Demystifying Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular ways to make money on the internet (other ways are freelancing, earning Adsense on niche sites and working on revenue share sites). Affiliate marketing is one of the key ways to make money from blogs, niche sites and article directories.  On some revenue sharing sites affiliate marketing is also acceptable, while it is banned on other sites (check the TOS carefully or ask).

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Companies are faced with task of attracting traffic to their websites. They could buy advertising (and many do) but where to buy the advertising exactly?  The internet is not like the newspaper industry where there are a handful of publishers in an market – there are millions and millions of publishers who run websites, newsletters and forums.

The answer developed in 1994, about 4 years after the world wide web formed.  Amazon launched its Associates program in 1996 which, while not the first such affiliate program, grew fast and brought the concept to a much larger audience.

The concept of a referral commission is very old but it is based on a personal relationship, while web affiliates are rewarded simply for sending buyers or leads to the advertiser.  In the scheme of things, this is a radical concept.

How to Find Affiliate Programs

Companies with affiliate programs either join one of the affiliate networks like Commission Junction or Share A Sale or set up their own programs (with or without the assistance of tools like e-junkie). If you are on a website of a company you might be interested in promoting, look to the bottom of the page for a link that says “Affiliates”, “Partners”, or something similar. You can also Google the company name + “affiliate” as some companies don’t make the affiliate program easy to find from the homepage or they only promote it through an affiliate network.

Affiliate Marketing Courses & Training

Some make money online bloggers sell expensive courses that teach affiliate marketing.  While some of these courses may have value, all you need to know about affiliate marketing is out there free to read and/or watch on video.

For example, large affiliate network Commission Junction has a useful series of videos found under the Support Center called Publisher Training Videos (must be logged in with an account to access). These videos explain the whole Commission Junction system and have good ideas for how to build affiliate links.

Keys to Affiliate Marketing Success

Affiliate marketing is a young and rapidly evolving industry that regularly frustrates newcomers to it.  To be a successful affiliate requires combining these main functions:

1. Content creation and management
2. Traffic generation and management
3. Finding and inserting appropriate affiliate links and banners
4. Managing the affiliate programs used and tracking changes to them

Failure in any one of these areas means failure in affiliate marketing.

Viglink.com is a new solution to points 3 and 4. This affiliate management service takes care of automatically inserting affiliate links and managing the thousands of affiliate programs they work with, freeing the publisher (that’s you) to worry about great content and bringing in quality traffic through keywords, link building, and maybe advertising.  For this, Viglink keeps 25% of the affiliate earnings, but they are also a top tier member of all kinds of affiliate programs so they collect and share higher percentage commissions wherever available.

Viglink is great for any site where you control the code – including all kinds of blogs on any blogging platform and forums. It does not work on a revenue sharing site or blogging platform where you can’t insert a little bit of code.