Affiliate Programs

Affiliate Programs and Joint Venture Campaigns





Affiliate programs, in this context, do not exclusively refer to an affiliate sales program
such as the one offered by Amazon.com; though some programs are interconnected
through a single network. Rather, it means that you can associate yourself with a
network and benefit from their traffic boosts—while also earning money for your traffic or
paying money to receive more traffic.
In essence, it is a glorified version of a link exchange, with some pivotal differences. An
affiliate program acts as an intermediary between web publishers (known as the
affiliates) and retailers who want to sell their products. You may choose either role if
you sign up with an affiliate…though you will only be able to work within the network.
You must also abide by the terms of the network as far as content goes, though you can
negotiate various issues such as banner sizes and placements, text ads, anchor text
ads and various other options.

You can benefit from the popularity of other websites within the network and enjoy a
blog-like community dynamic when you sign up for an affiliate program. The only thing
is, you have to consider questions such as: Does my site fit the theme of the other sites
on the network? (This is not only important for branding purposes, but also for traffic,
since you are only going to receive benefits if you can interest users from those other
sites.)
Basically, with an affiliate program you can expose your website to more traffic sources
and reach a larger, hopefully more mainstream audience. Of course, the retailer is only
interested in promoting the program to the publishers who are doing publicity for the
products.
Of course, revenue sharing and Cost-Per-Click or Cost Per Impression models are not
of prime importance to you, not if you want to earn traffic the fastest and most effective
way. The bottom line is that you can take your website and your stats directly to
advertisers and make more money without any content restrictions or other annoying
rules that you might encounter at an affiliate network.
Many entrepreneurs have worked with affiliate networking pro
grams and passed their
minimum traffic requirements…only to realize that there wasn’t much money to be
gained besides a few pennies a day. That, together with the fact that only hanging large
banners on your site seems to increase revenue—and that this may be in violation of
new search engine standards—make this a questionable opportunity
Joint Venture opportunities are similar to link exchanges and affiliate marketing but only
involve working with one or more large companies and establishing your own sort of
mutually beneficial “network”. Once again, this will only prove effective if you focus on
joint content development, or perhaps guest blogging. Keep things interesting and don’t
let the links do all the talking. Make sure you including some interesting text and anchor
text along with your links.