Java Glossary : affiliate

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affiliate

Many companies offer you a financial incentive to put links to their website on your web pages. You may get money:

Just for having the link.
For displaying a banner ad on your site.
For displaying an slowly changing banner ad on your site.
For displaying an animated banner ad on your site.
For displaying annoying large banner ads on your site.
For displaying highly annoying popup banner ads on your site. I consider these really tacky.
When people click through to the commercial site.
When the people buy something at that site.

Most commonly you don't get any money unless they buy something. Usually there are restrictions on you website. For example, many companies don't want their banners associated with sex.

How It Works

To be eligible for the benefits, you must sign up as an affiliate , sometimes called an associate with a service bureau who manages the affiliate program for the merchant . Large companies like Amazon manage their own affiliate programs. You also must put some complex HTML on your web pages to enable them to track where the traffic came from. It works usually with some combination of JavaScript, cookies and CGI. This means visitors to your site must have cookies and JavaScript enabled for you to get your commissions.

Here is some typical HTML to link to an advertiser's website:

view

Here is what visitors to your website will see:

Gator_logo Gator The service bureau tracks hits aka impressions (viewings of the banner), click throughs to the merchant site, and sales. The commissions can be based on any combination of all three, usually just sales. However, the service bureau usually tracks all three for the edification of merchant and affiliate. They often use a dummy 1x1 image loaded from the service bureau website for tracking hits. These can drastically slow down web page loading, so I suggest removing them. If you do, you will still get commissions for click throughs and sales, but not for simple impressions.

Companies Roedy Green Endorses

I have registered with as an affiliate with the following companies, all of which I was happy to endorse. I would have done it free. This is an incomplete list.

GoTo.com
Amazon.com
Stamps.com
ineedhits.com
Platinum Alternatives
Chapters.Indigo.ca
Allwall.com
Gator.com
GradFinder.com

Only Amazon generates any significant revenue. It is about $300.00 USD a year.

Affiliate Service Bureaus

If you want to find out about affiliate programs to add to your website ask the merchant or company you want to advertise, or check with one of the following affiliate service bureaus that handle thousands of companies in a very organised and automated way. bCentral/ClickTrade went out of business in 2001 September.

BeFree		also known an reporting.net. Has a feature to consolidate login accounts. Only works with Netscape 4.79. The click counters for this are deadly slow, making entire pages load slowly. They tell me they are mandatory, even when you don't get paid for clicks.
RegNow		They handle collecting money for a 16% fee, with a $2.00 minium. You thus need no merchant accounts with the credit card companies. Part of Digital River.
CCbill		More focussed on the credit card billing side. Much of its business comes from porn sites.
BMT Micro		handle Opera browser sales.
ClixGalore		It looks easier than most to set up from the merchant's perspective. Australian. Somewhat confusing for the affiliate since merchant features abound on all menus.
linkshare		The LinkShare people have the best organised affiliate program in my opinion. It is by far the easiest for affiliates to use. It has no mechanism to consolidate duplicate accounts.
cj.com		aka Commission Junction, aka qksrv.net, used by many high end companies such as eBay. The trick to finding HTML links is to click Get Links \| By Relationship \| My advertisers . Otherwise you will lost in the sea of alls possible advertisers and all possible products. It has no mechanism to consolidate duplicate accounts. They won't tell you what the HTML is to link until you have been approved, so you must do your setup in a two step process, apply then later set up the HTML links. Smartzones are a way to create indirect links. When links change you don't have to change your HTML, you just change all the links in one place in the smartzone. You can safely ignore them unless you are having trouble tracking all your links. You may not modify the HTML to download the image from your webserver instead to speed loads. You may not get rid of the the click counting 1x1 images in text links that slow down loads either. If you do, you forfeit your commissions. You can't thus modify the logos to be transparent or otherwise to be more tasteful. You have to take one of the garish banners exactly as presented. Further they can change what it looks like without informing you. Not good! This is high handed. You, not the advertiser should control the look of your website. Further CJ cheated me by telling me to remove the dummy 1x1 click counting images to improve the painfully slow page loading. They did not tell me I would forfeit all commissions as a result. The PID embedded in each link identifies who gets the commissions. The AID identifies the advertiser, the product and even the the banner.

Becoming an Affiliate

To become an affiliate, to sell other people's goods and services, you will have to do the following:

Register with the affiliate service bureau giving your name, address, company, tax number, phone number, where to send the cheques, who to make them out to etc. You must assign yourself a user id and password. Make doubly sure you get the address right. If cheques are undeliverable they will not inform you.
I found each service bureau works best with one browser. Try Internet Explorer 6.0.26, Netscape 4.79 or Netscape 6.22 until you succeed. Opera 7.0 does not work well.
Select the merchants whose products you want to advertise. It is just a matter of looking through the huge catalog of merchants and ticking off the ones you like. The service bureaus have search engines, alphabetical lists and lists by category to help you find suitable companies.
The merchants you select will have a look over your website, and will decide if they are willing to let you advertise them. You can track whether they have said yes in the service bureau database.
When you have been approved by a merchant, cut and paste the HTML they provide onto your web pages.
I usually modify the HTML slightly to pick up the graphics from my webserver instead of theirs to speed up page loading.
Check in periodically to the service bureau website to see how much money is they owe you. They won't actually send you a cheque until it reaches a threshold.
Keep your eye out for new affiliate programs that mesh logically with your website.
Look in your mailbox for a cheque.

Before you sign up as an affiliate at a website, check if that vendor is already handled by one of the affiliate schemes you are already signed up with. Otherwise, you will end up with duplicate accounts with the affiliate scheme. Only the Reporting.net people offer a way to consolidate them.

Disadvantages

It looks a little tacky to have animated GIF's on your website.
Ads distract users from the primary purpose of your website.
Ads for products you don't endorse or that are not directly related to the purpose of your website make you look sleasy.
The GIFs slow down page loading, especially if you load them from the service bureau server.
If the service bureau server goes down, you pages cannot load properly.
It is a lot of work to set up for very little monetary return.

Advertising Your Own Company's Products

Becoming an advertiser is somewhat more complicated. You must prepare a set of GIF or JPG banner ads. You must decide on how your royalty scheme will work, how much you will pay for what. You have to decide who will handle what money. You may have to put up a deposit to pay out royalties. Basically it amounts to filling out a number of online forms. Once you have done that, you need to beat the bushes to ask people to sign up as affiliates. Which service bureau should you pick? Consider these factors:

Size of deposit required.
commission.
Ease of use for affiliates.
Likelihood of getting more affiliates via the service bureau's promotion to its other affiliates, from people who would otherwise have never heard of you.

You have to assign all your products a category ID. The HTML at the affiliate site can insert additional detailed information, e.g. ISBN, size, colour ... and the service bureau will just pass those fields on through to you without examining them. That way you can set up search boxes, or put huge inventories instantly online without registering all your individual products with the service bureau. For an example of how this works check out Barnes & Noble and reporting.net. However, the category ID usually has to be sufficient to calculate the commission paid to the affiliate. It also has to be sufficient to compute the price if the service bureau handles payments for you.

There is a cheaper way to become an advertiser, banner trading . You put up a variable banner on your site that randomly selects other companies to advertise. In return, those companies will advertise your website. The problem with this approach is you have little control over who you advertise on who advertises you.

Banner Advertising

You can put general banner ads on your site, and get paid for it, or you can pay other people to place your banner ad on their sides. Banner ads are tacky. You have little control over who advertises. You are promoting products and services you don't necessarily endorse. You don't sign up as an affiliate with any particular company.

I have paid the ineedhits.com people to place the following banners for me on other people's websites. You are free to put them on your own websites. However, you won't get any money for doing so.

Canadian Mind Products Banners
Banner	HTML To Include The Banner
	<a href="http://mindprod.com/jgloss/jgloss.html"><img src="http://mindprod.com/images/cmpbannerj.gif" height="60" width="468" alt="The Java Glossary"></a>
	<a href="http://mindprod.com/bgloss/bgloss.html"><img src="http://mindprod.com/images/cmpbannerb.gif" height="60" width="468" alt="The Computer Buyer's Glossary"></a>
	<a href="http://mindprod.com/ggloss/ggloss.html"><img src="http://mindprod.com/images/cmpbannerg.gif" height="60" width="468" alt="The Gay and Black Glossary"></a>

The worked very well, doubling my traffic for the time they were placed, however the traffic dropped off back to normal after they stopped. This implies the banners were attracting people who were idly curious, not people who would become regular visitors. This highlights the problem with banner advertising. It does not target your specific audience.

You could download the GIF to your own site and modify the HTML accordingly. If you leave it as it is, my site will bear the burden of downloading. You will also automatically get any improved GIF I post. That may or may not be a Good Thing™. You might not like my new GIF.

The a Black Banner Network exchange gets you an exposure of your banner on other people's sites for every exposure you give someone else. It works by donation, and is aimed at the African American community. It works best with opaque banners.

Learning More

Click through to the service bureaus mentioned. They have extensive online documentation on how their schemes work. They also have help desks who actually answer email. Amazing!

The Bottom Line

I have not received so much as a penny from any affiliate program except Amazon. I can speculate on why this is so:

I sometimes correct HTML errors that HTMLValidator finds. Perhaps that quietly disqualifies my sales.
For faster image loading and to allow me to be responsible for all images displayed on my web pages, I usually arrange for banner to be downloaded from my own website. Perhaps that quietly disqualifies my sales.
Perhaps nobody every bought anything through my site except Amazon books, yet I myself bought books from Chapters. Perhaps there were too few such sales to meet some minimum to cut a cheque.
Perhaps all the cheques got lost in the mail. Yet no one has contacted me to find out why I did not cash my cheques.

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