Are you an affiliate of mine?
Affiliate Marketing Screen shot for Elegant Themes
Affiliate Marketing is where you signup with a company to be able to recommend them and in return receive a commission if the recommendation ends up in a sale. This is done by you having a unique URL that identifies you to the company. Here is an example. Ezylearn is an affiliate for Elegant Themes, who make an excellent range of WordPress themes to quickly enable you to have a professional looking website, all you need to do is write the content. Our special affiliate link for Elegant Themes is http://www.elegantthemes.com/affiliates/idevaffiliate.php?id=4090_0_1_7 and it’s the special “id” at the end of the URL that identifies EzyLearn.
Most affiliate links are not displayed in full but are either compressed (like this: http://bit.ly/aviJFf) using a special URL compressing site like www.bit.ly or simply included as a hyperlink like this. But no matter how they are used they are effective in bringing new visitors to a website.
The example used above (Elegant Themes) uses a self managed affiliate system that is running on their own web server called iDevAffiliate and it’s very powerful. It is ideal for technical people who know how to set this type of system up quite easily but most people prefer to have someone else manage the affiliate program for them. Companies like Commission Junction and Clixgalore are examples of companies who can help you manage your own affiliate program.
I setup an affiliate program for our online MYOB course earlier this year with ClixGalore and we managed to get a reasonable number of affiliates who wanted to promote our website in exchange for $30 commission. This commission figure represents quite a decent return considering the value of the sale. A fantastic aspect of affiliate marketing programs is that it establishes a win-win relationship whereby once a payment for the goods or services is confirmed a commission is paid. I also encourages a committed sales effort because the commission earned is usually only paid out once the total commission reaches a realistic value of say $100.
When you use a company like ClixGalore you pay all of your money to them and they take care of paying the affiliate as well as themselves from the statistics they gather. At EzyLearn we’ve discovered that they are not the easiest people to deal with and I’ll share more of my experiences with them over the next month or so. I’m happy to say that there are lots of alternatives from companies like zferral.com to open source scripts that are run from within a WordPress website like MagicAffiliate.
We’ll soon be relaunching the EzyLearn affiliate program so stay tuned for more info at this blog. Remember you can subscribe to this blog using the email field below or at the right of my website.