Affiliate Marketing

Recently I blogged about the affiliate network Affiliate Window and their new ‘Shop Window’ technology; this system allows you to construct a retail website using products from all of the merchants that provide product feeds to their network.

I wanted now to show a working example of this to demonstrate how, as a merchant, your website and products can be promoted by affiliates. The new website Just buy Toys has been set up promoting the different toy ranges available on merchants such as Toys R Us, Woolworths and the Entertainer. The website receives product feeds direct from these merchants and categorises them into various toy ranges, such as Doctor Who, Transformers and Dora the Explorer. As soon as a merchant updates its product feed the website automatically updates with the new products.

The Shop Window script itself has been customised and merged with Wordpress to allow it to be promoted with content relating to the toys, and for the addition of offer codes that, this time of year at least, are frequently created by the merchants.

The website could also be promoted with a PPC campaign for product specific ranges linking directly into the product pages, but to begin with the site will be promoted through organic SEO.

As one of the best ways to encourage your website to be indexed by Google is to consistently update it with unique content, the creation of articles on Just buy Toys will be fundamental to its success. So (shameless plug coming up) if you’re looking to buy toys for your offspring this Christmas, just buy toys.

I know, it’s a rubbish slogan but it’s the best I could come up with at such short notice.

Darren
Affiliate Marketing

I’m sure when you go shopping in Tesco, Sainsbury’s or even Asda you get asked at the till if you’d like some cashback? Sadly, as we all know, this isn’t some free offer where they give you cash out the goodness of their hearts in exchange for you actually shopping in their stores. It comes out of your bank account.

If you didn’t know that, you shouldn’t be allowed to have a bank account. Please stop reading now.

If you did know that, what you might not realise is the term ‘cashback’ when related to a website DOES in fact offer you cash out of the goodness of the hearts of the website owners, in exchange for using them to shop.

Surely that’s nonsense you might be thinking. Well no, in fact it’s not. If you’ve ever seen advertisements promising such unlikely offers such as ‘earn money while you shop’ or ‘get paid to buy your groceries’ there’s a good chance they are in fact real.

How does this work? How can I get some of this free cash?

A cashback website is basically a shopping portal website that is affiliated with numerous online retailers, usually high street brand names such as the aforementioned Tesco, Sainsbury’s and yes, even Asda. The owners of the website earn affiliate commissions whenever someone (you) purchases something via their link, but unlike regular affiliate schemes the cashback website offers to share the affiliate commissions with the buyer (yup, you again).

So basically you get the Affiliate commissions on offer through an affiliate scheme just by using the cashback site when you shop.

The cashback site then earns its money either by taking a subscription from its users (sadly this time it’s also you, sorry) on an annual basis, or by deducting a percentage of the affiliate commission. If you happen to spend a lot of money online then paying a £5 subscription every year is small change. You’ll earn more than that just by purchasing an iPod for example.

So, if you’re looking to do your Christmas shopping online this year it might be worth your while looking for a decent cashback site first, you could save yourself a few hundred pounds in affiliate commission.

What the emergence of cashback sites means for the affiliate marketing industry is another matter though, one that has stirred up quite a debate about the direction of the industry as a whole; but that’s for another blog.

Darren
Affiliate Marketing