What is affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketing is the craft of promoting and selling products or services of other companies online. Publishers or affiliates do this through so-called affiliate links. If the publisher promotes a product successfully, a lead is created and the publisher receives a commission for it. Affiliates who produce no leads earn nothing and go home without a commission despite the advertising effort. Affiliate marketing is usually run through partner programmes and has been a fixed part of online marketing for years.

Affiliate marketing example: who does what

The merchant

The merchant owns the product that needs to be advertised. This usually happens through a third party, the operator of an affiliate network, who creates the contact between merchant and affiliate. As a rule the merchant has no direct contact with the publisher. Exceptions are in-house programmes such as the Amazon affiliate network and other direct sales channels.

The affiliate network operator

An affiliate operator provides the network for publishers and merchants. In most cases these are partner programmes or affiliate networks. The network operator is responsible for smooth brokering and the technical side of the network. It is paid by the merchant, records the leads and pays the publisher the commission.

The publisher

The publisher provides the affiliate website or promotes affiliate links. Many bloggers and operators of niche sites are successful publishers. They can address the end customer directly and market a product effectively.

Affiliate marketing tips that actually work

There is a lot to get right as a successful affiliate. Both the sales channel and the execution of the advertising need to be thought through. A few examples of how the marketing can work out:

1. As a beginner, do not shy away from placing affiliate links as often as the content allows. This generates more clicks and traffic, and the chances of a lead rise with them. Always advertise discreetly rather than aggressively, though. Commissions in affiliate marketing rise with the quality of the affiliate website.
2. A typical affiliate marketing example: think hard about which product you promote. The landing page has to match the character of the page that links to it. An affiliate website about house and garden should not be marketing affiliate links to notebooks. The chance that a customer buys a notebook there instead of lawn fertiliser is small - and that is exactly what pushes down the conversion rate.
3. Many affiliates promote their links through questionable traffic sources. Despite thousands of website visits they earn no commission at all. The rule here: traffic is not everything. Promote your links inside a defined topic instead and do without raw traffic. To generate leads you need high-quality visits from the matching target audience.

Affiliate marketing providers and networks

Well-known European affiliate network operators are Awin, Digistore24 and SuperClix. The latter stands out for the automatic approval of partner programmes - you can start right away. Digistore24 is restricted to virtual products such as videos or e-books. Whether you can market those successfully depends on the topic of your own niche site. Awin has taken over several networks over the years and is a reliable choice.

Billing in these networks follows the same models that are common in pay per click marketing and in banner advertising - except that affiliate marketing as a rule only pays for the completed action, not already for the impression or the click.

Bring visitors to your affiliate site

An affiliate link earns nothing without readers. On eBesucher you can book targeted visits for your niche site and decide yourself which target audience sees it - by country, language and interest. Combined with a clean OnPage optimization that is the fastest way to get first numbers into your analytics.