Affiliate schemes allow you to sell a company’s products via your website and you can receive either a percentage or a fixed fee of the selling price. Other programs pay you by per lead which is where you refer someone who signs up to a service any you get a one off payment. There is also Pay per click where you get a payment for every visitor you refer.
There are lots of companies who now run their own independent affiliate schemes, for example one of the biggest is Amazon.
But, If you do not want to sign up to programmes individually and have to hunt for them on the internet there are a number of ‘umbrella’ companies called ‘affiliate networks’ that have hundreds of companies listed, and you only have to sign up once in order to access all of their company programmes.Click on any of the affiliate networks below to join for FREE!
| UK | |
| TradeDoubler | |
| Commission Junction |
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| Affiliate Future | |
| Paid on Results | |
| Affiliate Window | |
| US | |
| LinkShare.com |
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Once you have signed up to an affiliate network, it is time to choose your programmes, (companies). Some networks and companies will accept you instantly while others will have a look at your website to see if they want to have their name and products associated with your website.
It is important to try and pick companies that sell products or services that match the same theme as your website. For instance there is not much point if you have a website about religion and add banners and links about ann summers.
When choosing an advertiser you need to look at the following factors:
| 1. | Commission Rate, make sure you get the best rate, compare across networks. |
| 2. | Cookie length. After clicking through one of your adverts a cookie will be placed on the users computer, if a purchase is made within the time frame specified by the cookie (and if the cookie is not overwritten by another cookie from another website) commission will be paid. Therefore the longer the cookie period the better. |
| 3. | Relevance of product – as mentioned before. |
| 4. | Cost of product. Is the product price too high, people won’t pay over the odds for things even if you would get more commission, Also is the product price too low, it’s no good if each sale is £5.00 and you get 3% of it – 15p! |
It is also a good idea to try and market something on your site, that is not heavily marketed elsewhere, as Gambling and Credit cards are one of the most competitive areas on the internet, due to the large returns that can be made. But then again Clothing, DVDs and Books are probably the biggest selling items on the internet.