How to earn long-term commissions with an affiliate shop

There are people who run a blog or a web-site because they want to communicate themselves. And then there are people who want to earn money with it.

Admittedly the boundaries are not clear and in essence this is not important either. It is important that a blog or a website is a great opportunity to generate reach. And the reach is the aspect which (if done properly) also generates income. At the beginning of this blog I also tried to monetize my blog with a membership model, but failed with it. In the meantime I have made my own experiences and learned from others what works: Affiliate advertisement! This means to advertise for a product and to earn a commission for ones advertising success.

It is a simple principle but not entirely trivial in its realization. Posting a link on Facebook, a text in a blog or switching a banner does not translate into a successful recommendation at all. On the contrary, the chances that after a short period of time no more recommendations are generated are actually quite high.

The solution: Affiliate shops. I find that in contrast to banners or sponsored posts an affiliate shop is a fantastic opportunity to generate sustainable commissions by means of continuous clicks. I am also curious why not already many more people are doing exactly that. You will learn how simple the affiliate shop works later on in the article.

Why Banner Ads are Dying Out

Banners were the ultimate hit over a long period of time in regards to online advertisement. Sidebars plastered up with promotional advertising could not have been more multifaceted. A further banner in the header and another in the text and the overload of the senses was complete. In past times users responded to banner ads since they were new and different to what was known until then. Correspondingly high were the click responses.

This behavior rapidly changed by the intemperance with which these banners were put in place. The greed of individuals made the quality unusable. At the end there was way too much advertisement space and as already said, a complete overload of the senses which had very little to do with recommendations.

The times of the great and qualitative clicks on banners are over by now. If there are some still showing up, than maybe in magazines and only non-animated banners. The useable spaces and the interest of advertisers are reducing parallel (at least that is my feeling). The consequence: More and more page operators recognize the bad performance of banners and change to alternative advertising spaces which they can sell. The magic word is called “context-sensitive recommendations” or as they say: Content Marketing.

What banners don’t do anymore is replaced by content and personal relationships. Less is more and quality more important than ever.

Content Marketing means Recommending instead of Persuading

The first kind of content marketing which is getting closest to the current marketing conception originates from the year 2004. It was Microsoft who then established the first corporate blog with the title “Channel 2”.

Since then loads has happened. Content marketing has evolved to not only being a blog but engages in many forms with the user and the costumer, as with guest-article, sponsored posts or via storytelling as seen in Medium for example. Particularly sponsored posts are more loved than ever, even though I am not entirely convinced by this format anymore. Advertorials which are editorial appearing articles with the mere target to create conversions appear everywhere in the web.

But there is one problem. Such bought articles can have an explosive, urgent force for some time, but eventually they tumble down very rapidly due to newer posts and loose with that any direct attention. It is more of an impulse giver rather than a continuous converter (as long as no random SEO-success appears).

A note on the side: To offer a do-follow link in exchange with money means a breach of the Google guidelines and runs into the danger of being blocked by a manual action.

The most important aspect for an affiliate is to create regular recommendations rather than single impulses.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate programs are available like sand on the beach and according to my opinion some are actually really great. The most popular compensation types are Pay per Click (PPC), Pay per Lead (PPL) or Pay per Sale (PPS). The paid amount of the provider depends on how well one expresses recommendations and how well one manages to draw costumers. From my point of view two aspects are essential:

1. It has to be a really great product which is being recommended.
2. The recommender (affiliate) has to be convinced of the product which he uses ideally himself.

As an affiliate, one is responsible for how much or how little earnings are drawn. The good affiliates get more, the others less.

For any enterprise this kind of marketing is extremely attractive since only with due success a provision is to be paid. In other words: No risks involved. Admittedly I am not recommending advertising enterprises to partner with affiliate networks, since quality suffers significantly exactly at this point. I have experienced this myself.

But how do you manage to produce regular recommendations if banners drop out and posts and social media recommendations promise short success only?

The Sustainable Solution: the Affiliate Shop

At a first instant that might sounds rather strange (you are not offering a shop but a blog) but the solution of the problem is a shop which actually does not sell anything but only recommends. At a first glance it looks like a real shop but the “buy” button does not bring the customer to his shopping basket but rather via the affiliate link to the actual and external shop, f.ex. Amazon, Zalando, etc.

Successful and good examples are thewirecutter.com, thisiswhyImbroke.com, and downcomforterguide.com. At all three examples one does not shop with the provider, the affiliate, but gets transferred forward to the actual seller’s site. These are classic affiliate shops.

An affiliate shop has two important advantages to a “real” shop:

1. The entire processing and logistics falls away. This means you can absolutely concentrate on the marketing and focus on creating traffic.
2. You can give your visitor the opportunity to move around your shop and around the familiar environment of your website without creating the feel as if the visitor is being followed by advertisement.

The basics for such a shop are great affiliate deals but these have to be made first. The Amazon affiliate program is a good starting point in case of emergencies and one receives up to 10% provision as an affiliate.

The Way to My Own Affiliate Shop

I am showing right here in a concrete example how to build your own affiliate shop.

The foundation for a solid affiliate shop could either be an independent WordPress installation or a shop-expansion in an already existing blog or webpage. Following the WordPress installation set up the free ‘WooCommerce Plugin‘ and decide on the shop theme.

Once these basic steps for the establishment of a blog are complete the adding of the products can begin. Go to the menu and choose “products” and the further submenu choice “add a product”. A new and empty product mask is opening up. The title can be added, a long and a short product description as well as product pictures.

The crucial step only appears now: To turn your product into an affiliate product you have to set the product type to “external / affiliate product”.

With that step the product data mask changes; the price, the affiliate link and an individual button text (f.ex. “To the shop”) can be set. Save it and set up is complete. The product should now be seen in the shop.

Affiliate Shop on the Basis of PPC or Flat Rate Billing

If a small affiliate shop is set up, than I can recommend FastBill for the billing process. Agree with the merchant a price per click or a set price and count the clicks with a Plugin like Pretty Link. Once a month a bill is established with FastBill and sent to your merchant, settling all affiliate sales.

If the shop is bigger and carries many thousands of products from various merchants then things turn out to be more complicated. But with our second product FastBill Automatic also a huge affiliate shop can be settled without difficulties. Simply transfer the clicks via the API to FastBill Automatic and sales are automatically calculated once a month. If help is required, please contact me and my team at any time.

If simply the links to the affiliate programs are used instead of a click-deal, invoicing is not applicable to the affiliate shop keeper. In this case the affiliate shop receives a credit note from the seller (f.ex. from Amazon) and it can be added as income to the books.

Why Affiliates should be the Best Friend of Enterprises and Businesses

Each business has one problem: Where to generate (good) traffic and how to scale it! Google and Facebook are great channels of advertisement but even there limits are quickly reached. That’s why particularly niche providers who cannot or choose not to invest millions into TV-adds can benefit from affiliate deals. The aimed target customer is easily reached without major problems via blogs and content sites and in correlation with affiliate shops.

4 tips for Affiliate Shops

Even if from a technical point of view everything is perfect you still ought to take care of some things with the affiliate shop:

1. Pay attention to the rights of pictures! Particularly in the Amazon partner network warnings of letter lawyers are circulating who are searching for copyright breaches. That’s why it is so important to only take on products for which you have the picture rights. In case of uncertainty ask directly at the producer.
2. Value your clicks to see which products are popular and which are not.
3. More translucent than it is. Since you only pretend to be a real shop and you forward the user rather quickly the first impression is even more important. Pay great attention to an appealing shop-design. Maybe even invest some dollars for a proper design.
4. No-follow links are obligatory! Otherwise you breach the Google rules of conduct.

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Originally published at en.letsseewhatworks.com on October 14, 2014.