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affiliate
Many companies offer you a financial incentive to put links to their website
on your web pages. You may get money:
Just for having the link.
For displaying a banner ad on your site.
For displaying an slowly changing banner ad on your site.
For displaying an animated banner ad on your site.
For displaying annoying large banner ads on your site.
For displaying highly annoying popup banner ads on your site. I consider these
really tacky.
When people click through to the commercial site.
When the people buy something at that site.
Most commonly you don’t get any money unless they buy something. Usually
there are restrictions on you website. For example, many companies don’t
want their banners associated with sex.
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 sence. 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.
eSelletate uses the term affiliate.
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
Earnings Per Click.
How much money you get when visitors click an ad, whether they buy something or
not.
impression
Every time a vistor views a page containing an ad, even if he does not click
it, that is called an impression. The service bureau tracks this by dislaying 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 downoad 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 is Earnings
Per Click. I think this refers
to the seller’s profits, not the advertiser’s fee.
in-line 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
Stockkeeping 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
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 as 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 you insert on your web page. This is how art.com
works.
Via an short chunk of HTML containg 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:
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 1x1
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
I have registered with as an affiliate with the following companies, all of
which I was happy to endorse. I would have done it free. This is an incomplete
list.
If you want to find out about affiliate programs to add to your website ask the
merchant or company you want to advertise, or check with one of the following
affiliate service bureaus that handle thousands of companies in a very organised
and automated way. bCentral/ClickTrade went out of business in 2001-09.
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.
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:
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:
aka clickserve.cc-dt.com, connectcommerce.com.
Performics was just bought out by Google, and they have renamed it Google
Affiliate Network. The website does not work smoothly with Firefox, Opera or
IE8. I just waddle through with Opera, being careful to check manually anything
I copy-paste. 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:
Links to Barnes and Noble go via the Barnes & Noble website, rather than via
clickserve. Handle Barnes & Noble. Confusingly
refer to the vendors as your clients. When you first
set up links, they don’t work for about 5 minutes.
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.
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:
In CJ 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.
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.
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
for the software, and a monthly fee equal to 30%
of affiliate commissions earned or
(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.
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.
Of course many companies don’t use a service bureau. They run their own
affiliate program, perhaps using someone else’s software. See YourOwnPersonalsSite.com
Becoming an Affiliate
To become an affiliate, to sell other people’s goods and services, you
will have to do the following:
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.
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.
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.
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.
When you have been approved by a merchant, cut and paste the HTML they provide
onto your web pages.
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.
I usually modify the HTML slightly to pick up the graphics from my webserver
instead of theirs to speed up page loading.
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.
Keep your eye out for new affiliate programs that mesh logically with your
website.
Look in your mailbox for a cheque.
Before you sign up as an affiliate at a website, check if that vendor is already
handled by one of the affiliate schemes you are already signed up with.
Otherwise, you will end up with duplicate accounts with the affiliate scheme.
Only the Reporting.net people, now defunct, offered a way to consolidate them.
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
Becoming an advertiser is somewhat more complicated. You must prepare a set of *.png,
*.gif or *.jpg banner ads. You
must decide on how your royalty scheme will work, how much you will pay for what.
You have to decide who will handle what money. You may have to put up a deposit
to pay out royalties. Basically it amounts to filling out a number of online
forms. Once you have done that, you need to beat the bushes to ask people to
sign up as affiliates. Which service bureau should you pick? Consider these
factors:
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
If you already sell your product via your website, and have already set up a
custom system to accept orders, and process money, it is not much extra work to
roll your own affiliate program. This is what myfonts.com
does. It can be as simple as this: You look at the referrer URL
of all incoming transactions. If one of them belongs to one of your affiliates,
you tag the incoming IP as belonging to that affiliate. Any orders that IP
makes in the next 20 days (or whatever limit you choose)
give a cut to that affiliate. This is very convenient for the affiliate since
there is no special HTML. They can link anywhere they please into your website
with any type of transaction they please. The processing of payments to
affiliates can be tacked on as a batch process run monthly. It does not need to
affect online processing in the least, though of course your affiliates would
prefer timely balances.
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 referencing your site. Your server has to capture these affiliate ids
and the corresponding IP whenever it serves a web page.
Costs
If you sell or buy, the affiliate service bureau is taking a cut charged to the
seller.I thought you would like to see the prices on this webpage in ,
but you can change that instantly,
thanks to the Canadian Mind Products CurrCon
Applet that you too could use on your
own website to display prices in any world currency using today’s exchange
rates.
PayPal charges 3% plus
per transaction.
RegSoft charges 10% with a
minimum fee per transaction.
RegNow charges 16% with a
minimum fee per transaction.
So you might set up to use more than one bureau or so that everything over
will be done with RegSoft and everything under
will be done with RegNow.
<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.
Learning More
Click through to the service bureaus mentioned. They have extensive online
documentation on how their schemes work. They also have help desks who actually
answer email. Amazing!
The Bottom Line
None of the many affiliates I signed up for paid anything except three. I can
speculate on why affiliates don’t usually pay:
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 quietly drop you if don’t logon every month or so to keep your
email address and links up to date. They will also drop you if you don’t
generate any sales. They drop products, drop vendors, break links, retire link
code, change link code, totally change the software or go out of business all
without telling you. It is particularly important to keep your address up to
date so cheques arrive and your email address up to date so that notices arrive.
Put your affiliates in a bookmark folder and make a habit to just login and
check things out every month or two.
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.
Please email your feedback for publication, errors, omissions, typos, formatting errors, ambiguities, unclear wording, broken/redirected link reports, suggestions to improve this page or comments to
Roedy Green :
Please email your feedback for publication, errors, omissions, typos, formatting errors, ambiguities, unclear wording, broken/redirected link reports, suggestions to improve this page or comments to
Roedy Green :
