affiliate : Java Glossary

1. Just for having the link.
2. For displaying a banner ad on your site.
3. For displaying a slowly changing banner ad on your site.
4. For displaying an animated banner ad on your site.
5. For displaying annoying large banner ads on your site.
6. For displaying highly annoying popup banner ads on your site. I consider these really tacky.
7. When people click through to the commercial site.
8. When the people buy something at that site.

Affiliate Vocabulary

advertiser

cj.com and Google Affiliate Network use this term to mean the manufacturer of some product, the one who accepts money from customers, the merchant, or software publisher, the publisher of the software or books. Confusingly, the advertiser is not the website that places referral ads for the product. The terminology makes utterly no sense The advertiser places no ads. As far as I can see, they have it backwards. I asked them to pick less confusing terminology but they ignored me.

affiliate partner

When I agree to sell vendors’ products via my website, I am called the affiliate sometimes called an associate or partner. eSellerate uses the term affiliate.

affiliate manager

A proposed database software run by the affiliate to help manage the links in his websites to sell products and collect royalties.

affiliate service bureau

The company that tracks the hits and sales on behalf of the vendor, companies like Google ConnectCommerce, LinkShare and CCbill.

click-thru

When a visitor to your site clicks on an ad banner but does not necessarily buy anything. Sometimes you get revenue for clicks, e.g. with Google Ad Sense, and but usually you only get royalties for actual sales. These are sometimes called leads.

creative URL

A URL that generates an image or some text, or a search box that the viewer can click to learn more about or buy some product.

EPC

EPC (Earnings Per Click). How much money you get when visitors click an ad, whether they buy something or not.

impression

Every time a visitor views a page containing an ad, even if he does not click it, that is called an impression. The service bureau tracks this by displaying a one pixel gif, even for text links. It counts how many times this gif is downloaded. When a search engine spider goes looking for page it does not download the gifs, therefore it avoid making false impressions. It does however make click-thrus. If the affiliate service bureau sees a click-through without a corresponding download of the impression gif, it assumes it was just a spider and the click-thru does not count as an actual sales lead. This is why you need impression gifs in your html if you are being paid per impression, per click-thru, not per sale. Some programs offer you the option of getting a commission per impression, per click-thru or per-sale. You have to choose just one. I found that per click generates most revenue. EPC. I think this refers to the seller’s profits, not the advertiser’s fee.

inline text link

a word in the text that when you hover the cursor over it pops up a text box ad relevant to that word. Clicksor does this sort of ad. The advantage is it takes up no space most of the time. The disadvantage is it is distracting to the user trying to read the text. It is somewhat dishonest since it confuses links with ads.

publisher

cj.com and Google Affiliate Network uses the to mean someone who puts ads on their side to refer sales to someone else. I can’t think of any way to make sense of the terminology. People who place ads are in no sense publishers. I asked them to pick less confusing terminology but they ignored me. Others use it for the reverse, the merchant, or software publisher, whose products I sell on my website, the publisher of the software or books. eSellerate uses the term for someone who publishes software.

reseller

Someone who resells products. The customer pays the reseller and the reseller buys product at wholesale. With an affiliate, the customer gives no money to the affiliate, but pays the publisher directly. The advantage of being a reseller is you can set your own markup and price and can thus create a competitive advantage over other sellers. The disadvantage is you have to handle money and tracking sales. You also have to provide all the product descriptions on your own website. If you link to ones on some other website, the sale will likely go through that website. Normally you would sign up as a reseller only for an expensive or high volume product. I have signed up as a reseller for Excelsior JET Java Optimising Compiler.

SKU

SKU (Stock Keeping Unit). A specific product. If a program came in several languages, standard and pro, electronic and CD delivery, each combination would have its own SKU number. SKUs (Stock Keeping Units) is what eSellerate calls its product ids.

tracking URL

A URL that takes you to a page where you can get more detail about a product and/or buy it.

vendor

The merchant whose products I sell on my website, sometimes confusingly called by the client.

virtual store

As an affiliate, you select a set of the vendor’s products to display on your website. You may do this via:

• A large chunk of generated inline HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) you insert on your web page. This is how art.com works.
• Via a short chunk of HTML containing an iframe. The vendor generates your virtual store on the fly each time someone views your webpage. To the end user, the store appears embedded in one of your web pages. This is how allposters.com works.
• Via a text or banner link to the vendor’s website.

How It Works

To be eligible for the benefits, you must sign up as an affiliate, sometimes called an associate with a service bureau who manages the affiliate program for the merchant. Large companies like Amazon manage their own affiliate programs. You also must put some complex HTML on your web pages to enable them to track where the traffic came from. It works usually with some combination of JavaScript, cookies and CGI. This means visitors to your site must have cookies and JavaScript enabled for you to get your commissions.

Here is some typical HTML to link to an advertiser’s website:

Here is what visitors to your website will see:

Synchroncity

Don’t be shy. Click the image or the buy button to see how it works. You can always back out.

The service bureau tracks hits aka impressions (viewings of the banner), click-thrus to the merchant site, and sales. The commissions can be based on any combination of all three, usually just sales. However, the service bureau usually tracks all three for the edification of merchant and affiliate. They often use a dummy 1 × 1 image loaded from the service bureau website for tracking hits. These can drastically slow down web page loading, so I suggest removing them. If you do, you will still get commissions for click-thrus and sales, but not for simple impressions.

Affiliates Roedy Green Endorses

Most Important Affiliate Programs on this Website
Company	Logo	Revenue
Google AdSense		about $700.00 USD a year
outpersonals.com		about $360.00 USD a year. This baffles me. OutPersonals is a free gay personals listing service. I don’t know how they get the money to pay affiliates. It stop generating revenue entirely. I don't know why.
Amazon.com		about $300.00 USD a year.
SexToyFun.com		about  $100.00 USD a year.
art.com		about $25.00 USD a year.

Affiliate Service Bureaus

LinkShare		aka linksynergy.com. The LinkShare people have the best organised affiliate program in my opinion. It is by far the easiest for affiliates to use. It has no mechanism to consolidate duplicate accounts. Bafflingly, they call people who place affiliate ads on their websites publishers, and people who actually manufacture and sell the goods advertisers. This is exactly backwards to what you might expect. You have to get permission from each vendor before you can sell their products. If you don’t produce they revoke that permission. Here is what a typical link looks like this: They handle Hallmark, match.com, 1-800-Flowers. Affiliates like Barnes & Noble, or Tiger Direct don’t officially have a way to like to a specific project given its ISBN (International Standard Book Number) or part number. However, if you examine a number of links, you can see the pattern. For example you can like to a specific product on TigerDirrect.ca like this: Some vendors offer deep linking that let you create a link to any web page on the vendor site. The main thing wrong with LinkShare is banner serving is spotty. Starting about 2013-03-01 it often stops working for no reason. It works one minute, then stops then works the next without apparent pattern. I now serve LinkShare banners locally to get around this problem. Also banners are dropped entirely without notification.
RegNow		They handle collecting money for a 16% fee, with a $2.00 minimum. You thus need no merchant accounts with the credit card companies. Part of Digital River. It is primarily designed to sell software. You compose PAD files, an XML-format to describe your products and the pricing. They can handle licence branding and serving demo copies. The advantage of RegNow over PayPal to sell your software is RegNow affiliates will post links to your products on their websites in return for a commission on sales. Here is what a typical link looks like: <a href=http://www.regnow.com/softsell/nph-softsell.cgi?item=1234-1&affiliate=45478> <span class=button>buy</span></a> handles Panda Antivirus, Canadian Mind Products.
CCbill		More focused on the credit card billing side. Much of its business comes from porn sites. Here is what a typical link looks like: <a href=http://refer.ccbill.com/cgi-bin/clicks.cgi?CA=904142-0000&PA=60124&BAN=4> <img src=http://www.platinumromance.com/advert/platinum300x250.gif border=0></a> Handles Platinum Romance
BMT Micro		You have to manually patch in the AID (your account number) in the generated HTML. Here is what a typical link looks like: <a href=https://secure.bmtmicro.com/ShoppingCart/00310/buy-opera.html?AID=XXXXXX> <img src=http://promote.opera.com/banners/opera/windows/ow-get-00-en-ban.gif alt=[Buy Opera!] width=468 height=60></a>
ClixGalore		It looks easier than most to set up from the merchant’s perspective. Australian. Somewhat confusing for the affiliate since merchant features abound on all menus. You must get approval from vendors before you can link to them. Here is what a typical link looks like: <a href=http://www.clixgalore.com/Lead.aspx?BID=15761&AfID=6045&AdID=2561> <img src=http://www.is1.clixgalore.com/cgd.aspx?BID=15761&AfID=6045&AdID=2561 border=0 height=60 width=468></a>
Google Affiliate Network		aka clickserve.cc-dt.com, connectcommerce.com. Google bought out Performics, and they renamed it Google Affiliate Network. I find the website only works properly with Firefox. The HTML you insert is quite terse. It consists of a single number that internally indexes the vendor, the affiliate, the product, the banner and the target URL (Uniform Resource Locator) all in one atomic whole. Here is what a typical link looks like: <a href=http://clickserve.cc-dt.com/link/tplclick?lid=41000000024846960&pubid=21000000000049036> <img src=http://clickserve.cc-dt.com/link/banner?lid=41000000009080611 border=0 alt=Chapters.Indigo.Ca></a> Confusingly refer to the vendors as your clients. When you first set up links, they don’t work for about 5 minutes. Connect Commerce pays via your AdSense account. Put comments in your HTML about what your links are for, or you will have no hope of proof-reading them. Google will write you from time to time asking you to remove all links from some defunct vendor. It is up to you to find them. There is nothing common to the as-is links to a certain vendor that you can search for. You will have two different pubids, one for ConnectCommerce ads and one for AdSense ads. Google are going to shut it down 2013-07-31, though they will keep the immensely profitable AdSense/AdWords.
Clicksor		Clicksor is a similar system to Google AdSense, where you put a generic ad on your website that turns into a specific ad from some advertiser, roughly matched to your web content perhaps looking like this: The big problem with them is they insert pop-under ads, linking words on your page outside the ads to ads, which is downright dishonest, not to mention highly irritating to your viewers.
cj.com		disappeared for a while, but have resurfaced. aka Commission Junction. The affiliate domains bfree.com, bfast.com, qksrv.net, cj.com, commissionjunction.com and reporting.net and Partner Gateway were all bought up by ValueClick and now operate under the name cj.com. The HTML you insert is quite terse. It consists of a single number that internally indexes the vendor, the affiliate, the product, the banner and the target URL. Here is what a typical link looks like: <a href=http://clickserve.cc-dt.com/link/click?lid=41000000009080611> <img src=http://clickserve.cc-dt.com/link/banner?lid=41000000009080611 border=0 alt=Chapters.Indigo.Ca></a> In CJ (Commission Junction) terminology advertisers are merchants who actually accept money for goods and ship them, in other words the creators of the products, where publishers publish links on their websites to refer sales of those products. This is backwards to what you might expect where publishers are the creators of the software advertised. They handle Chapters Indigo. They now have an optional house scheme where the URL names the vendor’s website instead of theirs. They sometimes confusingly refer to the vendors as your clients.
Inuvo		Also known as Kolimo, My Affiliate, MyAP, Think Partnership and Kowabunga. These are different software/subsidiaries. I found its software unusually easy to use. Its website is much more responsive than the others. You run your own custom version of their software on your own servers. Think Partnership is the parent company, stock symbol: THK. Kowabunga Technologies Kowabunga is the company that built the MYAP software. It provides the MYAP software to merchants to allow them to run their own affiliate programs. Along with the MYAP software, they place these merchants in our Kolimbo network. They also offer affiliate management services. My Affiliate Program aka MYAP is the name of the actual software for use in running an affiliate program. It is what we would integrate with your website and ordering system in order to allow you to run your own affiliate program. There are about 600-700 merchants using the MYAP software. These merchants include some smaller sites, as well as very large clients like MGM/Mirage, Microsoft, Yahoo!, CNET, Carfax and QuickBooks. There is an initial setup fee of  $2495.00 USD for the software, and a monthly fee equal to 30% of affiliate commissions earned or $500.00 USD (whichever is greater). Included with the setup fee is having the Kowabunga team do all of the integration for the merchant, as well as branding the admin area to their company. Once the software is set up and tested, Kowabunga launch the merchant’s program on the Kolimbo network of over 50,000 active affiliates. Kolimbo is the affiliate network. By using the My Affiliate Program (MYAP) software to run your affiliate program, you will be listed as a merchant within the network of over 50,000 affiliates. The affiliates can then sign up to join your program from your listing in the network, or through a signup page.
Share-It		Seems to be a subsidiary of Digital-River/Element 5. I have not been able to log into it yet to learn more about how it works.

Becoming an Affiliate

1. Register with the affiliate service bureau giving your name, address, company, tax number, phone number, where to send the cheques, who to make them out to etc. You must assign yourself a user id and password. Make doubly sure you get the address right. If cheques are undeliverable they will not inform you.
2. In past I found each service bureau works best with only one browser, though recently I have had much less trouble of that sort. If you have troubles, try a different browser.
3. Select the merchants whose products you want to advertise. It is just a matter of looking through the huge catalog of merchants and ticking off the ones you like. The service bureaus have search engines, alphabetical lists and lists by category to help you find suitable companies.
4. The merchants you select will have a look over your website, and will decide if they are willing to let you advertise them. You can track whether they have said yes in the service bureau database.
5. When you have been approved by a merchant, cut and paste the HTML they provide onto your web pages.
6. The HTML is inscrutable. You can’t tell just by looking at it what product it sells or easily even which service bureau provided it. It is good to insert into your web page a comment naming the product, service bureau, and the date the html code was last refreshed. I am gradually adding
   <span class=affiliate>…</span>
   around all such links to make them easier to find with Funduc search and replace for update or special formatting.
7. I usually modify the HTML slightly to pick up the graphics from my webserver instead of theirs to speed up page loading.
8. Check in periodically to the service bureau website to see how much money is they owe you. They won’t actually send you a cheque until it reaches a threshold.
9. Keep your eye out for new affiliate programs that mesh logically with your website.
10. Look in your mailbox for a cheque.

Disadvantages

• It looks a little tacky to have animated *.gif’s on your website.
• Ads distract users from the primary purpose of your website.
• Ads for products you don’t endorse or that are not directly related to the purpose of your website make you look sleazy.
• The *.gifs slow down page loading, especially if you load them from the service bureau server.
• If the service bureau server goes down, you pages cannot load properly.
• It is a lot of work to set up for very little monetary return.
• Normally the affiliate bureau insists you not cache the text or images for the banners and links. They must be served from the affiliate’s server. This allows them to replace the ad with one you may not approve of on aesthetic, taste, political correctness, size, colours… grounds without your knowledge. They often simply discontinue a banner without informing you.
• The HTML they ask you to insert usually fails validation. They insist you not change it, but in practice no one has complained when I corrected the syntax errors.

Advertising Your Own Company’s Products

• Size of deposit required.
• commission.
• Ease of use for affiliates.
• Likelihood of getting more affiliates via the service bureau’s promotion to its other affiliates, from people who would otherwise have never heard of you.

You have to assign all your products a category ID. The HTML at the affiliate site can insert additional detailed information, e.g. ISBN, size, colour… and the service bureau will just pass those fields on through to you without examining them. That way you can set up search boxes, or put huge inventories instantly online without registering all your individual products with the service bureau. However, the category ID usually has to be sufficient to calculate the commission paid to the affiliate. It also has to be sufficient to compute the price if the service bureau handles payments for you.

There is a cheaper way to become an advertiser, banner trading. You put up a variable banner on your site that randomly selects other companies to advertise. In return, those companies will advertise your website. The problem with this approach is you have little control over who you advertise on who advertises you.

Roll Your Own

That scheme relies on the browser to provide the referring URL, a feature which some people disable for privacy. To deal with that eventuality, have your affiliates add a parameter &affid=xxxx to all their URLs (Uniform Resource Locators) referencing your site. Your server has to capture these affiliate ids and the corresponding IP whenever it serves a web page.

Costs

• PayPal charges 3% plus $0.35 USD per transaction.
• RegSoft charges 10% with a $3.00 USD minimum fee per transaction.
• RegNow charges 16% with a $2.00 USD minimum fee per transaction.

So you might set up to use more than one bureau or so that everything over $15.00 USD will be done with RegSoft and everything under $15.00 USD will be done with RegNow.

Canadian Mind Products Banners
Banner	HTML To Include The Banner
The Java Glossary	<a href="http://mindprod.com/jgloss/jgloss.html"><img src="http://mindprod.com/image/logo/cmpbannerj.png" height="60" width="468" alt="The Java Glossary"></a>
The Computer Hardware Buyers’ Glossary	<a href="http://mindprod.com/bgloss/bgloss.html"><img src="http://mindprod.com/image/logo/cmpbannerb.png" height="60" width="468" alt="The Computer Hardware Buyers’ Glossary"></a>
The Gay and Black Glossary	<a href="http://mindprod.com/ggloss/ggloss.html"><img src="http://mindprod.com/image/logo/cmpbannerg.png" height="60" width="468" alt="The Gay and Black Glossary"></a>

They worked very well, doubling my traffic for the time they were placed, however the traffic dropped off back to normal after they stopped. This implies the banners were attracting people who were idly curious, not people who would become regular visitors. This highlights the problem with banner advertising. It does not target your specific audience.

You could download the *.png image to your own site and modify the HTML accordingly. If you leave it as it is, my site will bear the burden of downloading. You will also automatically get any improved *.gif I post. That may or may not be a Good Thing™. You might not like my new *.gif.

Amazon

If you sign up specially for the right to use the Amazon APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) you will be overwhelmed with details, which Amazon admits almost nobody uses and which they are gradually withdrawing, I think, because they offered too many options. One simple technique is you can send ordinary http: GET request that include a digital signature field. Amazon sends you back an XML-formatted response to your query. These are easier to parse than raw HTML.

More Disadvantages

If you set up an affiliate program, exploiters will sign up just to get a discount on their own purchase, that they would have made anyway, then never be heard of again. Even if an affiliate make an honest effort to bring you some sales, but does not succeed, it is still going to cost you something to carry him. So you have to decide which applicants are likely to be profitable. I personally have received a number of rejection letters from affiliate programs. They are often worded in an impolite way that implies there is something malodorous or substandard about my site without specifying the problem. Just tell the truth, It costs us to carry you as an affiliate, and it looks as though there won’t likely be enough sales to justify that. Thank you so much for applying. Perhaps in future that could change. or give the reason We like to avoid the political controversy that defines your site. We don’t want to make it look as if we are taking sides. If you are rude, you turn a potential booster to a detractor.

Learning More

Scam

Most affliate links never generate a penny in revenue, even after years. I ordered $300 worth of equipment for myself from Tiger.ca through LinkShare through one of my affiliate links. No record of the sale showed up. I wrote both Tiger and Linkshare twice and they just ignored me. I suspect the industry norm is only to pay royalties to those generating substantial sales. In contrast, Amazon, Google and SexToys all pay.

The Bottom Line

• I sometimes correct HTML errors that HTMLValidator finds. Perhaps that quietly disqualifies my sales.
• For faster image loading and to allow me to be responsible for all images displayed on my web pages, I usually arrange for banner to be downloaded from my own website. Perhaps that quietly disqualifies my sales.
• Perhaps nobody every bought anything through my site except Amazon books, yet I myself bought books from Chapters. Perhaps there were too few such sales to meet some minimum to cut a cheque.
• Perhaps all the cheques got lost in the mail. Yet no one has contacted me to find out why I did not cash my cheques.

Affiliates often refuse my site because of the Gay glossary, or links in it to condom sales sites. Some vendors such as McAfee are quite puritanical wanting to offend in the slightest not even the most rabid Christian. At some point I will split off the Java section as a separate website to avoid this and the problem of various net nanny programs that block the mindprod.com site in its entirety.