Archive for affiliate network
Better Tracking of Your Affiliate Sales Efforts
Posted by: | CommentsI’ve been selling affiliate products for a few years now as well as my own products. If you sell affiliate products as well, you know that you probably should be testing and tracking more than you do. If you get a sale do you know which of your links got the sale and on what specific page?
We know we should create a specific link for every page, video, social network but we often don’t do it. So we don’t know which links are producing better results so we can do more of that. I recently reached out to some of the affiliate managers and they were quite helpful.
Link Tracking
With the ShareASale affiliate network you can add a special parameter to your link namely afftrack=xxx. So instead of using the same link all over the place you might put afftrack=youtube for a link in your youtube video (or more specifically the exact video if you have more than one). Or for a blog post afftrack=blogTop10TwitterTools.
Deep Linking
Another thing many of us don’t do is link to a specific page on the product website. Many of us send people to the order now page or the home page, making it difficult for people to find the product at times or coming off as too salesy. Why not send them to a content rich page? Many times we don’t have this link or we waste time looking for a specific link that’s been created for us. With the ShareASale affiliate network you can pick any page you want at the vendor site (a blog post for example) then create your own custom link. That way you can send people to those pages from your social networks and not come across as spammy. The way this works is through cookies being stored on the users machine, even though they don’t go right to the order page, the cookie tracks the sites domain so you are credited for the eventual sale.
The amazing thing is that you could even link to a site totally separate from the product website, create your own custom link and as long as the person finds the product page (through that separate website link) you will be credited for the sale! So you could create a custom link to a youtube video if the video description has a link to the product page (so that the user can hopefully click it and buy). Of course this is a more indirect method. You would want to test both sending them direct to buy page (so no distractions) or to less sales-oriented pages.
Getting Started with Affiliate Marketing
Posted by: | CommentsIn my last post about finding work at home no fee, I mentioned one of the easiest ways to make money online is via Affiliate Marketing. Companies that make and sell products online offer a commission to anyone who refers a customer to them. Instead of going around harassing all your friends to buy something like you might in the real world, you just post a link to the product somewhere (a blog, twitter, facebook, etc) and when someone clicks on it and eventually buys the product, you get a commission!
So the steps to start selling other people’s products are:
- Find a product to promote
- Sign up to be an affiliate
- Get a special affiliate link containing your affiliate id
- Post the link somewhere
Find a product to promote
It’s best to pick a niche that you’re interested in. This could be one of your hobbies, or a work-related topic. Some examples are learning guitar, carpentry, dog training, building websites, vegetarianism, or car repair. If you’re aware of a product in that niche, go to their website and scroll to the bottom. There will be a link for ‘Affiliates’ or ‘Affiliate Program’. Once you sign up you will get access to an area after you login, where you can get your own text or image links.
Sign up to be an Affiliate
You can either sign up at a specific website for a product you’re interested in selling, or sign up at one of the affiliate networks. An affiliate network is a website that contains thousands of products to sell, so once you have an account you can sell anything within the network. On a specific website, look for a menu item that says ‘Affiliates’ or ‘Affiliate Program’ where you can sign up to be an affiliate. For an affiliate network look for the ‘Register’ link. An example of an affiliate network is Clickbank.
Get your Affiliate Link
Once you have registered at either a product site or affiliate network, you need to login. Once logged in you can usually browse for a text or image link. Just copy the link by highlighting the text and right clicking and selecting ‘Copy’ or use Ctrl-C (on windows machines).
For example an affiliate link might look like http://www.learnguitarfast.com?affid=youraffiliateid, where youraffiliateid is your unique id. When someone clicks this link it is tracked back to you so will get credit. Here’s an example – I typed in ‘diet program affiliate program’ into Google search and got this link.
Post the Link Somewhere
If you don’t have a website or blog, start with your social networks such as Facebook. Be careful not to ‘overspam’ your friends but if you’re providing helpful advice to your friends, there’s nothing wrong with that. So take your affiliate link and post something like ‘How I lost 30 pounds in 2 months – http://www.loseweightnow.com?affid=youraffiliateid’ in your facebook status. Or write a blog on your Myspace profile or post a tweet on Twitter.
Once you make a sale, you can be paid via your Paypal account or you can opt to have them mail you a cheque.
I find it’s always best to promote products indirectly. So you write some articles, blog posts, etc about a topic and provide a link or two in the body of your content that leads to an affiliate product. So we will get into how to do that next with some free websites you can use.
Check out this beginner course on Affiliate Marketing.
