Starting Up with Jim Price

Affiliate marketing is a great way to both add substance to your site while at the same time generating significant revenue.  Here’s how the business model works:

You join the affiliate marketing program of an online retailer – let’s say Bubba’s Barbeque – and choose which of their products you wish to promote on your website – let’s say you want to start with two things, BubbaSauce and BubbaTongs.  You select those
products, and their pictures, names and product descriptions appear on your site.  You can choose to write articles, blog posts or other information on these items to customize the information.  Then, when a visitor to your site clicks on one of the items and chooses to purchase it, they are automatically taken to the Bubba’s Barbeque site, while your site receives a predetermined sales commission for that sale.  Most affiliate programs plant cookies on the buyers’ computers, so that even if they purchase up to a month later, you receive commission credit for having directed a sale to the merchant’s site.

So let’s put ourselves back in the shoes of Adam and me just launching our mythical startup GemGuitars.com.  We want to generate some cool content fast, and we find that we can join Amazon’s affiliate program and almost instantly add great content on books on the care and feeding of old guitars, old jazz and blues musicians, great sheet music, and so on.   And we can be generating meaningful revenue and creating a quality site that attracts aficionado traffic, as well.

So how do you find affiliate programs to join?  Fortunately, there are intermediaries that organize and run everything for you.  Look up affiliate marketing networks – such as Commission Junction (www.cj.com), ClickBank (www.clickbank.com), AffiliateScout (www.affiliatescout.com), or Clix Galore (www.clixgalore.com), to name a few.  Each of these networks has as many as thousands of online merchants registered with them.

All you have to do, as a publisher or website owner, is join a given affiliate sales network once, and then select among its many merchants – and within each merchant, their many products.  Merchants’ commission structures vary all over the map, with the heavies such as Amazon or Target offering a fairly light 3-5%, while merchants with less market power are willing to offer 25% or more to get you to list their products on your site.

Once you’ve joined a program with a given affiliate sales network – say Commission Junction – you can sign up with as many as
dozens of merchants through that network, and if you choose list hundreds of products from those merchants on your site.  The network will do all the back-office work to track the sales and send you a single, itemized commission statement and check at the end of each month.  It’s that straightforward.