Choose an Affiliate Program
The affiliate is the middleman between consumers and merchants.
Affiliate marketing is when a business rewards you for each visitor or customer they get from your marketing efforts. It is using one website (yours) to drive traffic to another (theirs).
Your job as an affiliate is to promote others businesses on the internet and to match consumers with products. Your compensation is the commission for each sale (or lead).
Affiliates display on their Web sites:
- advertiser's ads
- advertiser's text links
- advertiser's product links
Affiliates are paid a commission by an advertiser when:
- a consumer makes a purchase (a sale)
- fills out a form (a lead)
- subscribes to a service (a lead)
- visits a company's site (a lead)
An Affiliate (or publisher):
- Promotes other people's products or services on their Web site
- Earns a commission for sales or leads that are referred
- Has a blog or Web site with other people's ads
Compensations are based on a certain value for each:
- Visit (Pay-per-click)
- Registrant (Pay-per-lead)
- Customer (Pay-per-Sale)
There are tens of thousands of Internet companies that pay commissions through affiliate programs.
A few online companies like Amazon.com run their own affiliate programs; but most use third party affiliate networks.
Top Affiliate Networks:
- Commission Junction
- Link Share
- Share A Sale
Since Commission Junction is the largest, it'll be the one used as our example.
Get started by first creating a free account at cj.com:
- Go to http://www.cj.com/
- Click "Affiliate Services" (lower left)
- Click "Join us"
- Click "Publisher"
- Click "Get Started Now"
- Check box: "I do not have a CJ Publisher account and wish to sign up"
- Enter the CAPTCHA and click "Submit"
- Enter all the required information
- You will be asked to enter your website name ( click here if you don't have one yet )
- Once you finish entering all your info, click "Accept Terms"
- Commission Junction will then send you an email with your password
