Okay, so you might have heard all of that before, but the rest of this article will explain what you can expect if you paddle into the affiliate waters.

You’ll also get answers to the questions that all beginners wonder about, but are often afraid to ask.

What Exactly is an Affiliate Marketer?

This is the obvious first question for many as the term confuses many  people I meet in everyday life, when they ask what I do for a living.  Acting as an affiliate for a company means that you advertise for an  e-commerce website either by adding a text link to a website you  write  on, or by paying for search engine ad space. Then each time  your link leads a prospective customer to the website and they  purchase through your link, you receive a commission payment on  that sale.

Not all online retailers offer the opportunity to advertise their products for reward, so you need to find one that has an affiliate program which you can sign up to (almost always for free, but you might need a website to sign up to some).

Is Affiliate Marketing Respectable?

My answer is yes, absolutely. Sadly there are still some  misconceptions about affiliate marketers due to the work of online  spammers who misuse affiliate links, especially those advertising  online pharmacies in their quest to ‘get rich quick’. This is not what  affiliate marketing is about at all. Professional affiliate marketers only  behave ethically – adding value to the buying experience for  customers and working very hard at doing this. A lot of genuine hard  work is the only way to become successful in the long-term.

Until recently the industry has been poorly controlled and largely unregulated, but this is all changing as affiliate marketing now accounts for a substantial chunk of online retailers’ revenues.

These are exciting times for affiliate marketing as the industry is growing rapidly and is becoming a very professional area to work in – as anyone who attends the frequently held industry events and conferences will vouch for.

How Affiliate Marketing Works

Now if you’re wondering how the sales you make are tracked to you, the  answer is that each affiliate’s web link is encoded with a unique ID tracking  code, and this tags the sale to your account. Your commission amount per  sale will usually be in the form of a percentage – with a commission rate like  10% being a good figure to aim for.

Commissions will build up in your account as you make sales, and these are  held until you reach a certain payout level – usually about $100 or so. Your  earnings are then released, and a good affiliate can hope to receive a cheque  or direct transfer to their bank account each month.

How Hard is it & How Much Will You Earn?

credit:duchessa

In principle, affiliate marketing is very easy to do. You drive traffic to  your website or advertisement, and any sales you make earn you  money. However, it is not for the faint-hearted – especially if you  choose to pay for traffic. And affiliate marketing takes serious  commitment in terms of learning time, especially at the beginning.

You must be prepared to make a lot of mistakes and do a lot of  reading in forums initially, but over time the amount of money you  earn is only limited by the amount of time and work you put in. Of  course, you must also be working in profitable ways, which you learn  as you go along – through trial and error.

A recent survey commissioned by a UK affiliate network has showed that the majority of active affiliates make around $200 a month, but are also only working in the industry as a part time hobby. However, at the other end of the scale there are some affiliates who make millions a year through affiliate marketing alone (generally working full time at it). And of course there are many, many more who make a respectable full time income of several thousands a month.

How Should You Get Started?

The easiest way to get started is to read as much as possible  on the subject of being an affiliate. There is a lot of free  information online – especially in forums, about affiliate  marketing, so is not essential to buy a guide on the subject.  However, for those who would like a step by step guide, you  might want to consider buying Holly Mann’s Honest Riches (available as an ebook or paperback book).

Even whilst you are still learning through reading all you can  on affiliate marketing, you’ll need to sign up to some  affiliate  programmes to start putting your knowledge into  practice.  This is where the real learning begins, and things  become  more exciting.

You’ll want to sign up to one or two affiliate programmes to begin with – based on commission rates and choice of products to promote. This is best done through an affiliate network such as Affiliate Window (UK based products) or Commission Junction (international products), because you can browse through the programmes available and receive a single payout for all your programmes.

A simple, no-cost starting point would be to create a free blog about a topic   related to your affiliate programme or products. It is best if these are   interests of yours, but do not have to be. The next step would be to begin   filling this website with useful, unique articles and information. Once you   have a useful website, you can begin adding a few carefully chosen affiliate   links to your site. It is also essential to install website tracking such as   Google Analytics onto your webpages or blog so that you know which   keywords you are showing up for in the search engines, or where your   visitors are coming from.

To avoid confusion I have not touched on link-building, SEO or methods of   obtaining visitors. I will save that for a further guide. Hopefully this gives   you an idea of how to get started in affiliate marketing though.

If any of this sounds complicated, don’t worry, I am always available to   answer questions via my contact form on my website.

Wishing you lots of success and fun in your affiliate marketing adventures!

On a more serious note – I find this song inspirational and very relevant to the process of building an online business from scratch.

There is something quite unnerving about taking a different route to most people you know, and this is especially true with affiliate marketing if you are hoping to make a living out of it. Your state of mind reverts back to that of a child (or is that just me?) when you try to dream big and realise there are really no boundaries to what you can achieve. Especially in cyberspace.

It can also take a while to realise that even when you have a somewhat passive income stream in place, you should never sit back for too long and admire the view. Instead you should appreciate what you are achieving, but have backup strategies, new affiliate campaigns and other streams of revenue that you put into place – just incase something slides.

That said though, when you truly love what you do for work, so much so that going to bed at night after setting up a new PPC campaign feels like you’re a 5 year old waiting for Santa to arrive on Christmas morning – then it is definately all worthwhile. The climb is a lot of fun if you can put aside your fear. And the view from each mountain top is just breathtaking. Anyway, now you have an excuse to enjoy the wisdom of Miley!

We know as online customers ourselves, that when you do a Google search, or click on an ad, you expect to find the product you’re looking for at the end of the link you’ve clicked on. And when we end up at a busy homepage, it is off-putting and can distract us enough to leave without making even a necessary purchase.

This is where deeplinking comes into play – often it’s essential to send visitors to a specific landing page, especially when you are using search engine marketing. Many visitors will leave your landing page without making a purchase if they do not find what they’re looking for quickly and easily.

The Commission Junction affiliate network, or CJ.com, is one of the largest networks serving US and UK based affiliates and merchants. But I’ve never found it the easiest network to use, and until recently, I thought it was not possible to deeplink to specific pages or products – the same as with Clickbank. But many merchants do provide a deeplinking option if you know where to look.

How to find out if a merchant offers a deeplinking option:

• Go to the ‘advertise details’ page for a merchant then click on the link type you want to use at the right hand side of the page:

To find out if the merchant you want to link to allows it go to the merchant links area click on a banner or text link if deep linking is allowed there will be a note next to ‘Destination’ which says ‘Advertiser allows URL redirects for this link.’

How to create deeplinks:

• click ‘Get HTML’ besides one of the links from the list of results. (If you select more than one link with the checkboxes, then you will not be taken to the deeplinking page).

When you are given the HTML for the link, you will find out whether you can make this particular link into a deeplink. Unfortunately you currently have to check each link for a merchant to see if you can deeplink with it. This is something CJ are looking into changing, and according to their blog you can give them a call on 020 8785 5870 if you can’t find a deeplink for a merchant.

The image below shows the field you are looking for – a destination link option:

Change destination link to the URL of the page you want to an affiliate link to, then  click the ‘Update Link Code’ button.

Then, grab your deeplink code.

So, it was good timing that as I began to feel this way, I heard about several networking events happening near to me in London. First of all, I bought a ticket for the A4U Expo this year, which takes place in October. But whilst waiting for that event, I came across a free show called the ‘Online Marketing Show’, and I went along to both days of that this week. I even got the chance to sit on an affiliate panel for a debate on ‘the Principles of Affiliate Marketing’ – a nice opportunity to meet new people, especially since it was my first networking event!

There is another affiliate networking event this summer, which is free and specifically for socialising (unlike the Online Marketing Show). Drinks are free drinks and so is the BBQ, courtesy of all the big UK serving affiliate networks!

If like me, you think this sounds like a perfect chance to get out and meet other affiliates (away from a computer screen), then you can get full details and information on reserving a ticket over on the Affiliate Window event blog post, although tickets are limited. (For some reason I couldn’t get the ticket booking site to work through my Firefox browser, so I had to use IE). Perhaps I’ll see you there?

Affiliate Window

Catering to the UK market most specifically, the Affiliate Window network offers affiliate programs for a huge selection of high street brands and online stores which offer UK delivery. This is my favourite affiliate network for the quality of merchants, products and bi-monthly bank transfer payouts (at no extra charge). The below is a screenshot of some of my recent earnings through this network:

Merchants you can be affiliated with include:

• Play.com
• Marks and Spencers
• Vodafone
• Sky
• Currys
• ELC
• New Look
• PC World

Best features:

• Deep link builder tool – creates your product links automatically and tracks where your clicks from from clearly in your Aff Win analytics reports
• High quality merchants’ websites – no poor quality landing pages as all the affiliate programmes are for big name brands. This gives you the option of  direct linking to products and seeing good conversions, if you prefer not to use your own landing webpage for PPC campaigns.
• Shop window – an online store front that you embed into your website. Shop window provides your visitors with the top-selling products across the 4.5 million products on offer from 700 merchants through the network. Selling any of these through your online store will result in a commission.  See the demo site here
• Useful reports - breakdowns of where your conversions come from, including keyword tracking clicks (very useful for PPC!), earnings by merchants, earnings per click (again, useful for PPC to see if you’re in profit at a glance), and performance over time.
• Easy way to find affiliate programmes that convert and pay out - you can search for new merchants by important features like network earnings of affiliates, top rated (‘star performer’) programmes – those which genuinely convert best for affiliates, conversion rates, programme approval rates, and current payment status (if the programme is currently paying affiliates ).
• Good conversions - I’ve actively promoted about 3 affiliates through the programme (but hundreds of different product types through these), and 2 of 3 have converted really well, with daily sales resulting in profits through my PPC campaigns. Oh, and I don’t use my own landing pages either – but direct link to merchant pages… which usually isn’t recommended, but works for me with the programmes I’ve chosen.

You can sign up with Affiliate Window to become an affiliate here:

It costs £5 to register as an affiliate, but this is credited to your account when you are approved.

Other Affiliate Networks

I am also currently testing Market Leverage (CPA Offers), Clickbank and CJ on some of my sites. They are not converting well at present. I don’t like the quality of offers through MarketLeverage or Clickbank to be honest, but I am testing them nonetheless. This list will be updated when I have sustained success or good experiences with other affiliate networks.