What are Affiliate Link and Affiliate Program?

What are an affiliate link and affiliate program and how can I make money from them?

Before we get into a discussion of how affiliate programs works, here are a few definitions:

Affiliate program is a way for online companies to recruit you, to use your online influence through your website, blog, YouTube, Facebook, and any other social media account to direct traffic from your site to their online store.  If your viewer buys something from the store you will receive a commission on a sale.

An affiliate link is the advertising on your online website or social media account and direct traffic to the online storefront of a company that you are working with an affiliate program.  This is usually done by a banner ad or text link.

When you start an affiliate program with a company, this is a contract that permits you to become a salesperson for that company in that contract they will dictate the term that you must follow, and if you follow these terms, they are willing to pay you a commission for the sales that you have generated for them.

The program commission term ranges for company to company. Some companies will only give you commission on a certain item only, or other places will give a flat rate for any item that is sold from your affiliate link, or anything in between.  A lot of service based company will send you an initial lump sum commission for the sale and will not receive any additional revenue from that customer’s continuous use of that service.

Therefore, I strongly recommend that you read as much as possible about the affiliate program and the company that you are planning to use.  Buried in this information is how you can use their links, termination reason, when you will get paid, what is the minimum amount of commission you required to make before you will get paid, and how much sales are required to make to keep using the program.  If you break any of their rules they can legally withhold commission payment.

Should you use an affiliate link for your site?  As a content consumer, I do not like to see any advertisement on the website that I visit, but I know if I want high-quality free content, it has to be paid for somehow.  Hidden in what I just said you need to have a reasonable amount of traffic to your site. If no one sees the advertisement then no one will click on the link and no sales will happen. Therefore advertisement like this should be strategically located in your site when it is the most useful for your content consumers.  Remember to choose affiliate programs that work with your content. Since I am talking about business and technology topics, an advertisement for board or card games will not be a good match for my site.

How does an affiliate link look like? An example on an affiliate link is shown at the top of this page.

Where do you find an affiliate program? The easiest way to find an affiliate program is to go to a search engine and type in the company that you are looking for and then type affiliate link or affiliate program. Most of the time you can find it on the bottom of a company’s website buried in with the contact us, careers opportunities, and warranty policies, and other links that most people do not use unless they are looking for this type of thing.

In conclusion, If you are interested in affiliate programs, you require enough traffic to convert some of your content comsumers to your affiliate companies storefront to purchase products or services so you can to receive a commission.  To be successful you must promote the stuff that you find useful, yourself, and is related to your content on your site.