Affiliate Business Program

Affiliate Marketing And Revenue Sharing

Affiliate marketing refers to an incentive scheme set-up by online merchants to generate sales and grow their business. Basically, those who sign up as an ‘affiliate’ with the merchant receive revenue share, sales commission, or a fixed rate depending on the parameters that the merchant has set up.

The most common schemes are the Cost-Per-Action (CPA) and Cost-per-sale (CPS) schemes – meaning that an affiliate is remunerated from a referral to the merchant only if the customer/internet user buys or subscribes to the merchant’s website.

Some incentive schemes work on a Cost-Per-Click basis (CPC) which means that the affiliate earns when an advert is just clicked upon (or the user is redirected in some way from the affiliate’s website or email to the merchant.) This is also closely linked in with the Cost-per-mil (CPM) method, where the affiliate is paid for just displaying the adverts on their site. Although these two methods only account for 1% of affiliate marketing, due to many fraudsters taking advantage of it and therefore becoming too risky for the merchant. The more common CPA/CPS schemes mentioned above bare no risk at all to the merchant.

Affiliate marketing owes its roots to the revenue sharing idea that has been around long before the internet. However, affiliate marketing itself was birthed in late 1994, when companies like CDNOW and Amazon.com saw this low-cost opportunity to grow their online business. The success of those companies proves in many ways the success of the affiliate marketing system.

Affiliate marketing can sometimes be confused with Google’s AdSense scheme, which is not entirely the same. Google’s AdSense works with contextual advertising, and is not considered true Affiliate Marketing.
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Online Marketing

Your Affiliate Link and Affiliate Marketing

After an affiliate marketer chooses a product to promote, he is given a unique website link called an “affiliate link”. In this link, the unique identity of an affiliate marketer is attached. The affiliate marketer is required to promote this affiliate link as much as he can. For this purpose websites, forums, blogs, newsletters and many other ways are used. Whenever a visitor clicks on an affiliate link to go to the merchant’s website and make a purchase, the affiliate is credited.

This means that if someone looks at your affiliate link and removes your affiliate id from that link and then uses it to purchase products, you will not be credited. The reason is that merchant will not be able to know which affiliate had sent this buyer. The only way to get credited is the complete affiliate link.

Usually the affiliate link is in this form:
http://www.anymerchantwebsite.com?aff_id=someidlike123

In this URL there are two parts:
a) http://www.anymerchantwebsite.com
It is the link to the merchant website.

b) aff_id = someidlike123
It is the unique affiliate id of the affiliate marketer.

Risk

You can see in the above example that it is really very easy to remove the trailing affiliate id from the affiliate link. Anyone can remove your affiliate id and visit the merchant website to purchase. When this happens, you lose the commission that was rightfully yours. This is a problem for the affiliate marketer.

How to Resolve This Issue

There is a solution for this issue. You can hide your affiliate id in the affiliate URL in a way that it cannot be stripped off. But this can only be done if you are using your own hosting. Just follow the following steps to do this:

Using your file manager, make a new HTML file. Name this file relevant to the product you are promoting. In this file use the coding from this website

http://www.buildthatlist.net/hiding-your-affiliate-link/

After putting the code from the above mentioned website, save your file with an HTML extension. Now when someone types your personalized web address, the code in the HTML file will show them your affiliate link in such a way that they will not be able to edit it. They will not know that the link they are clicking is an affiliate link.

But if someone still does not want to use an affiliate id, he can do that by deleting their cookie files and changing some internal files. But the chances of this act are less likely as most of the people don’t have much time. And it is not giving them any loss if they are using your affiliate id to purchase something on the internet.

Affiliate URL is the link that is promoted by the affiliates to generate their affiliate revenue. This URL contains their affiliate id to identify them. Don’t use the plain and simple affiliate URL, because it will be really easy for anyone to remove your id and make a purchase. If this happened you would not collect commission, even though you had sent the user to make a purchase. The solution to this is to hide your affiliate id in your affiliate URL so that it cannot be easily removed. For this purpose you need to have your own hosting.
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