Affiliate Networks Overview
You sell something on your website. Be it shoes, toothbrushes, elearning courses, software downloads, or pictures of your gran on a pottery mug… (hmmm, I might get one of those).
Now, if it’s something worth selling once, it’s worth selling a thousand times. And if one website is selling it, well, a thousand websites should be selling it. Herein lies the strength of an affiliate network – a thousand, ten thousand, heck – a million websites all selling the same item.
Build this kind of a network and you can forget Google, forget Bing – forget some pillock even hacking your own website and bringing it to its knees. You have created a distributed sales channel capable of continuing to sell your products / services regardless of what happens to your own site! It could even survive a nuclear attack – isn’t that what started the whole Arpanet (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET) (Internet) thing in the first place?
In Brief
An affiliate is someone with a website. A good affiliate is someone with a website with traffic. A great affiliate is someone with a website with appropriate traffic.
The affiliate simply pastes a piece of linking code onto this website. Linking code is typically for a text link or an image link, but sophisticated affiliate software tools like iDevAffiliate use page peels and lightboxes too.
So, a potential customer is browsing your affiliate’s website. They come across the information on your product and, suitably impressed by the picture of your gran, they decide to click through to your site to investigate further. At this point the affiliate software performs its first task – it places a piece of code (cookie) on the shopper’s computer so that any resulting sales may be attributed to the correct affiliate.
Now the shopper is on your website. They like the pottery mug bearing the picture of your beloved gran – a mere £5, p&p included! So, they buy it. At the point they reach, and then pass, checkout – another piece of the affiliate software performs its job. It ‘sends’ information about the sale to the affiliate control panel, allowing the original referring site to be credited with the value of the sale made.
At some point, you will login to your affiliate management area and confirm (or reject) the sale. When you do this, a percentage commission will be credited to the affiliate’s account. You will probably run some kind of month end in which the value of total commissions for each affiliate is calculated and then paid over.
Simple!
Want an example?
Well, anywhere you see a link to iDevAffiliate on this page – hover over it and examine the link code itself. It is actually an affiliate link. That’s right – if you click it and subsequently purchase iDevAffiliate – we’ll be credited a small commission (15%), as this website has signed up as an iDevAffiliate affiliate (try saying that after a pint or two).
Why did we sign up as an iDevAffiliate affiliate?
Well, our software Course Merchant supports iDevAffiliate, as well as other affiliate tools. You can use iDevAffiliate to build and promote a large and sophisticated distributed sales channel to sell your e-learning Moodle courses – just as described above. Course Merchant also has its own in-built affiliate capability, not quite as sophisticated as iDevAffiliate perhaps, but still pretty effective. Info on Course Merchant’s own affiliate system is here >>>
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