An effective means to reward website owners for the goods they promote are affiliate programs which give the advertiser a portion of the profits of sale. Affiliate programs are extremely flexible and are well suited to nonphysical goods, like software or online education programs. These products do not typically require delivery fees or costs per unit, and therefore merchants usually give affiliates incentives of up to 75% of the sales value. If a product was sold for $100, the affiliate would earn $75 of that sale!
In summary, an affiliate program works as follows:
1. The affiliate adds a link to a product on their site. This link is frequently backed up with a comparison, critique or a call to action.
2. A possible client who clicks the link on the affiliate’s website will be sent to the affiliate service such as Clickbank or PayDotCom.
3. The affiliate service adds the affiliate’s info as a cookie to the customer’s computer.
4. The affiliate service then directs the potential customer to the product website.
5. When the potential client clicks the buy button they are directed back to the affiliate service.
6. The visitor makes the transaction.
7. The affiliate service interrogates the cookies on the visitor’s browser to determine the initial source of the visitor.
8. By comparing the affiliate information from the customer’s computer the affiliate service distributes funds to the affiliate.
So let’s look at a case study for a particular piece of software to show how this works.
SpinChimp is a brand-new spinner released by Aktura Technology. Affiliates get 50% of the sale cost and the software sells for $35. Aktura Technology utilize Paydotcom to track their affiliates. Paydotcom needs affiliates to be a member so they can get money for their advertising efforts. As is the case for Paydotcom the merchant providing the service pays all the affiliate service fees.
On Paydotcom all services looking for affiliates are advertised in the marketplace. A product is simply found by performing a marketplace search. Every product also has a product page that can be reached by clicking on the product link in the marketplace. The product page has a personalized link for the service that facillitates who to grant the sale to by Paydotcom.
The affiliate would then modify their website to contain the link given by Paydotcom. Usually to increase the usefulness of the site more data on the product will be provided. This additional data might be an article on the product, listing its is pros and bad points. Potential customer’s will be more likely to trust the affiliates data if you are always truthful in your reviews. The SpinChimp site also provides banners on the affiliate page to help affiliates get clicks. This is common practise for most products.
SpinChimp is slightly unique here in that it has a free three day trial period. Therefore, often people who click on the add will probably not purchase the product on that day. Paydotcom handles this problem as their cookies are stored for 6 months. This means that when the trial period is over, the visitor will either buy the product or stop using it. So whether the purchase occurs immediately or after the trial period the affiliate will still get the payment irrespective.
So although the process is fairly complex, it is transparent as far as the customer is concerned, and only requires the placement of a link on the affiliate’s website.