What are Affiliate Programs?

Affiliate programs are a partnership offered by many online businesses (or traditional businesses with an online presence) that allow website publishers like yourself to market and sell their products.  When you sell one of their products, you earn a commission fee.  The best part about it is all you have to do is send traffic to their websites where your users complete the transaction - you will never need to process orders or mail products and can concentrate on running your online business.

An example is the affiliate program for Barnes and Nobles Books - all you have to do is place links and reviews of their books on your web pages (perhaps books having to do with your industry or your website topic) and when a user clicks on one of these links, they are sent to the BN website where they complete their purchase you get paid commission for it.  The challenge for you is how do you market products on your websites and more importantly, how do you get your customers to click and then purchase these products?

Affiliate Marketing

You can join affiliate programs direct from many online businesses (e.g. Barnes and Noble).  However, many of the more popular businesses are migrating their affiliate programs to Affiliate Management Companies.  These are online companies that focus on managing large assortments of affiliate programs - they provide the online accounts, tools, account managers, and statistical tracking so that your online marketing campaign can be effective.  The best part about these companies is that by creating one singular account with them, you have access to the hundreds (even thousands) of affiliate programs and merchants that they offer.

Commission Junction (CJ) offers a variety of other benefits to affiliates. First, unlike many of the other affiliate networks, commissions earned from all merchants are pooled together in one check, and you are paid monthly by CJ directly (not by the merchant). The advantage here is that if you sign up for, say, 10 different CJ merchant's affiliate programs, and each one earns you $5, you will be paid the full $50 you earned.  With many other affiliate networks, you would have been paid zero, since you would have not reached the normal minimum check sizes they set (generally $25-100 per merchant). Additionally, CJ offers centralized online commission reports for all merchant programs under one unified log on and interface.

Check out our advice and tips page for the Google Adsense program.

Useful Resources

Commission Junction University (CJU) is a great place to read about the industry, get the latest tips and advice, and learn about affiliate marketing regardless of your experience level.

Webmasterworld.com is the premier affiliate marketing forum on the internet.  Read the forums for insight onto many internet-related topics including: Google marketing, Google Adsense/Adwords, advertising, ecommerce, analytics, and programming.

SEO Tools is a collection of the best online SEO tools and applications that will help you to optimize your website and move your search engine position higher

Google Analytics Conversion University - Help files from Google on how to best optimize your site, convert, and maximize ROI.

Search Engine Optimization

SEO Tools  has links to the best SEO Tools on the internet and these tools will help you to optimize your website and move your search engine position higher.

SEO Book Keyword Tool tells you the popularity of key words based on Word Tracker and other databases.  This helps you decide whether or not to pursue certain key word combinations in your marketing.

Aaron Wall's SEO Tools has many excellent SEO tools that will help you optimize your SEO campaign.

 

Faces in the Crowd

Brett Tabke is an American programmer and SEO professional.  He is the founder of WebmasterWorld.com, an online search engine and internet marketing forum that often receives over 1 million page views per day.  One of his most famous published posts is the "26 Steps to Success with Google".

Aaron Wall is a pioneer in the SEO industy.  Over the last couple years Mr. Wall's websites have been mentioned in news publications like The Wall Street Journal, The London Times, Wired, BusinessWeek, Business2.0, Time Magazine, MSNBC, Slashdot, and The Guardian.  He is most widely known for the e-book he has published called SEO Book.

Affiliate Industry Books

Super Affiliate Handbook
Rosalind sells this book with the subtitle "How I made $436,797 in one year selling other people's stuff online" and I don't doubt it for a minute. The information she has included in this book is very detailed and there are so many ideas for how to get more traffic, better conversions, faster responses and so on that I just couldn't take it all in. I will be reading this book again after I've had some more time to try out the things I was able to take in.

The Ultimate Guide to Google Adwords
Perry Marshall is well-known as the world's top Google adwords expert. I've used Perry's tactics to make tens of thousands of dollars in my adwords campaigns, and I even interviewed him for my writing adwords.com site -- so be sure to grab Perry's latest book.

One of the things I like best about Perry's knowledge is that he's tested various campaigns, and helped many clients run many adwords campaigns - so he knows what Really works, and what doesn't, based on a rich background of actual campaign results.  Investing in Perry Marshall's training, and resources like this superb new book, is "money in the bank", if you're interested in using Google adwords. Perry's the "go to" guy for Adwords - highly recommended.

Web Analytics an Hour a Day
'Web Analytics: An Hour a Day' describes in an absorbing and insightful way the most important topics for a Web Analyst or any professional related to the management of a website. Topics covered include: basic terminology, tool selection/implementation, online segmentation, conversion rates improvement, competitive analysis, and many others.

Web Analytics for Dummies
I am grateful for Web Analytics for Dummies efforts to lay out what was once Greek to me comprehensively and in basic terms. Before its purchase, I was going to go so far as pay someone to do my analytics for me; but now I can positively say I [think] I am capable of doing the job myself.