Affiliate Programs

Affiliate programs are a form of marketing that is unique to the internet. For most affiliate programs, you display advertising for their products on your website, and they pay you when the customer actually buys something from them.

Some programs pay simply for the customer clicking on the ad, but these are rare and tend not to pay much per click.

The important thing to keep in mind in your affiliate relationships is that you are not the customer. Your affiliate client is your customer. Most of them are thoughtful and provide all kinds of tools, reports and resources to help make it easy for you to advertise for them, but they are the customer and you are the service provider in the business relationship.

I mention this so that you won't starting posting whiny rants on the Amazon Support Forums about Amazon's poor "customer service" because they won't pay you for buying stuff through your own links.

I've found that affiliate marketing works best when there's a mutual contribution of value: offering the product enhances the value I offer to the visitors to my websites, and my sites enhance the value of the product.

Let's look at Amazon.com for a moment. It's one big store. So big, in fact, that it can be difficult for customers to find what they're looking for there. Enter the affiliate (Amazon usees the term Associate). If I collate a series of links to books on teaching sign language to babies, Amazon has an improved chance of selling those products to someone who's interested in them. My website increases product exposure and it pre-filters the customer base.

My site is enhanced by offering the product as it is helpful to the person looking for sign language resources. It also gives me something to write about, and words are what the net is all about.

I've tried a number of different affiliate programs on my websites. Some have performed better for me than others. This isn't necessarily an indictment of those programs. Like any relationship, it works best when there's a good fit, a synergistic flow of energy and value that is transformative, or at least positive, for all parties.

At the current time, I use the following programs: