Chapter 4. Making Money with Affiliate Programs
You’ve got the content (Chapter 1). You’ve created an effective campaign to drive traffic to your site (Chapter 2). You’ve optimized your site for the search engines (Chapter 3). Now, where’s the cash?
This chapter explains how to make money from your web site by having your site work as a virtual “sales rep.” You become a sales rep for another site, often called a merchant, by becoming an affiliate (also sometimes called an associate) of the merchant.
With affiliate programs , your site provides links to a merchant’s site. You make money if—and only if—visitors you send to the merchant’s site make purchases. If this sounds easy, it can be. You don’t need to stock inventory, or worry about fulfillment, shipping, and returns. And you still make money—sometimes very good money—when the product sells.
However, selling on the Internet is very competitive; there are always multiple avenues for a consumer to buy anything. Furthermore, there’s nothing to stop consumers from bypassing your site completely and going directly to the merchant. You’ll only be successful with your affiliate links if the goods provided by the merchants you are associated with are highly relevant to the content of your site.
This chapter explains the different kinds of ad programs, how affiliate advertising works, how to work with affiliate aggregators—everything you need to know to make money with affiliate programs, provided your sites draw traffic that will click on links to your affiliated merchants and that these merchants can convert your traffic so that sales are made.
Kinds of Ad Programs
Affiliate programs differ from most other advertising approaches: to make money your traffic has to generate sales. This important distinction has implications for your web site content and design.
It’s worth going over the three primary approaches to making money via advertising with your web content so the underlying distinctiveness of affiliate advertising is clear.
The three most common ways to use advertising to make money with content on the Web are:
- Affiliate programs
Affiliate programs pay you a sales commission when someone who clicks through a link on your site to an advertiser’s site actually buys something from that advertiser.
- Sponsored advertising
You are paid a fee when a sponsored ad (either banner or text) is displayed on your site. Sponsored ads are often called CPM—short for cost per thousand page impressions—ads because these ads are paid for on a CPM basis.
Tip
For more information on CPM ads, see Chapter 5.
- Contextual advertising
Contextual advertising is primarily text-based advertising that appears on web pages where there is a contextual relevance as determined by automated software. Contextual ads are often called CPC—short for Cost Per Click—ads, because that is the basis on which they are paid.
Tip
For more information about contextual advertising generally, see Chapter 5. Google’s AdSense is the best-known CPC program. Working with AdSense is explained in Part II.
From your viewpoint—that of the publisher of content on one or more web sites—what you probably really care about is how much money you can make from each kind of approach to advertising. Of course, that depends on a great many variables, and there are ways to maximize the yield from each kind of advertising program. It’s worth experimenting to find out which kind of advertising works best with the specific content on your site (and the kind of traffic your site draws). It’s also the case that some sites carry all three kinds of advertising.
The key conceptual difference among the three kinds of advertising is what a visitor to your site has to do to make you money. It’s a spectrum.
One way to look at this is by the amount of action required on the part of your site visitor, from most to least:
Affiliate ad—the visitor has to actually get out a credit card and make an online purchase from the advertiser’s site.
Contextual ad—the visitor has to actually click the ad to surf to the advertiser’s page (but does not have to buy anything).
Sponsored ad—all that has to happen is that it is displayed on your page.
Understanding Affiliate Programs
Affiliate programs go by many names, including: “Affiliate marketing programs,” “Virtual Marketing,” “Revenue Sharing,” “Associate Programs,” “Internet Affiliate Marketing,” “Direct Marketing,” “Performance Marketing,” “Partner Marketing,” “Pay-For-Performance,” and “Referral Programs.” The names themselves give you an idea of what is involved. But as Shakespeare put it in Romeo and Juliet:
What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.
By whatever name it’s called, an affiliate earns a commission from a merchant for generating a desired result. The specific result that must occur for the affiliate to earn a commission is (or should be) spelled out, and specified contractually, when the affiliate signs up for the program.
Warning
Read the fine print carefully when you sign up for an affiliate program. These agreements can be complicated, but you should be completely clear about exactly what commission you are supposed to get under all the circumstances covered by the agreement.
Most often, the event that leads to a commission for the affiliate is (as I’ve already stated) a merchant sale resulting from the affiliate’s promotion. But this need not be the case. In some circumstances, providing a merchant with a qualified sales lead may be enough to generate a commission for the affiliate.
Joining an affiliate program is potentially lucrative, but requires real attention and care. If not done right, you will not make any money from the affiliate programs you have joined.
Unlike other forms of advertising on your site, you really should care about who your affiliate partners are. This is because you do not get paid unless the affiliate links on your side lead fairly directly to a sale (or other qualifying event).
Understanding affiliate programs can be confusing: there’s not a great deal of objective information available about this kind of advertising, affiliate aggregations sites are complex, and affiliate agreements are often full of legalese and opaque. But fear not! After reading this chapter, you’ll have a pretty good idea of what affiliate programs are, how they work, and how you can craft an affiliate strategy that can help you make money from your web content.
Mechanics of the Process
There are a number of steps involved in the affiliate marketing process. Here’s an overview:
A publisher (an owner of a content-based web site or sites) signs up as a web affiliate of a merchant, either using an affiliate aggregator—a company in the business of servicing affiliates for multiple merchants (See "Affiliate Aggregators" later in this chapter)—or directly with the merchant (for example, Amazon.com). This signup is done using a web interface, although certain documents (such as a W9 tax form) may need to be filed with the merchant or affiliate aggregator by mail or fax.
The merchant approves the publisher. Depending on the goals and methods of the merchant, this step may happen automatically or semiautomatically, or it may involve a manual determination of the suitability of the publisher by the merchant. Marketing goals and guidelines vary; a premium-brand merchant may want to take care that an affiliate is not perceived as déclassé and therefore manually approve all affiliates. Other brands may feel the more inbound links, the better, and let anyone sign up as an affiliate who wants to.
Once the publisher has been approved, the publisher is provided with a tracking ID to use in affiliate ads.
The merchant supplies banner and links—collectively called creatives (See "Creatives" below)—that use the publisher’s tracking ID. The merchant also supplies information about how to create links with the proper tracking ID to the publisher. If the merchant-publisher connection is taking place with the facilitation of an affiliate aggregator, then the aggregator makes it easy for publishers to obtain links. Banners and links are supplied as HTML code, usually complete with the publisher’s tracking ID embedded in the link, so you don’t need to know much HTML to join an affiliate program. Graphics, most often hosted on the merchant’s site, are supplied by the merchant or affiliate aggregator.
The publisher incorporates the supplied HTML in web pages, and/or constructs links based on the tracking ID, that mesh well with the publisher’s content.
Visitors to the publisher’s site click the banners or links that open the merchant’s site; these links contain the tracking ID of the publisher.
Most often, the merchant’s site places a cookie on the visitor’s computer so that the publisher is credited for actions that take place at a later point by the visitor (often up to 30 days).
If the visitor takes a desired action—usually by buying something—the publisher is due a commission (often, as specified in the original agreement, there’s a time delay before any actual money is paid in order to handle issues like merchandise returns). Reputable affiliate programs provide an easy mechanism for publishers to keep track of page and click statistics and what they are owed. The tracking software is managed either by the merchant or by a third-party affiliate aggregator.
Figure 4-1 shows how the affiliate marketing process works, assuming that the publisher has already been approved by the merchant and that a third-party aggregator actually tracks sales and commissions .
Creatives
Banners, buttons, and links provided by a merchant to an affiliate publisher are generally called creatives , a term deriving from the ad agency business. (Yes, I suppose it takes some creativity to make a good banner!) Creatives vary from fancy, splashy graphics made using Flash to simple text links pointing at a single product.
There’s a great variety in the kinds and sizes of creatives made available by merchants. To generalize, the most common kinds of creatives are:
- Text links
Simple hypertext links.
- Banners
Graphic images, usually laid out horizontally. Sizes vary, but 480 × 90 pixels or 600 × 90 pixels are typical.
- Skyscrapers
Graphic images, intended for vertical deployment (hence the nickname skyscraper). Typical dimensions are 120 × 600 pixels.
- Buttons
Small graphical images, typically 120 × 90 pixels.
- Search boxes
Search boxes combine graphics, HTML, and text to allow your site visitors to search the merchant’s site.
Figure 4-2 shows some of the different creatives that are available to affiliates of the photo stock service Corbis.
The best creative to use depends upon context and individual taste and what you think will work with visitors to your site. It’s worth spending some time experimenting with different creatives to see if one performs better than another.
Warning
There’s a tendency on the part of people running affiliate marketing campaigns to produce what are—in my opinion—garish creatives: banners and buttons full of movement and special effects. It’s obvious why merchants do this—to get attention—and it is mostly no skin off their nose if an affiliate web site looks a little tasteless. But as a content publisher, you should probably avoid these kinds of creatives. Banners that don’t flash most likely work better and won’t overwhelm your site content.
All creatives used in affiliate marketing provide a mechanism for including the tracking ID of the publisher, so the publisher can be credited for sales or other action events.
Affiliate marketing works best when the merchant has high appeal to the demographics visiting a publisher’s site (See "Matching affiliates with content,” later in this chapter). In fact, some of the most effective affiliate links are simple text links to products that your content discusses or recommends. For example, a digital photography web site might well want to provide a link to a merchant partner selling a specific Nikon digital camera.
Warning
Providing links to a specific product for sale by a merchant partner in the context of a web site discussion of the product raises ethical concerns about the separation of editorial and advertising content. Most affiliates do it. You’ll have to resolve this for yourself, but I would suggest that you not include positive content about a product unless you believe your content, and that you not direct your site vendors to a merchant unless you would buy that product from that merchant yourself.
If you decide to use text links to product items, such as a Nikon D70 digital camera, eventually you’ll probably need to understand where the merchant’s tracking ID goes in the HTML used for a specific product link, as well as how to link to a specific product within a merchant’s catalogue.
For example, here’s the code that Amazon.com provides as a text link to the Nikon D70 on Amazon.com (for more about Amazon and working with its creatives and links, See "The Amazon.com Associate Program,” later in this chapter).
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?link_code=ur2
&camp=1789&tag=XXXXXXXXX &creative=9325&path=tg/detail/-/B0001LGDAO/">
Nikon D70</a>
<img src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=XXXXXXXXX&l=ur2&o=1" width="1"
height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important;
margin:0px !important;" />Tip
The actual publisher tracking ID, which Amazon.com passes as the value of the tag variable, has been changed in this example to
XXXXXXXXX. The 1-pixel by 1-pixel transparent
image file (which cannot be seen by the site visitor) is added so that Amazon.com can add its own cookies to the
visitor’s computer before the link is clicked, and is not necessary for you to
receive credit for the sale as an affiliate.
The actual link that the Amazon.com code creates looks just like a normal text link, as you can see in Figure 4-3.
In the Nikon D70 example, the product is designated using its ASIN identification number, which is B0001LGDAO. As you can see, if you know a product’s ASIN—which is easily available on the Amazon.com product pages—or, for books, the ISBN, you can easily construct your own affiliate links by hand.
An interesting point is that you should understand where the graphic (usually a JPEG or GIF file) used in banner and button creatives is located. Amazon, as well as many other major affiliate merchants, hosts these graphics itself. Other programs ask you to copy graphics to your own web server. It’s less trouble when the graphic is on the merchant’s site, and it uses less of your own bandwidth, but if the merchant’s server goes down, then your site looks (and is) broken . This happens more often than you might expect. True, if the merchant is not serving creatives, it is probably also not selling product, but if a graphic is missing from your site, it looks worse for you then if a link simply doesn’t work.
Areas of Concern
The relationship between a content web site and an affiliate advertiser is essentially like that of a commission-only sales rep to a manufacturer. You’ll want to examine the same areas that a brick-and-mortar independent sales rep would look at before agreeing to carry a merchant’s products. Start by asking these questions:
Does the merchant have a good reputation?
Will the merchant honor its commitments?
Will your customers want to buy the product?
Will the merchant stay in business?
More specific to the Web, as I’ve mentioned in the context of hosting creatives, if a merchant’s site goes down, then your links will be broken, and you won’t be able to earn a commission. So you should feel reasonably good about the web site stability of a merchant whose affiliate program you join.
As a Web “sales rep,” you should also be concerned with (and investigate as thoroughly as possible) these issues:
Each of these points is worth some more discussion.
Amount of the commission
You can (and should) find out the amount of the sales commission when you sign up for an affiliate program. There’s a huge variety of commission structures, but you should probably expect a commission of between 3% and 10% of what the merchant receives, exclusive of shipping, handling, and sales tax.
Tip
The Amazon.com commission structure tends to be at the lower end of this range; however, note that on nonbook items Amazon.com is often acting as a go-between, rather than directly selling actual merchandise.
You should take care to note precisely what action items trigger a sales commission. Most of the time, it is a sale. However, some sales may be excluded. In addition, some sites may pay commissions for qualified leads—for example, someone signing up for a home mortgage and completing the paperwork—whether or not the product actually sells (with the mortgage example, refinancing wouldn’t have to be completed for you to make your commission).
Be on the lookout for commission structures that reward you for good performance. These kinds of programs can add bonus percentages to the commissions you make and can be quite rewarding if you deliver substantial traffic.
In addition, some affiliate programs simply offer flat fees as incentives. For example, a web hosting affiliate program might pay affiliates $90 each time a visitor to the affiliate site signs up for a web hosting contract of a year or more.
Tip
$90 is, in fact, roughly the current going sales commission for an affiliate who sends a site visitor who signs up for a web hosting contract.
Also note that, depending upon the program, commission payout usually does not take place right away. Most affiliate programs build some time in for product returns (or buyer’s remorse). Once it is clear that there will not be any returns, it can still be 30 to 90 days before you are paid.
Sales and commission tracking
Sales and commission tracking is a serious issue. It’s very important to most affiliate site publishers. If you don’t know that transactions originating from your site are being consistently tracked, then you have no way to be assured that you will be paid the commissions you are owed.
This implies that you should be careful to work only with third-party affiliate aggregators (See "Affiliate Aggregators,” later in this chapter) or enroll in programs managed by an extremely reliable vendor, such as Amazon.com (See "The Amazon.com Associate Program,” later in this chapter).
Merchant support of affiliate programs
Will the merchant support your efforts with good promotions, incentives, and creatives? Ideally, an affiliate relationship is a long-term partnership. You’d like to know that the merchant supporting the affiliate program is in it for the long haul. Merchant support of affiliate programs makes a big difference in the following areas:
To make an affiliate program work well, you’ll want to be able to provide value to your site visitors in terms of special promotions.
If you put great effort into an affiliate program and perform well, you should be rewarded with incentives.
To keep your site visitors coming back to an affiliated merchant, you need a steady stream of quality, fresh creatives.
Matching affiliates with content
Perhaps the single biggest factor in successful affiliate marketing is the alignment of the content of your site with the affiliate merchant’s offerings. In other words, visitors to your site should be genuinely interested in the products the merchant has to sell.
You’ll have a tough row to hoe if you try to sell cosmetics to visitors to a digital photography site, but should find it easier to sell these visitors digital photo equipment and processing services. Visitors to a site that provides technical services of use to webmasters are likely candidates for web hosting affiliate programs, but unlikely to buy lingerie or refrigerators.
In the brick-and-mortar world, there used to be talk about a salesperson who could “sell ice to the Inuit.” No web site can sell as well as this proverbial salesperson, so you need to use common sense and devise an intelligent strategy to provide affiliate links to products and services that are relevant to your site visitors. Relevant links get clicked, goods get purchased, and publishers get their commissions. More than any other form of web site advertising monetization, affiliate marketing requires careful honing of site content with an intelligent choice of partners and creatives.
Working with an Affiliate Program
Generally, there are three affiliate marketing situations you may get involved with as a web content publisher:
The affiliate program is managed by an affiliate aggregator (See "Affiliate Aggregators,” next).
An extremely well-known entity offers a broad and well-thought-out affiliate program (the Amazon.com associates program is the best example, as explained in "The Amazon.com Associate Program" section later in this chapter).
A vendor with a limited line or products or service starts its own affiliate marketing program (see the "Ad Hoc Affiliation" box at the end of this chapter).
Affiliate Aggregators
Major affiliate aggregators provide the following benefits to web publishers:
The publisher can use “one-stop shopping” to work with many different merchants.
There’s only one software interface to learn.
Reporting and commission payments are consolidated.
A third party (the aggregator) provides consistent tracking software and provides some recourse in case of disputes over sales.
Tip
Don’t forget: affiliate aggregators are paid by merchants, not publishers. They exist to provide a service to merchants who want to effectively manage affiliate programs without having to roll their own. They primarily represent the interests of the merchants who are their clients, not the interests of the affiliates.
You’ll need at least one content-based web site to enroll with an affiliate aggregator. Once you’ve signed up with an affiliate aggregator, the aggregator will provide a single web site that allows you to:
Apply to individual merchant affiliate programs
Get HTML for creatives
Generate activity reports
Tip
It’s pretty easy to add multiple web sites to your account with an affiliate aggregator once you have obtained an initial account. This is such an important point that it is worth rephrasing and repeating: as a publisher, you can use a single account with an affiliate aggregator to manage your relationship with multiple merchants and multiple content web sites.
Commission Junction , http://www.cj.com, and LinkShare , http://www.linkshare.com, are the two best-known affiliate aggregators.
Commission Junction
Commission Junction represents more than 1,000 merchants, ranging from Discover Card to Half.com, through dating sites, software publishers, and companies selling clothes—just about any kind of merchant you can imagine. If any legitimate product or service can be bought over the Internet, you can probably figure out a way to make a sales commission from selling it via Commission Junction. The Commission Junction home page is shown in Figure 4-4.
By choosing Account → Web site Settings, you can add a new web site for deployment with the Commission Junction affiliate programs (Figure 4-5).
Tip
If you look carefully at Figure 4-5, you’ll notice that a PID has been assigned as a site setting. The PID is the number that Commission Junction uses as its tracking ID.
The Run Reports tab, shown in Figure 4-6, provides a very complete set of metrics covering how many times ads have been displayed on your pages (called page impressions ), how many times your ads have been clicked (called click throughs ), and the sales commissions you have earned.
The heart of the Commission Junction interface is the Get Links tab, shown in Figure 4-7.
Tip
A key metric at Commission Junction is EPC, or earnings per click. If you look at Figure 4-7, you’ll note that the box on the lower right, listing Advertisers with special promotions, is sorted by EPC from highest to lowest. As a publisher, a high EPC is a great reason to sign up with a merchant.
Using the Get Links tab, you can find merchants—called advertisers in Commission Junction nomenclature—by category, by searching using various filters, or by listing
the merchants with whom you have an existing relationship. You can also browse the entire list of Commission Junction merchants by clicking Advertiser List.
Once you’ve found a merchant you are interested in, you can apply to join the merchant’s affiliate program by checking the program application box and clicking Apply to Program, as shown in Figure 4-8.
Tip
You can view the links a merchant provides, and statistics such as EPC, before you join a program.
Your application to join a merchant program will either be approved automatically (if the merchant has decided to approve all would-be affiliates) or manually. During the manual approval process, which may take up to several days, your status with the merchant is set to “Pending Approval.” With manual approval, you will be notified by email whether you’ve been accepted or rejected.
Once a merchant has approved your application to join its affiliate program, you can go grab the HTML required to make links. To do this, use one of the mechanisms provided by the Get Links tab to find the merchant that you have the relationship with.
A good approach to finding the merchants who have approved your affiliate application is to open the Get Links-By Relationship page shown in Figure 4-9.
Locate the merchant you want to add to your site. Click View Links. You can now scan all the creatives offered by the merchant. For example, Figure 4-10 shows some of the creatives offered by Half.com to participating affiliates.
To grab the HTML for a specific creative, either click the creative or check the box next to it and click the Get HTML button at the top of the page. In either case, a Get HTML window, like the one shown in Figure 4-11, will open.
Tip
If you are managing multiple web sites, make sure to select the right one on the web site drop-down list before copying HTML. You can also use the Get HTML window to set a variety of options, notably setting the affiliate to link to open a new browser window (an important choice because it helps to keep visitors on your site longer).
The HTML for the new affiliate link is pretty simple and includes the web publisher’s PID (tracking identification) as part of the link:
<a href="http://www.kqzyfj.com/click-1665162-10377011" target="_top" >
<img src="http://www.ftjcfx.com/image-1665162-10377011" width="120" height="90"
alt=" New buyers: Save $5 off orders of $50 or more! " border="0"></a>If you paste this HTML into the code for your web page, the new creative will now appear on your site (Figure 4-12).
Tip
To maximize affiliate revenue, it’s important to constantly tweak ads, for example, to respond to seasonal conditions such as holidays. To facilitate ad changes across a range of pages, it’s vital to use an include architecture, as I explain in Chapter 1.
LinkShare
LinkShare, http://www.linkshare.com, is the oldest major affiliate aggregator, currently representing several hundred merchants ranging from David’s Cookies to Overstock.com to Vermont Teddy Bear and beyond. LinkShare provides roughly the same functionality as Commission Junction.
The LinkShare home page is shown in Figure 4-13.
Within LinkShare, you’ll find four tabbed windows in addition to the home page:
- Join program
Used to apply for approval to merchant’s affiliate program (as with the merchant members of Commission Junction, some approvals will be automatic, and some will be manual)
- Create links
Used to builds and select merchant creatives (requires prior acceptance in a merchant’s affiliate program)
- Run reports
Used to generate detailed reports about site and program metrics
- Your account
Used to change account information (for example, add a domain)
To obtain a creative, click the Create Link tab. A list of the affiliate programs for which you have been approved appears (Figure 4-14).
Tip
If you have registered multiple web sites with LinkShare, be sure the one you want to use the creative with is selected from the drop-down list that will appear at the top of the page.
Click the name of the merchant you’d like to link with, for example, Sierra Trading Post, a discount retailer of sporting goods and clothes. A page that will let you generate creatives specifically for Sierra Trading Post will open. Choose the kind of creative you’d like to create from the Available Link Types box, shown in Figure 4-15.
Tip
The Dynamic Rich Media category tends to produce creatives that are “blue plate specials,” such as rotating deals of the day.
For example, suppose you want to add a box to your web site that searches the Sierra Trading Post product database. To do this, you’d click the Search Box link. A page showing a number of possible search boxes, such as the one shown in Figure 4-16, will open.
To add the search box to your site, copy the code and paste it into your page. Here’s the code that generates the Sierra Trading Post search box:
<table width="150" height="150" border="0" cellspacing="0"
cellpadding="0" style="padding: 0px; background-image:
url
(http://www.sierratradingpost.com/assets/images/ppam/ad_images/LSsearchbox.jpg);">
<form action="http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/statform" name="form1" id="form1"
method="get"><input type=hidden name=id value=RQUescWsfWI><input type=hidden
name=offerid value=42083><input type=hidden name=bnid value=740><input type=hidden
name="subid" value="">
<input type="hidden" name="Ntk" value="All">
<input type="hidden" name="Nty" value="1">
<input type="hidden" name="Ntx" value="mode+matchallany">
<input type="hidden" name="track" value="true">
<input type="hidden" name="DCMP" value="LS05">
<input type="hidden" name="KC" value="LS05">
<tr>
<td width="150" height="65"></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td width="150" align="center" height="25">
<input type="text" name="Ntt"
value="enter keyword or item #" maxlength="50" style="font-family:
arial,helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 11px; width: 140px; padding-left: 2px;">
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td width="150" align="center" height="25">
<select name="N" style="font-family:
arial,helvetica,sans-serif; color: #000000; vertical-align:
top; font-size: 11px; width: 105px; height: 18px; width: 140px;">
<option value="0">All Departments</option>
<option value="9000310">Outdoor Gear</option>
<option value="9000154">Men's Clothing</option>
<option value="9000230">Women's Clothing</option>
<option value="9000342">Shoes & Boots</option>
<option value="9000335">Kids' Corner</option>
<option value="9000331">Home Decor</option>
</select>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td width="150" align="center" height="35">
<input class="submit" type="submit"
value="Search Sierra Trading Post" style="font: 11px arial;
color: #ffffff; width: 140px; height: 30px; border:
outset 1px; background-color: #447744;">
</td>
</form>
</tr>
</table><IMG width=1 height=1 border=0 src="http://ad.linksynergy.com/fs-
bin/show?id=RQUescWsfWI&bids=42083&type=5">Tip
The Sierra Trading Post search box code consists of an HTML form
formatted using table tags. The value of the affiliate tracking ID is passed
using a hidden form variable named id.
With this code pasted into your web page, the Sierra Trading Post search box will appear on your site as shown in Figure 4-17.
If a visitor to your site enters a specific item, for example Men’s socks, in the search box and clicks Search Sierra Trading Post, the results page for the item will open (Figure 4-18). This helps to increase the rate of conversion of clicks to sales, because visitors are looking only at items they have some interest in, and therefore increases the likelihood that you will make a commission.
The Amazon.com Associate Program
If you belong to just one merchant’s affiliate program, Amazon.com is probably the one to join.
Tip
In Amazon.com’s terminology, affiliates are called associates , just as the sales help at a brick-and-mortar Wal-Mart (and other fine stores) are also associates. Becoming an Amazon.com associate sounds like the better of the two options to me!
Amazon.com makes a great partner for an affiliate (particularly if the affiliate is only going to be associated with one merchant program) for a number of reasons, including:
Amazon.com is one of the oldest businesses on the Web.
Amazon.com has a great reputation with customers for reliability and fair dealing.
Amazon.com—at times in combination with partner merchants—can supply almost any conceivable product to your customers.
Amazon.com provides creatives with great variety and flexibility; it’s easy to use them to link to any product or Amazon.com search result, and the creatives fit well with most site designs.
The application process for becoming an Amazon.com associate can be accessed at https://associates.Amazon.com/gp/flex/associates/apply-login.html. Essentially, Amazon. com approves all applicants who provide a valid email address and the required social security number (or EIN).
Amazon.com pays between 4% and 10% sales commissions, with the bulk of the commissions in the 4% to 7% range. In some cases, performance bonuses are given to affiliates who are extraordinary producers.
The home page for the Amazon.com Associate program, called Amazon.com Associates Central, is located at http://associates.Amazon.com . Once you’ve joined the program, you can log in to update your account information, generate reports, and obtain creatives.
Click Build Links to specify creatives and obtain the corresponding code. There are five varieties of Amazon.com creatives:
- Product links
Link to a specific product that you select and display a product image.
- Recommended links
Link to Amazon.com recommendations by product category or keywords.
- Banners
Wide variety of banners, both rotating special promotions and by shopping category.
- Text links
Text link to any Amazon.com page, such as a product page, or a page that results from an Amazon.com search.
- Search boxes
You can put an Amazon.com search box on your site.
Figure 4-19 shows the launch panel for building this wide selection of creatives at Amazon.
For example, suppose you want to add a box on your digital photography site that will display a digital camera that Amazon.com recommends (and let Amazon.com take care of the specifics of which camera is highlighted).
To start, click Build Links with Recommended Product Links selected. The Choose Content panel, shown in Figure 4-20, will open.
In the Choose Content panel, select a product line and enter keywords or choose a subcategory. For example: if “Camera & Photo” is the primary category, “Digital Cameras” might be a good subcategory (but you could also limit the recommendations to a specific brand by entering “Nikon,” “digital,” and “camera” as keywords rather than selecting a subcategory.
With a content type selected, click Continue. You’ll next be asked to select a size for the creative. With a size selected, you can now move to final adjustments (for example, to the colors used in the text and background of the creative) and copy the HTML, using the window shown in Figure 4-21.
Here’s the HTML produced for this creative:
<iframe src="http://rcmAmazon.com/e/cm?t=XXXXXXXXX&o=1&p=8&l=bn1&
mode=photo&browse=281052&fc1=&=1&lc1=<1=&f=ifr&bg1=&f=ifr"
marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" width="120" height="240"
border="0" frameborder="0" style="border:none;" scrolling="no">
</iframe>
Tip
In the example, the Amazon.com
associate ID has been replaced with
XXXXXXXXX.
When you copy this HTML into an include used by your digital photography site, the creative appears, as you can see in Figure 4-22.
Tip
With a recommended product creative that refers to a category of products, Amazon.com automatically rotates the actual products that are displayed in its creative.
Action Items
Here are some action items for you to consider to make money from your web content using affiliate programs:
Identify merchants with affiliate programs that mesh well with your content.
Explore, and sign up with, affiliate aggregators and individual merchants’ affiliate programs.
Integrate creatives as HTML links, banners, and search boxes on your web site.
Monitor affiliate statements for traffic, click, conversion, and sales commission statistics.
Experiment with your choice of merchants and their creatives to optimize your returns.
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