Affiliate Marketing, or ‘Performance Marketing’ generally refers to the practice of affiliates (often called publishers) sending new customers to a business (often termed an advertiser) through website links or other methods of referrals. In exchange for these direct referrals, affiliates are usually given a percentage (often 4% to as high as 10% or more) of the sales revenue generated by a new customer’s transaction.

Why Affiliate Marketing?

Many businesses rely almost entirely on affiliates to bring in new customers, and find it a more efficient and cost-effective way of marketing their products and services to an audience.  Affiliate programs are especially attractive to advertisers and publishers who work with niche content and products, because it allows them to focus their marketing efforts towards only the people who may be interested in certain products and services, rather than the general public as a whole.

Affiliate marketing can be very effexrtive for small- and medium-sized  businesses who do not have the advertising budget of large corporations, yet have products that sell within a given niche.

Example: Gourmet Coffee Niche Marketing

AS an example, an on-line retailer of rare gourmet coffee beans from Hawaii may offer a product which only appeals to a small audience of people.  Although this niche is very small, however, this audience is highly interested in information and products related to the preparation and serving of this gourmet coffee.  In this case, a blogger may start a website giving customers background information, reviews, and purchasing information about cofffee beans, or start a ‘coffee lovers forum’ which encourages people to partciipate in discussion about the coffee and share tips with other aficionados.

To generate revenue for such a coffee lovers site, the blogger may place certain affiliate links in different areas on the site, whether banners or text links.  These links contain sepcial codes which allow parent businesses to track which affiliates are sending them traffic, and thereby credit, or pay the affiliates for any sales generated by their leads.  Thanks to sophisticated tracking technology, many affiliates are able to receive credit for sales generated by visitors as much as 6 months after the first visit – that is, if the visitor does not purchase immediately the affiliate may still get credited for a later purchase if it is proven that the affiliate was the person who referred the customer.  Most affiliate programs utilize ‘browser cookies’ to verify the last affiliate who referred a user, therefore ensuring the affiliate receives the commission.

Keys to Affiliate Success

There are many affiliates who earn a six-figure (that’s right) income from affiliate marketing.  This of course takes real planning, intention, and savvy, that can only be gained by practical experience.  So get started today!   Some of the keys to success as a performance (or affiliate) marketer are also important for content publishing in general::

1. Providing useful relevant, targeted information for a user. Relevant information will build traffic to your website, which will increase your chances of sales.
2. Highlighting specific products and services which ‘complement’ the content that the user is viewing.
3. Becoming an expert in your particular niche, and gaining the trust of your readers.  (This can happen as a result of steps 1 and 2).
4. Highlighting sales and promotions so that your users will save money as a result of clicking through your links.

What Kinds of Affiliate Programs are Available?

There is a great deal of technology behind affiliate programs – tracking all sotrts of metrics such as effectiveness, “cost-per-view”, “cost-per-click”, and other technical statistics.  Because of the need for such technically detailed reporting and tracking, many businesses choose to use a 3rd party affiliate program provider, which then takes care of the technical specifics regardings setup and execution of the program.  This allows a publisher (such as a blogger) to go to sign up for multiple programs via one website, instead of having to go to multiple websites and manage multiple programs.

There are affiliate programs for just about every niche on the Internet, and new affiliate programs are created every day.  If you are a publisher, this is  great news, because you are then able to combine your relevant and interesting information and services with products and links which are actually useful to the user, which means revenue for you. This is a ‘win-win’ situation as all parties (users, service and product providers, and yourself) benefit and gain information and services that they want. Affiliate programs work well when people learn more about what they are looking for (rather than seeing ads for what they do not want).

Where Can I Sign Up For Affiliate Programs?

Listed below are some of the well-regarded (and highly successful) affiliate program providers on the Web.  To get started, just click through, signup, and begin placing links on your website.  With a little patience and perseverance, you can begin earning affiliate income.

Linkshare

Commission Junction

Shopzilla Publisher Program

Amazon Associates Affiliate Program

Ebay Partner Network

Pepperjam

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Jay Harley is the CEO and web architect of Heaven Interactive. As a technologist, Jay specializes in creating business productivity software and offering clients high-level media consulting services. Before founding Heaven Interactive, Jay led a double life as a web consultant and MFA New Media instructor at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. At AAU, he enthusiastically developed several courses in web application design and scripting, and enjoyed daily interaction with design students, offering guidance, support, and camaraderie as a media professional. Jay is now squarely focused on providing Web 3.0 solutions to businesses in the form of collaboration and presentation software, by utilizing the power of the "Web as a Platform."