Affiliate Marketing is an essentially simple concept and a fantastic way for both merchants (retailers) and publishers (affiliates) alike to profit from internet marketing. Affiliates promote the brand and products of a merchant by attracting traffic and sending it to the merchant. In return they receive commission on any sales (or in some cases leads) generated. For the merchants, this provides an excellent low-risk marketing channel wherein costs are incurred only when a sale is made or a good quality lead is generated. The affiliates benefit by joining a cost-free program that ensures that, as long as they can generate traffic via their site or sites, they can monetise their web presence without the risk and costs associated with holding inventory, fulfilment or having a contractual or financial involvement with the end consumer.

How do I Attract Traffic?
As a new affiliate, you first need to decide what sector or sectors to target. The days of simply creating PPC campaigns and driving traffic straight to the merchants ‘arbitrage’ style are all but gone. Equally, thin directory-style sites are not longer viable: you need to create significant value to justify and monetise your presence in the process. Thus it is essential that you choose your target sectors wisely. Needless to say the markets follow the money. Whilst the potential earnings in online gaming, mobile phones, broadband, electronics, finance and a number of other high volume sectors are significant, so is the competition! If you plan to enter any of these sectors, be absolutely sure that you can add significant value.

For a new affiliate, it can often make sense to go for a niche sector as a starting point — perhaps a specific area of furniture, sporting goods, apparel or a hobby of some form. Choose something about which you have a least some degree of knowledge — and enthusiasm!

What Do I Need To Create an Affiliate Site?
Once you have chosen your sector or sectors, there are many ways in which to create an affiliate website which really depend on the type of market you are intending to approach and your technical experience. However you will certainly need the following:

A Domain/Hosting Package – you will need a domain (website name)! Domain name decisions are often made without putting sufficient thought into them. Try to ensure that the domain name links closely to your chosen subject area as this is likely to make a difference when trying to increase your search rankings in the longer term. The major search engines are still sensitive the presence of target keywords in the domain name itself. Don’t however, be tempted to buy a domain name consisting of 27 keywords separated by a dash — this can be counter-productive. One potential approach is to choose a domain name that perhaps starts with your target keywords (at the beginning of the domain name is better) and includes your own name. For example if you are creating a site selling Oak Wardrobes and you are called Helen, why not buy oakwardrobesbyhelen.co.uk or oak-wardrobes-by-helen.co.uk. You then need to host the domain. Since few of us have a web server at our disposal, your best option would be using a web hosting company to provide this service. There are so many hosts out there offering similar services, many at modest costs. If you do some searching you will find that domain and hosting packages can be purchased for as little as £2.50 per month. Do your research and read reviews – not all UK hosting companies are of decent quality. You will also need to choose between a Linux / Apache server running PHP scripts or a Windows server running classic ASP or ASP.NET scripts – this will be determined by your technical knowledge (or that of your developer) and any development package or template you decide to use such as Dreamweaver, Wordpress or FrontPage.

A Site – If, like many other affiliates, you aren’t experienced in creating web content then there are some great options available to you. Wordpress is a good example. This provides you with a simple publishing platform within which to create a good-looking and reasonably well optimised site. A whole host of themes and add-ins are also available allowing you to completely customise your site. Even the most inexperienced of developers will find creating their first site with Wordpress fairly easy. However, be aware that there are some vulnerabililities with all of these tools: you need the latest versions and plug-ins or upgrades to cater for these.

Some Compelling Content – Without doubt, the most important factor when creating an affiliate site is the on-site content itself. Decent content, together with links (which we cover in other articles here at lammo.net) are essential to drive internet users to your site. Without users there are no sales. The content that you write MUST be unique and valuable / informative in order for the search engines to rank your site highly in the longer term. Even if you are running a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign to drive traffic, your site will need to be of decent quality in order to ensure sensible bid costs, approval by the PPC search engines — and to establish sufficient trust with the users for them to be comfortable clicking on your affiliate links.

Affiliate Links – with a live site and decent content under your belt, you can then identify relevant affiliate programmes, both directly with merchants and using the affiliate networks (see below). These will provide you with various options to add trackable links to your site — whether simple text links or banners and graphics. It is these links that will monetise your traffic so they need to be positioned prominently. However, each page should also contain valuable unique content for user and search engine reasons alike. This is particularly important if you plan to use the data feeds from affiliate programmes or networks to populate your site with product information. Whilst this can provide a good volume of relevant products, it will also result in your site containing the same product data as thousands of other sites — so unique content becomes ever more important.

What Type Of Revenue Generating Methods Are There?
The methods used to generate revenue have changed over recent years. Schemes such as cost per click (where affiliates were paid when adverts were clicked no matter whether a sale was generated or not) have all but disappeared. These particular schemes are susceptible to ‘click fraud’ which has been notoriously difficult to manage and traffic quality was widely held to be poor. The most popular methods are now those that are based around ‘cost per sale’ or ‘cost per acquisition’ (CPA) where the affiliate is paid a percentage of the sale value generated.

What Kinds Of Affiliate Programs Are There?
You name it, there is almost certainly an affiliate programme for it! Affiliate campaigns are sometimes offered by merchants directly but many merchants choose to use affiliate networks and affiliate management companies to manage and promote their programs. This brings many different programs together in one place which makes the affiliate’s job of picking the correct programmes that much easier. It also means that you need only set up a few relationships and it provides easier payment and tracking support than going directly. With the wealth of programmes available on most networks, it may even give you some ideas and inspiration as to what affiliate site to embark on next! Popular UK affiliate networks include Affiliate Window, Paid on Results, Tradedoubler, Affiliate Future, DGM, Commission Junction and Webgains.

How Much Does It Cost To Become An Affiliate?
Aside from the costs of producing and hosting your site — absolutely nothing! This means you can get your first site up and running for less than a fiver a month. However, it won’t make you a bean until you have traffic! You will therefore need to give consideration to promotion – whether you are going to go for long term traffic using natural / organic search or you plan to run a pay-per-click campaign to drive traffic immediately — or both. As with any business, there are significant costs involved in marketing and promotion. Natural search promotion can be learned and can be handled by you at a cost of time alone if you are willing to make the effort. PPC campaigns involve up-front financial outlay.

We’ll explore both natural search and pay-per-click promotion in other articles here at lammo.net

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