Chapter 26
Affiliate Advertising

Affil­i­ate adver­tis­ing pro­vides you rev­enue. You put affil­i­ate ads in your con­tent, and the adver­tis­ers pay you. The pay­ment terms vary, but many affil­i­ate ads can be very lucrative.

Pick­ing affil­i­ate adver­tis­ers is some­thing that requires care­ful con­sid­er­a­tions. You want to pick adver­tis­ers that will appeal to your web­book read­ers. If they don’t click on ads, you don’t get paid. Beyond that, how­ev­er, you don’t want to alien­ate your read­ers by putting in front of them ads in which they have no inter­est what­so­ev­er. In oth­er words, the ads must rel­e­vant to your con­tent; it’s the con­tent that attracts the read­ers to your webbook.

Anoth­er con­sid­er­a­tion is how much does the affil­i­ate adver­tis­er pay you and for what? Three ways that affil­i­ate adver­tis­er might pay you:

1. A click on the affil­i­ate add link. This usu­al­ly pays the least, because there’s no guar­an­tee to the affil­i­ate adver­tis­er that the click through will amount to any action by the user (read­er).
2. A click on the affil­i­ate ad and the user takes some action there­after. The action might be to fill out an appli­ca­tion or ques­tion­naire. It might be sim­ply for the user to add their address to the affil­i­ate adver­tis­er’s email­ing list.
3. Some adver­tis­ers seek a click fol­lowed by a pur­chase. In oth­er words, you don’t get paid unless the user pur­chas­es some­thing from the affil­i­ate advertiser.

Pay­ment is typ­i­cal­ly a fixed amount of cash con­tributed to your account. In the case of a sale, how­ev­er, it might be a per­cent­age of the sales price. What­ev­er the arrange­ment, you do not get paid until a read­er clicks on the affil­i­ate add in most cas­es not get paid until the read­er take some action thereafter.

The name of the game is to get paid as much as pos­si­ble for the affil­i­ate ads that you include in your web­book. Thus, in choos­ing your affil­i­ate adver­tis­er’s you always con­sid­er the amount to be paid. In addi­tion, you must con­sid­er the like­li­hood that one of your read­ers will take the action which sat­is­fies an affil­i­ate adver­tis­er’s requirement.

What are some of the pit­falls. First, choos­ing the affil­i­ate adver­tis­ers that pay the most is like­ly not the best pol­i­cy. The adver­tis­ing must be rel­e­vant as well as pay well. It’s quite pos­si­ble that you will include affil­i­ate ads that pay very lit­tle, but you con­sid­er them to be of great val­ue to your users.

Sec­ond, you will want to test out any affil­i­ate ad you include in your web­book. You can’t test it your­self, because affil­i­ate adver­tis­ers do not per­mit you to click on the ads in your web­book for obvi­ous rea­sons. Nonethe­less, you can use some­one else’s com­put­er to test the affil­i­ate ads. You want to make sure that an affil­i­ate ad is not some­thing that will be offen­sive to your users. In addi­tion, you want make sure that the affil­i­ate ads are not some kind of scam that expos­es users to fraud.

So where in the world will you find affil­i­ate adver­tis­ers? You can­not go to indi­vid­ual adver­tis­ers to nego­ti­ate some kind of a adver­tis­ing arrange­ment. It would take far too much time and ener­gy on both your part and the part of the affil­i­ate adver­tis­er. Con­se­quent­ly, affil­i­ate adver­tis­ing orga­ni­za­tions have mate­ri­al­ized on the web that facil­i­tate adver­tis­ing arrange­ments. I don’t know what to call these orga­ni­za­tions, but you might refer to them as adver­tis­ing bro­kers or adver­tis­ing cat­a­logs. The name that seems to be catch­ing on is affil­i­ate net­works.

You sim­ply join such a net­work as a pub­lish­er. Some affil­i­ate net­works will allow any­body to join. Oth­ers are very picky about who they allow to par­tic­i­pate. In any case, the cat­a­log is just a list of affil­i­ate adver­tis­ers who want to adver­tise on web­sites. Each adver­tis­er has their own par­tic­u­lar require­ments and pay­ment arrange­ment. In addi­tion, the cat­a­log pro­vides the HTML code for the link to each adver­tis­er’s ad.

Your job is just to go into the affil­i­ate adver­tis­ing cat­a­log and pick and choose the adver­tis­ers that you want to include in your web­pages. Once you pick and choose, it’s just a mat­ter of copy­ing and past­ing the affil­i­ate adver­tis­er’s link into a web­page. As you will see in Chap­ter 28, there might be more to it than just that, but the process is sim­ple and straightforward.

If you look at it from the affil­i­ate adver­tis­ers point of view, it’s an effi­cient way for adver­tis­ers to spread their adver­tis­ing around while avoid­ing hav­ing to nego­ti­ate each par­tic­u­lar adver­tis­ing arrange­ment. Thus, the affil­i­ate adver­tis­ing cat­a­log becomes the place where you go to make adver­tis­ing arrange­ments with the advertisers.

Summary

Join an affil­i­ate adver­tis­ing net­work (to access the cat­a­log) and pick adver­tis­ing that is both rel­e­vant to your read­ers and pays well. Then use the pro­vid­ed links (code) to place the adver­tis­ing in your web­book. Read chap­ter 28 for more infor­ma­tion on exact­ly how to han­dle affil­i­ate adver­tis­ing links in your webpages.