What Is An Affiliate Link?
So we have just learned that affiliate marketing is basically selling other people’s product and getting an affiliate commission in return. The question is how the heck do these networks know that it’s me that sold the product and not the other affiliates? The answer is it could be determined through your affiliate links.
Affiliate links are simply unique links which determines whether the certain product being promoted is under you or others. What’s the difference of affiliate links from normal links? Take a look:
http://teethwhitening.com/?213123 or http://affiliates.network.com/9689
http://teethwhitening.com/
It’s easy to notice that the first and second url is the affiliate link. The text highlighted in red is the unique number for each affiliates. Of course it varies depending on affiliate network and cloaking links which we will discuss in future posts. You can also see in the other link that it’s a little different from the first. Why? As time passes by, affiliate networks has largely evolved. The second link is just a ‘jump link’ which when clicked, would also go directly to the first link. This has been done so affiliates could have better conversions and for the networks to have easier time in tracking. With that unique referral key, affiliate networks could easily track details such as clicks, impressions, conversions and etc. The third link, on the other hand is the direct link of the merchant. If someone purchases under that link, the merchant would get 100% of the revenue since it’s not an affiliate link
Just remember not to forget embedding your referral link to your landing page instead of just the direct link or you’ll just be wasting your time. In our future posts, we would be tackling ways on how to hide and cloak links for better conversions, so stay tuned!
Reading And Learning Is Where Peeps Start
Just a quick writeup for you guys here. There are a lot of people who want to start affiliate marketing (I get a lot of IM messages) and the common question is how do I minimize my costs and mistakes as much as I can? My answer is plain simple: read and learn!
While a lot of people would say jumping headfirst and learning from experience is the best thing for improvement, I think understanding how things work first would very much help. No doubt, experience is the best teacher but that doesn’t mean experience alone can help you succeed.
For example, my niece started affiliate marketing 3 months ago. She felt she understood everything already and she’s courageous. Problem was her ads couldn’t even get approved in Adwords! She tried Facebook but all of her ads were disapproved!
You see, taking action is not a problem to her. But reading and learning is. Many newbies tend to fail because they don’t even read the Adwords Guidelines first. They don’t even know what are the acceptables ads on Facebook and what are not. And worst, they don’t even know the offer only accepts traffic from a certain country!
That’s where the first stages of learning comes in. Before starting, you may want to read the policies first, you may want to read some article first from authority blogs and you may want to instill it to your understanding. As where everything starts, one should always read first, then learn. After all, this is where super affiliates start anyway right?