply to become a promoter. Another benefit of using an affiliate network is that they usually have great online tools for measuring performance and generating tracking links.
Conclusion
Affiliate marketing when done right and on a large scale, can be a nice income source. Most people make review blogs or video’s with affiliate links, but you can do all sorts of other things like a product comparison website. Your technical skills and imagination are the limit!
Most advertisers don’t care how you sent people to their web shop, as long you abide legal and ethical guidelines. If you want to learn more, I recommend reading this Reddit interview with a guy that makes $10k per month as Amazon affiliate!
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