today i'm going to explore the world of affiliate marketing. affiliate marketing is a mechanism by which you direct customers to another website and you get essentially a commission for sales on that website. for example, if i were an amazon affiliate and you clicked on a link on my site to get to amazon and made a purchase, i'd get some percentage of the sale.
so, i'm going to sign up for a few of these and chart the progress. first up, you guessed it -- amazon.
- amazon.com. it was really easy to sign up for their affiliate program. i just had to sign into my amazon account and fill out a very short app, which included giving some data about my site. as you can see, i've already linked to amazon using the affiliate link. the way it works is that they provide a unique id that tells them who referred the visitor in. if that results in a sale, you get a commission. actually, it even works if you use the link yourself, so at worst it's a way to save some money when you buy from them.
- ebay.com. the signup process was a bit more complicated. they outsource their program through a site called commission junction. it's not as finely tuned as amazon, but it didn't take much effort, either.
- commission junction. since i had to sign up for commission junction anyway, i figured i'd take a look at it. it's a affiliate network, so it sort of sits between an affiliate and a seller and links the two up. they make it easy to sign up with a number of sellers, so you can tailor your ads to line up with your site. but, their site is really, really slow. i almost gave up a few times. i signed up with capitol one, equifax, citibank, ing direct, and lendingtree, but all but equifax and lendingtree have a manual approval process.
No comments:
Post a Comment