Internet Advertising / Affiliate Programs

Ever since the early days of product promotion, it has been important to create what is nowadays known as "brand awareness", whereby you would try to get a name which was known by a large number of people and associated with one product.  One very good early example of this was the vacuum cleaner which has been known more commonly, since early 1900s as "the Hoover" (Hoover being one of the few companies to produce reliable early vacuum cleaners).

As technology improves, the range of marketing possibilities has also increased.  Any company which wants to promote brand awareness throughout the world has to use displays, media, shop fronts and word of mouth in order to spread their name and link with identifiable products, as widely as possible.  In actual fact, many companies continue to rely upon word of mouth as being the most beneficial type of promotion, however, the rapid expansion of the internet over the past 5-10 years has meant that it is even more important to get your presence felt and to create a corporate identity which will enable your web-site and possibly reviews of your products to be found quickly and easily.  Without this a search for any product is likely to return 100+ website addresses, all of which may relate to the given product, something similar, a competitor's website or even something completely unrelated.

Although a few companies may run their own programmes which you can join direct in order to offer their advertising on your web-site, you will probably find it easier to join a scheme which offers several affiliate programmes, allowing you to easily track all traffic through your web-site, collect commissions together (avoiding bank fees) and keep your links up to date easily.

A recent report has noted that on-line advertising has grown by 19% year on year to a total of £196.7m (outstripping cinema advertising for the first time) and yet it still only represents 1.4% of the total amount spent on advertising on all media - there is therefore room for a lot of growth in this area and therefore you need to consider joining a programme which will inform you of new schemes as they come on line, enabling you to keep your site interesting and advertising relevant.

There are several such schemes available, all of which offer the same basic facilities, including providing rolling banners (where they will switch between chosen advertisers each time that a webpage is refreshed), static banner adverts and text links to numerous advertisers, all willing to pay you for introducing traffic and/or sales to their website.  You can check for traffic errors, which may be caused by a problem in your HTML code, or an expired link, keep tabs on your commission earned (including trends typically over a couple of days, a week, a month and a year) and apply easily to join the numerous programmes.

Such banners can also be used in email marketing campaigns, although many of the advertisers look on this as a dubious practice, as it reflects upon the advertiser more than the person who sent the email.  As a result, the advertisers and affiliate schemes tend to keep an eye on all such emails to ensure that they are not used in bulk emails and offer proper opt-in schemes.  However, please see the notes at the bottom of this review about how you can actively manage an email opt-in scheme which should be acceptable to your affiliate advertisers.

Although many of the advertisers pay commissions in US dollars, the schemes will generally collect these commissions together and convert them into your local currency for payment direct to your bank account (or via cheque) without incurring any conversion fees on your behalf.

The choice of scheme does not really appear to be limited to the facilities on offer, but rather the advertisers available through that scheme.  For example, we ourselves have used several different affiliate links on our website, but in order to offer the range and specifically targeted programmes, we have had to join several different scheme providers.

It may be worth your while joining one of the affiliate newsletters which exist, such as the WeAreAffiliates free weekly newsletter which features new affiliate programs on the market and tells of affiliates & affiliate program success stories. It even allows you to check out the affiliate programs & networks at My 15 Best Performers.  This can help you to pick the affiliate programs which you want to join and promote on your website.

Out of the best affiliate scheme providers which we use, we have found that Commission Junction offer the widest range of advertiser programmes and one of their most successful links (eBay), even allows you to create a frame containing a specific search for items listed on that web-site, which can be added to your own web-page and updated in real-time (see our second hand Sinclair QL items page for an example).  Other schemes which we belong to and have found provide very similar facilities to Commission Junction are:

Affiliate Window - offer a broad range of schemes as well as allowing you to easily create a store front.

Trade Doubler offers one of the most flexible schemes around.

UK Affiliates (Deal Media Group)

Leadhound affiliate network  

Affiliate Future Network

The only real problem with these various schemes is that several of them insist that you join their scheme as a publisher in order to find out the details of all the affiliate programmes available.  Luckily, it is free to join such schemes.  

Trade Doubler is one of the most flexible programmes in that it allows you to specify whether any advertising link should be included as Javascript, HTML,  a pop-up or pop-under, or plain text (which you can edit).  This allows you to overcome problems with browsers which do not support Javascript (or have it disabled) or people who use advertising blocking software.  Trade Doubler also offer various programmes which provide some text content to include on your site, such as Tesco.com which will provide details of their current best electrical offers, including details and pictures to include on your website.  Finally, perhaps the biggest advantage of Trade Doubler is that they manage several shopping portal websites, such as theMutual.net and GreasyPalm, who use the advertisers on the Trade Doubler network almost exclusively.  If you therefore advertise a website through Trade Doubler, you are guaranteed a market of people who are interested in reading your banners and advertising material, as well as having an incentive to sign up or try your program, since they will receive a reward in the form of a percentage share of your affiliate scheme payment.  

Affiliate Window also offers a very wide range of programs, and allow you to choose whether to create links as Javascript or HTML.  Many of their affiliate programs also offer email templates.  They also provide excellent tools to create your own store front and custom content units, using the products on offer from the various affiliates.  This scheme is therefore extremely flexible and could be used to allow you to offer a wide range of items on your website with very little effort on your part.

Although UK Affiliates offers a broad range of programmes and an easy to use website, we feel that both the Leadhound and Affiliate Future Network websites let those programmes down, as the websites are not very inspiring and also the range of programmes which they offer tend to be from lesser known websites, many of which are adult related.

These affiliate schemes have been used very effectively by some of the more innovative internet companies to set up websites which offer loyalty schemes of some form to give back some of the revenue which they earn from these affiliate programmes - we discuss these loyalty schemes here

So, if you run your own web-site, this can provide a very useful source of additional revenue, provided that you follow simple rules:

1. Keep the number of adverts down to a minimum on any given web-page
2. Ensure that the size and style of any adverts fits in with your general web-site design.
3. Ensure that any advertising is relevant to your audience - for example, it is not worth advertising Viagra on a site aimed at teenagers.
4. Utilise both text links and banner adverts on a given page to allow links to be as unobtrusive as possible.
5. Avoid email marketing, unless you are certain that the recipients will find an interest in the content which you are providing to them.  SPAM is one of the most dreaded side effects of using the internet and likely to get your Internet Service Provider to bar your account.
6. If you insist on using email marketing, you may like to consider using the Constant Contact software available from Roving Software which provides tools to add to your web-site to enable people to opt-in to your email list and then you can use this system to create HTML newsletters (using supplied templates) and send them to your email list.  You can then access results, to find out how many customers read your email and check which links were clicked on and remove invalid email addresses (or people who opt-out). Charges are based on the number of subscribers to your email list (up to 50 subscribers is free of charge)

To give you an idea of the sort of earnings available - we have provided a table of our earnings from the previous month below.  This does of course vary month to month and also depends upon the advertisers which you promote on your website.

How about earning money for searches?