AFFILIATE MARKETING SCHEMES AND NETWORKS

Affiliate marketing schemes and networks, best affiliate marketing programmes to join with no set up costs or fees.

One of the biggest problems facing affiliates (who are often individuals or small businesses) is how to find merchants and convince them to take party in an affiliate relationship. Similarly, for a merchant who wants to use affiliate marketing to increase their online sales, it is hard to know where to find affiliates and a big administrative overhead to keep track of all the various affiliate commission payments that are owed. This is where an affiliate network comes in.

Start of article about Affiliate Marketing.

An affiliate network acts as a middleman by bringing together a range of merchants and a large number of affiliates. As well as providing a convenient centralised resource for affiliates to find merchants to promote, the affiliate networks also take care of tracking all the clickthrus and sales and handle the transfer of commission payments from merchants to affiliates.

How much money you make from affiliate programmes will depend on a number of factors. First of all, there is the question of how much traffic your website gets. After all, if your website only gets two or three visitors per day then you are likely to earn a lot less than someone whose website gets several hundred visitors per day.

If your website does not get much traffic then you will need to consider using pay-per-click advertising or search engine optimisation to drive more visitors to your site. Of course, you must strike a balance. It's no good spending hundreds of pounds on PPC advertising if it only earns you a few pence in affiliate revenues.

Secondly, you should try to pick affiliate schemes from merchants that are relevant to the content of your website. In the example I gave earlier, Mark decided to become an affiliate for merchants who sold products related to the theme of his site - his site was about film reviews and he picked affiliate programmes that offered his visitors the opportunity to buy films on DVD. By doing that, he is likely to get more people clicking on the affiliate banners than if he had opted to promote something unrelated like life insurance.

Thirdly, you need to pick a merchant whose products or services are going to sell and who offers a decent level of commission. Again, you need to strike a balance. Suppose you decide to join an affiliate scheme to promote and sell the latest MP3 player. One merchant might be offering a 20% commission versus the 10% that is on offer from another merchant. So the one offering 20% is the best one to sign up with as an affiliate, right? Not necessarily. If that merchant is charging £20 more per item than the merchant who is offering 10% commission, then you may be better off going with the lower commission merchant because you stand a better chance of making more sales through them. Similarly, one merchant may have a more attractive and easy to use website which will lead to higher conversion rates and hence more earnings in affiliate commissions. Often the only way to determine which affiliate scheme is best for any particular product or service is to try two or three and compare the results and earnings from each one over a period of time.

So what are the best affiliate schemes?