Most affiliate programs operate on one simple principle: you sent this person to us, they completed this action or spent this amount of money and, in turn, we will pay you a flat rate or a percentage of what they spent.
Though some affiliate programs may pay on a cost per click (CPC) basis, most pay on cost per action (CPA) and the most popular action is, unsurprisingly, the act of purchasing or spending money. There are of course other valuable actions, like lead generation – for example, you sent a person to our website and they filled out a contact form or asked for more information.
It’s not always about immediate action. Through the use of cookies, many programs will give you credit if the person makes a purchase within a specific period of time and you were the last to refer them to the merchant. This holds as long as the person you are referring has cookies enabled and returns on the same device that they initially visited on, since cookies don’t transfer between devices.
Some affiliate networks also call themselves CPA networks, but some prefer one label to the other. They share plenty in common, but CPA networks are often more focused on lead generation than sales. Pure CPA networks are often less restrictive in some of their program policies and usually offer less direct access to merchants or advertisers.
Even so, when it comes to strategies, there is a lot of overlap. For this reason, and for simplicity, we’ll stick to the “affiliate network” title for this chapter. But, what is said will almost always apply to both network types.
Though it can take some additional effort, for some communities, affiliate relationships represent the most lucrative form of monetization. Your level of success will depend on your community, your identification of the right programs and how well you integrate them.
In the early days of ecommerce, most people transacted quickly, in just a visit or two in less than a few hours. As a result, attributing one source to a sale was considered a fairly safe bet and many of the advertising models we use today, including CPA, were developed. However, things have changed dramatically and, as a community, understanding your role in the conversion chain is essential.
Today’s online shopper typically takes over 26 hours before making a purchase from a given store. People surf at work, at home, on mobile devices and elsewhere, leaving behind “cookies” right, left and center. And while ecommerce grew to an estimated $188 billion dollars in the U.S. in 2011, it is assumed that direct influence on offline sales is more than 5 times that. Many people simply want to walk into a store. Multi-channel attribution reporting is in its infancy, so if you’re only making money by being the last stop on the train (the final click before a purchase), you’re giving away a lot of your value.
Forums by their very nature are highly utilized for validation, research and opinion, but forums generally are not purchasing gateways: that is to say, people will visit a forum at length to read about a product’s value, reputation and differences and to get a “person like me’s” opinion, but may not be as likely to click off to make a transaction right away. This is especially true if the discussion centers around the product itself, more so than on where to buy it or on providing links to places it can be purchased.
Instead, people may go elsewhere compare prices or to look at different models, which lead to them giving search and shopping sites the credit for the sale and not your forum. Similarly, members may develop an interest in a particular product or service after weeks, months or even years of exposure from other participants talking it up. This can lead to a low CPA. But, as centers for user controlled opinion, the impact of your forums on validating a product and even creating initial awareness, or positive perception, cannot be overstated.
Ideally, if you have the value to offer, your strategy can involve direct negotiations with advertisers where you can sell a more hybrid program or, in the event that CPA is the only card on the table, receive a higher than typical payout rate to compensate yourself for the value your community is creating beyond direct, tracked sales.
One way to strengthen your case is to find a mid-sized or small company that’s looking to advertise and partner with them to create a case study on the life provided to their brand, not through direct sales but overall, after a program is put in place. From clicks to sales increases to social chatter and mentions, you can create a matrix showing the different types of sales, retention and brand increases that you deliver, which you can then use to convince additional advertisers of the value that you have to offer.
Many communities are not yet in a position to accomplish this. Even if they are, affiliate programs can still be a great source of additional revenue.
The number of affiliate programs is staggering. If you are new to them, you’ll be surprised. Huge companies have them and tiny companies have them. Though virtually all large online retailers offer them, in addition to many smaller ones, it goes way beyond just the companies you’d traditionally consider a retailer.
For example, American Express pays large bounties for new credit card applications, Ford compensates affiliates for visitors who request a quote on a new car and TurboTax also pays for new customers. No matter what your community is about, there is likely to be a large selection of affiliate programs that will resonate with your visitors. Your goal, then, is to find the ones that work best for you.
The way that one program operates may vary widely from how another does. This can include the amount of products offered, the tools that they provide you for using their program, the payment structure and how much they pay you.
Though it may seem easy to gravitate toward the programs that pay you the highest rate, being blind to other factors is a mistake. It doesn’t matter if someone pays you a 50% commission if it is on a product that your audience has no interest in. 50% of $0 is still $0. Meanwhile, 5% of a product that they love may generate much more revenue for you.
Companies that sell a wide array of products, like Amazon.com and eBay, will serve a lot of communities well, but it is important to dig deeper and consider the companies that serve the topic that your forums cover. A good starting point is to visit the websites of the companies that you think would do well and the companies that your community routinely talks about.
If a company offers an affiliate program, they will usually mention it on their website. It is often in the footer. They may call it an “associates,” “partners” or “webmasters” program or something along those lines. It may even be hidden behind an about us page. For whatever reason, a small percentage of companies do not even mention it at all on their websites.
Beyond just visiting specific websites, you can also sign up with affiliate networks, which represent and help manage the affiliate programs for large numbers of companies. They can offer you a central location from which you can apply and work with all of the organizations they represent. While the majority of affiliate programs fall under an affiliate network, some companies opt to fully manage their own program.
Some of the larger affiliate and CPA networks include Google Affiliate Network, CJ (Commission Junction), LinkShare, PepperJam, zanox, buy.at, ShareASale, Webgains, ClickBank, Clickbooth, Neverblue, MarketLeverage and PeerFly, though there are many other players, so you shouldn’t limit yourself to just this list. There are networks dedicated to specific countries and geographic regions and to specific industries. For example, oneNetworkDirect and Avangate are affiliate networks that focus on software companies.
Once a member, you can then browse merchants by category and search keyword to find the ones that match well with your audience and apply to join their program.
Beyond anything else, the single most important factor in the successful use of affiliate programs is how you integrate them. You can pick the perfect programs, but if they are integrated in a half-hearted way, you will receive half-hearted results.
It’s not about filling a page with links and ads; it’s about well thought out, deep integration. The more natural it is and the better it works, the more value it will bring to the community and to you.
When a lot of people get involved with affiliate programs, they start with the really simple things. Unfortunately, that is also where many of them stop. This includes placing manually text links in various locations, like a link to a fitness company in the description of your fitness forum or a link to a book in a thread or article where it was reviewed. They may add some graphic advertisements for the company or add a special page where people who shop at the given store (or a selection of others) can click on the links to give credit for the sale, in order to support the community.
As individual offers come up that may resonate with your audience, you can promote them specifically, through announcements, posts or even in a special deals section. If you decide to go down that route, you’ll want to keep up to date on the latest offers provided by your merchants and networks. But, make sure the offers you share are actually good ones. Mediocrity leads to people tuning out.
These aren’t bad ideas, but if you limit yourself only to them, you will also be limiting your revenue.
When you join a program, take a look at the tools that they offer to you. This may only be some code for text links and graphic advertisements, but some of the larger programs will offer more. Though they may not offer the deepest integration, they are worth investigating.
For example, Amazon.com offers a wide array of widgets. Among them are search boxes, allowing people to enter a search term and be taken to the online store; an MP3 Clips widget, which allows you to display a creative where people can preview albums or songs that you recommend, right from your website and Omakase, a service that allows you to generate standard display ad sized boxes where it lists the products that it thinks your visitors will be most likely to buy.
For auto sites, they even offer an Auto Part Finder Widget, which allows your members to select the year, make and model of their vehicle and find a list of products that are compatible with it.
eBay offers similar widgets. They allow you to generate content boxes of any size filled with eBay listings that fit the criteria that you enter. So, if you run a Coca-Cola enthusiast community, you can display Coca-Cola memorabilia, complete with images of the products, prices, bid counts and more.
They also offer RSS feeds, allowing you to generate a constantly updating assortment of eBay listings that meet the search terms, categories, prices and more, of your choosing. The feed itself is just text, making it easy for you to display and style it in whatever manner that you want.
All programs offer their own means of integration. You should play with them and experiment to see what works best for you.
Many affiliate programs offer an API, which stands for application programming interface. The API picks up where the basic tools end. An API gives you direct access to the merchant’s product data, which you can then slice and dice for your own use, as a member of their program. You are limited only by the merchant’s program and API policies, your imagination, your programming ability and/or your budget for a programmer.
To continue to use eBay’s program as an example, there are forums that feed forum related content, such as the title of the thread that you are viewing, to eBay through the API which then returns results relevant to that thread. When a visitor uses the forum search, that search term could also be run through eBay to display a list of relevant products right alongside the relevant forum threads.
The API will likely limit you to a specific number of calls – or connections that you can make – within a given period of time. But, if you are hitting the maximum and have experienced success, the program may be willing to raise the limit for your account.
Of course, this is just a small number of easy to explain examples. If you have the ability and resources to manipulate the API, you can dream up new applications for your community.
For some programs, third party scripts exist that can tie into the API and create a storefront or other presence that you host on your own server. For the Amazon.com Associates program, some of the scripts include Associate-O-Matic and Fresh Store Builder. These scripts allow you to create your own Amazon.com powered stores.
Depending on the software that you use to power your forum, a hack, modification or add-on may exist that aides affiliate integration. The best thing that you can do to find these is to use Google and to check out the community resources that exist around your chosen software platform.
There are numerous co-branded content opportunities out there for online forums. Depending on the program and the perspective, they may be considered an affiliate program and may involve the use of an API, or they may not be considered an affiliate program at all. Something might just be referred to as a widget or a form of embeddable content. Terminology varies, but the relationships boil down to this:
We are going to give you this content. You can (usually) host it as a section on your website. Our logo or name will be attached to it, though it may be in a simple, nonintrusive way. We will pay you when someone views it, orders something, posts something or, perhaps, when they do something else.
A job board is a popular example. If you have the traffic, you may be able to host your own job board and keep all of the profits. But, for many communities, it is easier to work with one of the large online job sites, some of which provide great tools.
Simply Hired, JobThread and Indeed are three of the more popular players in this space. Though the precise details vary by program, they all allow you to create your own job board, where you can charge what you want for a job posting. They then take a cut of that amount. They will also provide relevant results from the jobs that they already have posted on their network, so your job board never looks empty. Some programs will also pay you for any clicks generated on those backfilled results.
RevResponse offers a compelling service, especially for professional and technically focused communities. They allow you to offer free publications and white papers to your members, through a co-branded storefront that matches the design of your website. They pay you anywhere from $1.50 to $20 per person who orders a particular piece of content. Even though they are paying for leads, the free content they offer is often of good quality.
nSphere powers directories of local content, which serve as an extension of your website, and gives you a share of the advertising revenue. The Voxant Newsroom operates on a similar basis, allowing you to create video players with categorized content from major media companies. Just as with nSphere, they serve advertisements and give you a share of the revenue.
These are a handful of examples and there are more out there. Co-branded opportunities allow you to extend your media offering and provide additional useful services and content with little overhead, all while generating additional revenue. As long as the content matches with your community and its goals, programs like this can be a worthwhile addition to your site.
When members on your community post links to an online retailer, visitors will click the links and potentially make purchases. But, by default, you won’t receive any credit for those sales. This is where automatic affiliatization comes in.
The leaders in this space are Skimlinks and VigLink (disclosure: Alicia Navarro, the CEO of Skimlinks, contributed a small portion of this chapter). Both companies offer you the ability to monetize existing links to retailers and/or turn product references into links to retailers.
In addition, they can also help with the implementation of some of the techniques discussed in this chapter. For example, Skimlinks offers an API of its own, allowing you to tap into many merchants through a single API. They also offer Amazon.com and eBay search boxes and product widgets. This can be a time saver for some forums and provide a more centralized location to manage some of these implementations.
Beyond the revenue earned through simple integration of automatic affiliatization solutions, you can also stimulate further revenue by adding sections that encourage product related discussions or even discussions about a specific online store or marketplace, such as a forum where members can share their eBay links or reviews of products they have tried and recommend, as long as a link is included. You will then receive credit for sales generated from these merchant links.
These services, including best practices and implementation strategies, were discussed at length in the In-Text Monetization chapter, earlier in this book.
A good rule of thumb is that it is better to over-disclose than to under-disclose. Being open and honest with your community is important and, if they have faith in you, your members will be more likely to support the appropriate use of affiliate links. That said, the nature and level of disclosure that is appropriate can vary. Let’s take a few examples.
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) guidelines state that if someone is endorsing a product and that person is knowingly receiving money or an incentive from recommending said product, their association must be disclosed within sight of the affiliate link. The legislation can be confusing to interpret, as it isn’t clear what form this disclosure should take and it implies that if there is no endorsement or the affiliate link clearly looks like an ad, disclosure is not necessary. It also implies that if the person responsible for the endorsement is not in receipt of the benefit, disclosure is not necessary either, which suggests that forums and other sites using automatic affiliatization services do not need to disclose affiliate links on posts that they appear in, as long as the author of the post is not receiving any incentive from those links.
However, legal issues aside, it is recommended that you disclose your use of affiliate links somewhere appropriate within your site, for example on a separate disclosure page or in a specific forum post about how you have integrated affiliate links. Being open with your community gives you credibility and allows people to view reviews honestly.
While these principles will hopefully help to guide you toward an appropriate policy, in the end, you know your community best and all disclosure policies should be defined with its best interests at heart. It is also your responsibility to research and comply with local legislation and it is up to you to ensure that you are satisfied with your interpretation of these laws and guidelines. You are legally responsible for your use of affiliate links and this book cannot be construed as legal advice for your specific set of circumstances.
Affiliate links give you the opportunity to capitalize on purchases and interest that your community would already otherwise be generating. They also allow you to create new opportunities by working with brands that your members will appreciate.
Beyond making money, some affiliate and partner programs can help you add useful sections to your website, expanding your content offering, which can lead to more traffic and higher engagement.
Affiliate programs don’t conflict with most other forms of monetization. This means that, if you are willing to put in the extra effort, they can be an attractive addition to the revenue that you are already generating.