laptopmanpaul.co.uk

Sell stuff the easy way on your website - get affiliated!

Brass in pocket?

One of the many new things I’ve learned about whilst working on my websites is how to go about signing up for affiliate websites to (hopefully!) derive a bit of commission.

Most people would immediately think of Google Ads or Google Adsense for this … and I’ve certainly used Google Adsense on all of my sites.

I think that when you’re starting an online business, and you’d just be happy with covering your hosting costs, Google Ads is probably a bit ambitious for starters and you’re better establishing yourself in the search engines first.

I’ll come back to Google in a later post as it has some brilliant tools and I’m a big fan.

I’ll also get around to Amazon Shops at some point too, as this is another service I make great use of.

Choose your pals

Affiliate schemes allow you to put adverts on your site for specific companies, rather than letting Google select them for you.

In the case of my site your-local-shop.co.uk this was particularly important for me as I can’t be helping locals shops to promote themselves on the one hand, then feature an advert for Tesco in a Google ad on the same page … you can imagine how popular that would be!

I’ve opted for a mixture of affiliate sites and Google Adsense on my sites as sometimes you specifically want to target a particular service or product.

The teccie bit

For instance, all my websites are now hosted with nativespace.co.uk … I chose them because I’m happy with their service, their prices are good, they offer ‘add-ons’ which means I can boost my disk space and bandwidth if my businesses begin to grow, and their customer support is good.

So, I give them a plug on my websites, by adding an afiliate link like the one below:

The code for the graphic above looks like this:

<a href=”http://my.nativespace.co.uk/aff.php?aff=012“><img src=http://my.nativespace.co.uk/banners/468×60_banner_nativespace.gif width=”468″ height=”60″ border=”0″></a>

If you click on that link and sign up to the nativespace.co.uk service, a small commission goes into my account … and you’ll see from the code that I’m affiliate 12 by the aff=012.

In the case of nativespace.co.uk you get a very limited number of affiliate options … and I’ve just used another affiliates option in the link above.

If you look at the code (right click on the hyperlink above and select ‘Properties’) you’ll see that when you click on that link, and if you purchase a service from nativespace.co.uk, I get a commission. Here’s the code:

http://my.nativespace.co.uk/aff.php?aff=012

If you want a wealth of choice so that you can choose the best ads for your site, you need to use an affiliates company which specialises in this area of the web.

Affiliate ‘X-Factor’

I use 4 different services, and I’ve added personal notes about each as a guide.

The advantage of these services is that I can sign up all my sites on one account and manage the adverts I place on all the sites via one account.

By the way, I’m not making any money yet as I haven’t begun to market my sites properly, so I’ll reserve judgement on how successful these are for now.

If you’re further down the line and have begun to turn in an income from affiliates, please let me know.

Also, if you know of any other quality affiliate sites or have tips and experience to pass on, please contact me.

Tradedoubler

This is my favourite in terms of ease of use and user friendly interface.

It has a good range of advertisers and shows you how much money your links have brought in on logging in … my balance currently shows £5.70, and to be honest with you, I’m not really sure where that came from as my sites are available on search engines, but fairly well hidden at the moment, prior to marketing beginning.

I’ve got all 10 websites registered within the one account and can easily administrate all of them through that account.

My only gripe is that I’ve contacted customer service twice now about problems with ads not displaying on castle-visits.co.uk and scotbystation.co.uk and I still haven’t had a reply from them.

Oh, and it can take ages to get a new signup approved … I’ve been waiting for a couple of weeks to get my latest batch approved.

Having said that, I still like their service, use them a lot and would recommend them.

Webgains

Webgains is much less intuitive as a website, but it’s packed with affiliate schemes, many of them companies and services I’ve never even heard of.

I use it a lot on my sites and like it because I can manage adverts for all 10 sites via the one interface.

Webgains itself feels a bit cluttered, and I have to go to the FAQs to do something as simple as adding a new website to my account … but in spite of that I’d still recommend it and I still use it a lot.

buy.at

I’m new to buy.at and I’ll admit I haven’t given them a lot of my time as yet.

However, they seem to have all the really good businesses as part of their scheme, so at some point, when I’ve got time, I’m going to give buy.at my full attention.

The reason I can’t face it yet is because … wait for it … for each diferent website you own, you have to set up a separate account.

I wrote to customer services to query this, and this is what they told me:

As for joining the programme with a new URL, this can only be done by opening up a new account, assuming you mean you want to track the success of separate sites?

For this reason, I would reccommend setting up separate accounts if you have different URLs whch you want to use to apply for different programmes.

When applying for programmes,the Account Manager will tend to look at the first site registered in the Organizational URL field so if this is not relevant for the programme you’re applying for, there is a chance it may  not be accepted.

So, I’ll get around to it eventually, but that’s a lot of work in prospect to get 10 websites signed up.

Affiliate Marketing

This company doesn’t have a massive number of advertisers on its list and, to be honest with you, I had a devil of a job tracking them down in the first place.

I discovered tham as part of my research for big-group-cottages.co.uk as I was trying to find out who managed the Blakes Cottages affiliate scheme.

A lot of searching and I finally tracked it down.

They have some pretty big accounts here, such as Alliance & Leicester, Halifax and Tesco Finance, and the interface is easy enough to use.

It’s certainly worth giving them a try to see if there are any companies that you could usefully link to on your own websites.

Posted by pt23
webcumbria.co.uk

More websites from webcumbria.co.uk