Affiliate Networks

Affiliate networks and how to get started using them for affiliate marketing is the subject of this article.

Affiliate networks are companies that act as an intermediary between publishers (website owners who want to join affiliate programs) and merchant affiliate programs (website with affiliate programs who are looking for website publishers). They make it easier for website publishers to find and join affiliate programs which are compatible with the subject matter of their website. This enables website publishers to more easily and efficiently monetize their website content for generating income from related affiliate programs.

Affiliate networks also benefit those companies and websites that offer affiliate programs by enabling them to reach a larger audience by promoting their affiliate programs to all of the publishers participating in the affiliate network and by taking the headache out of managing your own affiliate program.

So what does this look like in practice. I was looking for affiliate programs for my Old-Woodworking-Tools website.

I was aware of several programs but certainly didn't know of all the possible affiliate programs related to the content on my website, so I joined several affiliate networks including Commission Junction, Google Affiliate Network, and Share a Sale and began looking for ways to monetize the Old Woodworking Tools website with links to the products or services from affiliate programs.

Each of these affiliate networks represents thousands of websites with affiliate programs on hundreds of thousands of different topics. Their websites have tools that let you browse a directory or search by product keywords or company names. After a few minutes of searching the Google Affiliate Network, I located the Rockler company as one possible affiliate program that would meet my needs.

Rockler is a company that has a website that sells woodworking tools and related products like furniture hardware, finishing materials, etc, that would be a good fit for my site concept, old woodworking tools. They were a member of the Google Affiliate Network so after I logged into the affiliate network website and did a search for products related to old woodworking tools, Rocker was one of the affiliate programs that appeared in the search results.

I completed a simple application to become a Rocker affiliate. After a day or two my application was approved and then I had access to the affiliate program information, text and image links etc. for the Rocker products. There were several items that I thought I could do well with given the traffic at the website (about 1,000 unique visitors per day) and the complimentary content from Rockler.

For example, I have several pages about old table saws on the site. Rocker sells a variety of table saw accessories like rip fences, miter gauges, hold-downs, etc. that would fit with the table saw content and that visitors to my table saw pages would be interested in and who could potentially purchase one of these items.

This was a great benefit to me because I could offer visitors to my website information about accessories closely related to my site content and if a visitor clicked a link to the Rockler website and made a purchase, I would earn a %5 commission on the sale.

I did the same for several other affiliate programs that were related to my old woodworking tools website. Once I had selected the items I wanted to promote on my website, I logged into the affiliate network, found the items, copied the code for the affiliate ads and

For me, the web publisher, the affiliate networks make it easy to search multiple affiliate programs for products that are related to my site content. When it comes time to receive a check , they simplify that as well as they consolidate all affiliate payments into a single payment each month. That way I don't have to track each affiliate program separately.

Instead I have only one (or a few if I'm using more than one affiliate network) site to login to, one monthly report to track, one affiliate check, each month from the network, not each individual affiliate. This simplifies much of my paper work and takes less time each month to reconcile monthly income reports.

For the affiliate program, it also relieves them of the many headaches associated with running their own affiliate program in house. Instead they can join an affiliate network like those mentioned above and let them manage all of the individual affiliate relationships and take care of the record keeping and tracking that is involved.

Using an affiliate network is a good way for anyone just starting out with affiliate marketing to learn the business and to get access to a large selection of affiliate products, many of which may match the content and subject matter niche of your website.

Any of the following affiliate networks would be a good place to start looking. I've had success with each of these affiliate networks on some of my websites. A word of caution however, to those who think affiliate marketing is easy. It's not. It takes a ton of traffic to your site, and it's hard to make money in affiliate marketing when you're also using Google AdSense.

Commission Junction (www.cj.com)

Commission Junction was one of the first affiliate networks. I manages thousands of companies affiliate marketing programs including many of the Top Fortune 400 companies. Commission Junction is now owned by ValueClick.

Commission Junction provides services internationally and they offer some excellent tracking data. They also make regular monthly payments to publishers. They also offer regular seminars and training sessions for those new to affiliate marketing. CJ is a good first choice for anyone entering the affiliate marketing business.

Clickbank (www.clickbank.com)

Clickbank is another good affiliate network for those just getting started with affiliate marketing. Clickbank deals mainly with egoods like ebooks, digital audio, tutorials, and other digital products that can be easily downloaded. Clickbank commissions are usually much higher than many other affiliate networks and can sometimes go as high as 70% or the purchase price depending on the product.

Clickbank offers more than 10,000 digital products but because of the relatively high commissions that are paid, competition for selling them is stiff. If you have highly trafficked niche site, however, you can do well with affiliate products that match your content or niche subject matter. Clickbank topics span the gambit from laptops to barbeques and everything in between.

Amazon (www.amazon.com)

Yes, Amazon! While it isn't thought of as an affiliate network, it really is. Amazon represents thousands of vendors and their products, pays a percentage of each sale to the website publisher, and tracks all of the clicks and data that comes from the publishers website. They send out monthly payments to publishers for their commission on the sale of merchandise from customers referred to their website from the publishers site.

Amazon also makes it quite easy to generate adds and text links for various products on their website. They offer a nice user interface for publishers (called Amazon Associates) to login to and track their clicks, sales, and commissions. They also provide tools for setting up an Amazon Store on your website, and a variety of links and banners, widgets, and stores that can be used to get the attention of visitors to your site.

ShareaSale (www.shareasale.com)

Share a Sale is another highly recommended affiliate network that has over 2,000 merchant members. You can join and promote their products via text links, image ads, promotional codes and more. Some of their merchants also provide datafeeds.

Merchants offer a variety of ways to make money. Some are pay a fixed rate per lead while others pay a percentage of a sale.

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