Growth and Marketing

The basic “what is this stuff” idea behind Affiliate Marketing is simple. It’s selling the other guy’s products for a commission. For example, you have a store selling fishing equipment. As your affiliate I send people your way and some of them buy your stuff. For each of those who buy something you send me a percentage of the sale. Simple enough, right?

Not an Employee

An affiliate is not an employee, but an independent contractor. The affiliate takes responsibility for all of his/her own taxes, expenses, marketing, etc. The owner of the products tracks sales from the affiliate, makes the payments, and keeps appropriate records for tax purposes. Both parties agree on a percentage and what the rules are (eg: the affiliate can’t say/do this or that.)

In the online world the affiliate can push the products in any number of ways, either directly or through some third party. If you were to make a deal with a real estate company to send them leads in exchange for a payment on each lead then you have a direct relationship and no third party is involved. Amazon.com is another such program. No other company is involved, amazon handles it all in house.

Online Connections

Most affiliates do actually go through the third party. Some companies, such as cj.com, act as organizer and facilitator. A company joins cj.com in the hopes of being connected with affiliates capable of promoting that company.  The company provides CJ with appropriate info, banners, product lists, etc., and CJ provides a common system where affiliates can sign up for that company and get coded links.  The coded links allows transactions to be tracked so that all parties, including CJ, get paid.

The company doesn’t have to set up its own program and the affiliate gets to pick among many companies, each using a common interface and login procedure. This makes it pretty easy for the affiliate to pick the appropriate company. Each merchants handles monetary transactions with their own system, linked to CJ’s system for tracking, and payments are made to and through CJ to the affiliate.

Clickbank.com (CB) is a similar idea, but all of the products carried there are digital. In addition, Clickbank handles all of the financial transactions, so the product owner doesn’t need to have a merchant or paypal account. The buyer buys an ebook, through the affiliate’s link, and Clickbank handles all of the transactions through their own system. Buyer and seller each get paid and CB takes a small cut of every transaction.

Again, the seller gets a system to plug his/her products into and doesn’t need to do anything else, other than to set up download links. The affiliate gets an easy interface to use through which he/she can grab coded links which allow CB to track all transactions.

By the way, CJ and CB are far from the only affiliate systems out there. There are many others and most of them operate in more or less the same way. Also, many companies keep their programs entirely in-house; Amazon, for one. The procedure is pretty much the same, though. You join the program, get coded links, and place them appropriately. Their system tracks clicks through those links and any buys that are made. You get credit and a check.

CPA programs, Cost Per Action, are really the same thing. You join the CPA company, grab one of their coded ads, place it someplace, and everytime someone clicks on it and does some action you get paid. The action can be anything from just clicking the ad to entering an email to filling out a form to buying a product.

Methods of Affiliate Marketing

There are a few basic ways, and a lot of variations, to push the other guy’s stuff with affiliate marketing (or even marketing your own stuff.)

You can put up a website with some kind of content (that’s the stuff people might want to look at) and have your affiliate links somewhere in the text. Another options is to put some kind of ad or banner in or alongside the text. In either case it’s a link from your site to the product, via your affiliate link. The content can be anything from product reviews to related information to workable info (how to catch this fish in that place) and the affiliate link is to a product that would make that easier.

You can have an email capture system set up. People enter their name and email in exchange for whatever good stuff you’re offering and in addition to the good stuff you send the occasional link to the other guy’s stuff. Obviously this can be, and is, abused. The good stuff can be an informational PDF or email course or… something that’s interesting enough  that I’m willing to provide my overworked email address to get it.

(Rant: At the moment I’m thinking of the CPA ads that are dumped to huge email lists. Since these lists are sold repeatedly there is no way that they can say we opted into the list and there is, frequently, no easy way to get off that list. Reputable CPA companies frown on such actions and take serious steps to prevent it, as do reputable email systems. )

You can post articles on third party sites pointing to the product you’re recommending. For example, I could write an article for EzineArticles.com and link to my wife’s cookbook on Clickbank (The Tauren Chef.) Some article directories will allow affiliate links, many won’t, and EzineArticles certainly doesn’t. However, you can get around this in a couple of ways.

1. Buy a domain name and point that domain name to the product using your affiliate link. This lets you use a “top level domain” in your articles and you don’t need to set up a website.
2. Create your own page, which can be on your domain or WordPress blog or Squidoo lens or on any number of other places, and link to that page from your article. Your affiliate link(s) will be placed within the content of that page.

Buy ads on a search engine. Google’s Adwords is probably the best known example of this. You open an account with Adwords, and there are a few hoops to jump through, and you will be able to place ads on their system. Every time your ad is actually clicked on you will pay a certain amount, for each click. The trick is to balance your click costs with the income you make from the buys. All of the big search engines, and many other sites, have systems similar to Adwords.

Buy ads on other sites – these can be text links or image (banner) ads. Either one can be linked to the product that you’re promoting or your inbetween page(s) or your email sign-up form or…  Either one can be done directly or through a third party (such as Text-Link-Ads.com.) To do it directly you would send an email to, or otherwise contact, the site owner and present your proposal.

Where to you go from here?

No matter which way you go, if you want to make money you need to have a large number of eyeballs viewing your ad and a “reasonable” number of clicks on that ad/link and a “reasonable” number of buys resulting from those clicks. “Reasonable” may mean something very different between any two people. Person A might just want hobby money, B might want to make a house payment, and C might want a lot more.

Wealthy Affiliate is a terrific place to be no matter what your definition of “reasonable” is. Go here to check it out and grab their bonus book, “Who Loves Money,” which covers the affiliate marketing game and how to do it inexpensively.