The CurrCon Java Applet displays prices on this web page converted with today’s exchange rates into your local
international currency, e.g. Euros, US dollars, Canadian dollars, British Pounds, Indian Rupees… CurrCon requires
Java 1.1 or later, preferably 1.6.0_14. If you can’t see the prices, or if you just
want to learn more about CurrCon, click here for help.
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.
cj.com and Google Affiliate Network use this term to mean the manufacturer of some product, the one who accepts
money from customers, the merchant, or software publisher, the publisher of the software or books. Confusingly, the
advertiser is not the website that places referral ads for the product. The terminology makes utterly no sence. The
advertiser places no ads. As far as I can see, they have it backwards. I asked them to pick less confusing terminology
but they ignored me.
affiliate partner
When I agree to sell vendors’ products via my website, I am called the affiliate
sometimes called an associate or partner. eSelletate uses the term affiliate.
When a visitor to your site clicks on an ad banner but does not necessarily buy anything. Sometimes you get revenue
for clicks, e.g. with Google Ad Sense, and but usually you only get royalties for actual sales. These are sometimes
called leads.
creative URL
A URL that generates an image or some text, or a search box that the viewer can click to learn more about or buy
some product.
EPC
Earnings Per Click.
How much money you get when visitors click an ad, whether they buy something or not.
impression
Every time a vistor views a page containing an ad, even if he does not click it, that is called an impression. The
service bureau tracks this by dislaying a one pixel gif, even for text links. It counts how many times this gif is
downloaded. When a search engine spider goes looking for page it does not download the gifs, therefore it avoid making
false impressions. It does however make click-thrus. If the affiliate service bureau sees a click-through without a
corresponding downoad of the impression gif, it assumes it was just a spider and the click-thru does not count as an
actual sales lead. This is why you need impression gifs in your html if you are being paid per impression, per click-thru,
not per sale. Some programs offer you the option of getting a commission per impression, per click-thru or per-sale. You
have to choose just one. I found that per click generates most revenue. EPC is Earnings
Per Click. I think this refers to the seller’s
profits, not the advertiser’s fee.
in-line text link
a word in the text that when you hover the cursor over it pops up a text box ad relevant to that word. Clicksor
does this sort of ad. The advantage is it takes up no space most of the time. The disadvantage is it is distracting to
the user trying to read the text.
publisher
cj.com and Google Affiliate Network uses the to mean someone who puts ads on their side to refer sales to someone
else. I can’t think of any way to make sense of the terminology. People who place ads are in no sense publishers.
I asked them to pick less confusing terminology but they ignored me. Others use it for the reverse, the merchant, or
software publisher, whose products I sell on my website, the publisher of the software or books. eSellerate uses the
term for someone who publishes software.
reseller
Someone who resells products. The customer pays the reseller and the reseller buys product at wholesale. With an
affiliate, the customer gives no money to the affiliate, but pays the publisher directly. The advantage of being a
reseller is you can set your own markup and price and can thus create a competitive advantage over other sellers. The
disadvantage is you have to handle money and tracking sales. You also have to provide all the product descriptions on
your own website. If you link to ones on some other website, the sale will likely go through that website. Normally you
would sign up as a reseller only for an expensive or high volume product. I have signed up as a reseller for Excelsior
JET Java Optimising Compiler.
SKU
Stockkeeping Unit. A
specific product. If a program came in several languages, standard and pro, electronic and CD delivery, each combination
would have its own SKU number. SKUs is what eSellerate calls its product ids.
tracking URL
A URL that takes you to a page where you can get more detail about a product and/or buy it.
vendor
The merchant whose products I sell on my website, sometimes confusingly called by the client.
virtual store
As as affiliate, you select a set of the vendor’s products to display on your website. You may do this via:
A large chunk of generated inline HTML you insert on your web page. This is how art.com works.
Via an short chunk of HTML containg an iframe. The vendor generates your virtual store on the fly each time someone
views your webpage. To the end user, the store appears embedded in one of your web pages. This is how allposters.com
works.
Via a text or banner link to the vendor’s website.
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:
Don’t be shy. Click the image or the buy button to see how it works. You can always back out.
The service bureau tracks hits aka impressions (viewings of the banner), click-thrus 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-thrus and sales, but not for simple impressions.
Affiliates 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.
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 2001-09.
aka linksynergy.com. 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.
Bafflingly, they call people who place affiliate ads on their websites publishers, and people
who actually manufacture and sell the goods advertisers. This is exactly backwards to what you
might expect. You have to get permission from each vendor before you can sell their products. If you don’t produce
they revoke that permission. Here is what a typical link looks like this:
They handle Hallmark, match.com, 1-800-Flowers.
They handle collecting money for a 16% fee, with a $2.00
minimum. You thus need no merchant accounts with the credit card companies. Part of Digital River. It is primarily
designed to sell software. You compose PAD files, an XML-format to describe your products and the
pricing. They can handle licence branding and serving demo copies. The advantage of RegNow over PayPal to sell your
software is RegNow affiliates will post links to your products on their websites in return for a commission on sales.
Here is what a typical link looks like:
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. You must get approval from vendors before you can link to them.
Here is what a typical link looks like:
aka clickserve.cc-dt.com, connectcommerce.com. Performics
was just bought out by Google, and they have renamed it Google
Affiliate Network. The website does not work smoothly with Firefox, Opera or IE8. I just waddle through with Opera,
being careful to check manually anything I copy-paste. The HTML you insert is quite terse. It consists of a single
number that internally indexes the vendor, the affiliate, the product, the banner and the target URL. Here is what a
typical link looks like:
Links to Barnes and Noble go via the Barnes & Noble website, rather than via clickserve. Handle Barnes
& Noble. Confusingly refer to the vendors as your clients. When you first set up links,
they don’t work for about 5 minutes.
Clicksor is a similar system to Google Adsense, where you put a generic ad on your website that turns into a
specific ad from some advertiser, roughly matched to your web content perhaps looking like this:
The big problem with them is they insert pop-under ads, linking words on your page outside the
ads to ads, which is downright dishonest, not to mention highly irritating to your viewers.
disappeared for a while, but have resurfaced. aka Commission Junction. The affiliate domains bfree.com,
bfast.com, qksrv.net, cj.com, commissionjunction.com
and reporting.net and Partner Gateway were all bought up by ValueClick and now operate under
the name cj.com.
The HTML you insert is quite terse. It consists of a single number that internally indexes the vendor, the affiliate,
the product, the banner and the target URL. Here is what a typical link looks like:
In CJ terminology advertisers are merchants who actually accept money for goods and ship them, in other words the
creators of the products, where publishers publish links on their websites to refer sales of those products. This
is backwards to what you might expect where publishers are the creators of the software advertised. They handle Chapters
Indigo. They now have an optional house scheme where the URL names the vendor’s website instead of theirs.
They sometimes confusingly refer to the vendors as your clients.
Also known as My Affiliate, MyAP, Think Partnership and Kowabunga . It is a smaller company with a distinctive
orange colour scheme. I found its software unusually easy to use. Its website is much more responsive than the others.
You run your own custom version of their software on your own servers.
Kowabunga Technologies Kowabunga is the
company that built the MYAP software. It provides the MYAP software to merchants to allow them to run their own
affiliate programs. Along with the MYAP software, they place these merchants in our Kolimbo network. They also offer
affiliate management services.
My Affiliate Program aka MYAP
is the name of the actual software for use in running an affiliate program. It is what we would integrate with your
website and ordering system in order to allow you to run your own affiliate program. There are about 600-700 merchants
using the MYAP software. These merchants include some smaller sites, as well as very large clients like MGM/Mirage,
Microsoft, Yahoo!, CNET, Carfax and QuickBooks. There is an initial setup fee of
for the software, and a monthly fee equal to 30% of affiliate commissions earned or
(whichever is greater). Included with the setup fee is having the Kowabunga team do all of the integration for the
merchant, as well as branding the admin area to their company. Once the software is set up and tested, Kowabunga launch
the merchant’s program on the Kolimbo network of over 50,000 active affiliates.
Kolimbo is the affiliate network. By
using the My Affiliate Program (MYAP) software to run your affiliate program, you will be listed as a merchant within
the network of over 50,000 affiliates. The affiliates can then sign up to join your
program from your listing in the network, or through a signup page.
Seems to be a subsidiary of Digital-River/Element 5. I have not been able to log into it yet to learn more about how
it works.
Of course many companies don’t use a service bureau. They run their own affiliate program, perhaps using someone
else’s software. See YourOwnPersonalsSite.com
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.
In past I found each service bureau works best with only one browser, though recently I have had much less trouble of
that sort. If you have troubles, try a different browser.
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.
The HTML is inscrutable. You can’t tell just by looking at it what product it sells or easily even which service
bureau provided it. It is good to insert into your web page a comment naming the product, service bureau, and the date
the html code was last refreshed. I am gradually adding
<span class="affiliate">…</span>
around all such links to make them easier to find with Funduc search and replace for
update or special formatting.
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, now defunct, offered 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
sleazy.
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.
Normally the affiliate bureau insists you not cache the text or images for the banners and links. They must be served
from the affiliate’s server. This allows them to replace the ad with one you may not approve of on aesthetic,
taste, political correctness, size, colours… grounds without your knowledge. They often simply discontinue a
banner without informing you.
The HTML they ask you to insert usually fails validation. They insist you not change it, but in practice no one has
complained when I corrected the syntax errors.
Advertising Your Own Company’s Products
Becoming an advertiser is somewhat more complicated. You must prepare a set of *.png, *.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. 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.
Roll Your Own
If you already sell your product via your website, and have already set up a custom system to accept orders, and process
money, it is not much extra work to roll your own affiliate program. This is what myfonts.com
does. It can be as simple as this: You look at the referrer URL of all incoming transactions. If
one of them belongs to one of your affiliates, you tag the incoming IP as belonging to that affiliate. Any orders that IP
makes in the next 20 days (or whatever limit you choose) give a cut to that affiliate. This is
very convenient for the affiliate since there is no special HTML. They can link anywhere they please into your website
with any type of transaction they please. The processing of payments to affiliates can be tacked on as a batch process
run monthly. It does not need to affect online processing in the least, though of course your affiliates would prefer
timely balances.
That scheme relies on the browser to provide the referring URL, a feature which some people disable for privacy. To deal
with that eventuality, have your affiliates add a parameter &affid=xxxx to all their URLs
referencing your site. Your server has to capture these affiliate ids and the corresponding IP whenever it serves a web
page.
Costs
If you sell or buy, the affiliate service bureau is taking a cut charged to the seller.I thought you would like to see the prices on this webpage in ,
but you can change that instantly, thanks to the Canadian Mind Products CurrCon
Applet that you too could use on your own website to display prices in any world
currency using today’s exchange rates.
PayPal charges 3% plus
per transaction.
RegSoft charges 10% with a
minimum fee per transaction.
RegNow charges 16% with a
minimum fee per transaction.
So you might set up to use more than one bureau or so that everything over
will be done with RegSoft and everything under
will be done with RegNow.
<a href="http://mindprod.com/ggloss/ggloss.html"><img src="http://mindprod.com/image/logo/cmpbannerg.png"
height="60" width="468" alt="The Gay and Black Glossary"></a>
They 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 *.png image 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.
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
None of the many affiliates I signed up for paid anything except three. I can speculate on why affiliates don’t
usually pay:
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.
Affiliates quietly drop you if don’t logon every month or so to keep your email address and links up to date. They
will also drop you if you don’t generate any sales. They drop products, drop vendors, break links, retire link
code, change link code, totally change the software or go out of business all without telling you. It is particularly
important to keep your address up to date so cheques arrive and your email address up to date so that notices arrive.
Put your affiliates in a bookmark folder and make a habit to just login and check things out every month or two.
Affiliates often refuse my site because of the Gay glossary, or links in it to condom sales sites. Some vendors such as
McAfee are quite puritanical wanting to offend in the slightest not even the most rabid Christian. At some point I will
split off the Java section as a separate website to avoid this and the problem of various net nanny programs that block
the mindprod.com site in its entirety.
by Roedy Green ©1996-2009 Canadian Mind Products
Please email your feedback for publication, errors, omissions, broken/redirected link reports
