Affiliate Marketing

How you, like us, can make money from your website or blog!

What is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is an online advertising channel in which advertisers (online merchants that sell products or services) pay publishers (webmasters that promote the products or services of an advertiser on their Web site) only for results, such as a visitor making a purchase or filling out a form, rather than paying simply to reach a particular audience. This "pay-for-performance" model is in essence the modern version of the "finders'-fee" model, where individuals who introduce new clients to a business are paid for doing so. The difference in the case of affiliate marketing is that advertisers only pay their publishers when the new client introduction results in a sale or a lead, making it a low-risk, high-reward environment for both parties.

How it Works
Advertisers in a Network, like those we mention below, put ad links in an interface, making them available for placement by ordinary webmasters or bloggers, ( usually called publishers ). Each link is assigned a commission, such as a fixed amount per lead or a percentage of a resulting sale on the advertiser's Web site. Publishers looking to monetize their traffic apply to join an advertiser's program. Upon acceptance, the publishers select and place the advertiser's links on their Web sites, blogs, newsletters, in their email campaigns or as part of search listings.
When someone clicks on a publisher's link, a cookie is set on the visitor's browser that identifies the advertiser, the publisher, and the specific link and payment rates. If the visitor makes an actual purchase online or fills out a form, that transaction is tracked and recorded by the Network. Upon recording the transaction, the Network handles all of the collection and processing required to ensure fair and timely commission payment for the publisher, and all of the admin and verification necessary to ensure quality sales and leads for the advertiser.

Affiliate marketing really isn't that hard to understand, in fact the concept and idea behind it is a very simple one. There are 3 main pieces to the jigsaw;
Network - a third party company that handles a merchants advertising account (eg. Clix Galore)
Merchant - an ecommerce website that has goods or services to sell online (eg. Dress-for-less)
Affiliate - A website or groups of websites that advertises merchants goods (eg. Your personal website)

In the following example, we will pretend you, the affiliate, own a blog that concentrates on Babies. People who visit your website are obviously interested in babies and mothering and so it should be easy for you to integrate affiliate websites into your content, eg;
Amazon - Buy the latest baby books
Precis Petit - Designer Baby Clothes
John Lewis - Kids furniture
Posters.com - Posters
Everytime one of your visitors clicks on an affiliate link, like the ones above, the merchant stores a cookie on the visitors machine. Cookies are harmless! Cookies are used purely to keep track of what items someone has added to their online shopping basket, and also informs the shop that you sent the visitor. If you, as a visitor, decided to buy something from any of the above websites within the next 30 days (some companies offer cookie lengths of 999 days) then you would receive a %age of the final sale price.
Most affiliate programs, or affiliate networks, pay on a monthly basis once you have reached a certain threshold level, usually €50. If you have not reached this level within any given month, then your affiliate commissions are simply rolled over and added to your next months commissions to ensure you never lose any money owed to you.
Some affiliate programs operate what is known as residual income. When you refer a visitor or customer to a merchants website, should the person ever go back in the future and purchase again and again, then you will continue to receive commissions for the lifetime of that customer. These affiliate programs are obviously very popular with affiliate websites, as you continue to make money with very little effort, but are a little slow in the uptake by merchants.

How much can I make ?

The honest answer is: - it depends on you. Research says that something like 70% of affiliates will never make more than 500 euros with affiliate programs. While that may be true, I can tell you that the 80/20 rule ( 80% of the revenue is made by 20% of affiliates )definitely applies in affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing can be extremely lucrative for those who do it well.
Earning at least a €25,000 yearly income is very common for the 20% that do well in AM. A €50,000 income per year for an affiliate marketer is not considered “super-affiliate” and several Irish "super-affiliates" are earning over €100,000.
While earning a full time income is the exception and not the rule, there is nothing preventing you from being an exception except for sheer drive, willingness to learn, hard work (and a bit of design talent).

Where do I find Networks to work with?

We work with these networks. You should check them all out, as almost every one will have an Advertiser suitable for you.

Clix Galore (Ireland, UK, USA, Worldwide over 4000 merchants)


Linkshare (UK / USA)


ShareaSale ( USA mostly )


Paid on Results (UK & Ireland)


AffiliateWindow (UK & Ireland)


Affiliate Future (UK and Ireland)


Clickxchange (USA)


Zanox (UK)


Zanox (Ireland)
Register for free and tap into new sources of income!

TradeDoubler (UK, Ireland, Europe)


How do you choose which affiliate program to work with?

Let’s assume that you’ve found a few affiliate programs offering products that would work with your audience and website[s]. How do you decide which one to use? Whichever one offers the most commission: - right? Wrong.
Just because an affiliate program offers the highest commissions doesn’t mean that they are definitely the merchant you make the most money with.
As an example: Merchant A pays €3 per sale & Merchant B pays €5 per sale. Merchant B looks like the clear winner. But then you contact both merchants and find out that Merchant A has a 4 percent conversion rate on their main site, while Merchant B has a 1 percent conversion rate.
If you send 3000 people a month to both websites, using the typical conversions, Merchant A converts 4% of those 3000 visitors, or 120 of them, into sales. At €3 commission per sale, your monthly check will be for €360. Merchant B converts 1% of those 3000 visitors, or 30 of them, into sales. At €5 commission per sale, your check will be for €150.
So even though Merchant B pays €2 more per sale, you made €210 more with Merchant A because they had a better conversion rate.
When comparing merchants to decide which affiliate program to use, I usually look at base commissions combined with conversion rates of their main website. (some affiliate programs won’t give out this info, some will - if they won’t give it to you, you may have to test it yourself.) I always look for linking options too (if one merchant allows you to create links to specific products and another only has links to main category pages, the first makes it much easier to sell those specific products relating to your website's content.