Revenue Sharing 101

You've seen those ubiquitous Amazon.com links on news and sports sites. You've seen the Barnesandnoble.com boxes on search engines and music sites. You've even seen a link to One and Only Internet personals on your best friend's personal home page. What do all these sites know that you don't? Quite simply, they understand the revenue-generating power of affiliate programs. Merchants and Webmasters everywhere are participating in them, and so should you.

What is an affiliate program?
Essentially, affiliate and revenue-sharing programs allow Web site owners to feature a merchant banner, logo or text ad and earn a percent of a sale or commission.

However, affiliate success does not happen overnight. Before you get started, you'll need to have these necessary components in place first:

Define your niche market and have it reflected in your domain name
Try to pick something you enjoy such as gardening, toys, airplanes or tennis. Did you know that thousands of good domain names expire every day? Go to: Whois.net and type Tennis (or your topic of interest) into the blue box titled "Get your own domain name." Chances are, obvious and generic names such as Tennis.com will already be taken, but a list of previously registered domains will appear after your search results. Try your search again using phrases that are associated with your site such as: court, elbow, racket. You will be surprised to see just how many domain names are available.

Host your own site
After your domain name is registered, you'll need to find a hosting company. Try to find a simple no frills plan without all the bells and whistles of a large e-commerce company. An affiliate program sends traffic to other merchant shopping sites, so it won't be necessary to have your own credit card processing or shopping software.
Although tempting, I recommend staying clear of the many free homepage sites. Personally, I'd be hesitant to shop on any site that does not have it's own registered domain name. Be sure to check out thelist.com for a complete selection of ISP's and hosting companies.

Finally, join affiliate programs
There are literally thousands of affiliate programs on the Web. After your site is live, you'll need to join programs that are of interest to your visitors. Launched in December 1997, Refer-it.com is the leading search engine for revenue-sharing programs. Its database includes descriptions and ratings of 3,812 quality affiliate programs. A search for sports on Refer-it.com came up with 159 sports-related merchants. Now, that's a pretty good start!

Each merchant program requires that you fill out an affiliate sign-up form to get started. The form will ask you for a description of your site, contact info and page views. If your site is fairly new, I would suggest either leaving the impression information blank or coming up with a conservative estimate.

Many merchant programs will automatically approve your site into their program. You will get a confirmation e-mail with all the information needed to access your affiliate account. It is very important that you keep these e-mails in an electronic affiliate folder for future reference. I would suggest using the same username and password for all programs. With thousands of affiliate programs to choose from, you'll be happy that you did. Try to pick something easy to remember such as username: TennisElbow, password: net2001.

Merchants using the same affiliate tracking system (solution provider) are part of an affiliate network. These networks have applications that allow you to join multiple programs with a simple check box. Take advantage of this technology.

Don't get upset when you get a rejection e-mail from a merchant. Many times, a site will be rejected if the impression or page view level does not meet specific requirements. Don't write these merchants off. Plunge forward and in a few months, try again.

Update your code
After you have a handful of affiliate acceptance e-mails in your inbox, you'll need to login to the merchant site and get your affiliate code. Many programs have made it very easy to access this information. Most merchants offer a choice of generic banners, specific product links, text links and promotional banners. After you have chosen your banner or link, you'll need to upload it to your site. The banners can be served on the merchant site by cutting and pasting the appropriate affiliate code, or you may have to save the image to your hard drive and enter the affiliate code in the <a href=> tag. Both work fine, but if you have more than a dozen banners served from merchant sites, you may experience slower than normal load time.

Be sure to update your banners frequently. Do not plaster your new site with hundreds of flashing banner ads that take forever to load. Selectively pick quality merchants and try to maintain a balance of content and banner ads.

Be sure to monitor affiliate performance
The best way to find out which affiliate programs are performing is to check your physical mailbox. Be aware, many programs pay quarterly and will only issue checks after a defined sales level is achieved. Most merchants provide a reporting center where you can run reports to monitor sales, clickthroughs, and commission earned. Position those merchants that are performing well in high traffic areas and remove some of the programs that are not performing.

Promote your site and your affiliate links
Tell everyone you know about your site. Don't forget friends, family, colleagues and your tennis team. If one of your merchant programs is having a spring blowout clearance on tennis shoes, e-mail your contacts and be sure to include an affiliate link to the sale page.

Be patient
After you spend some time updating your site and getting familiar with the ins and outs of affiliate programs, you'll need to work on getting visitors.

Cynthia A. Arko is the Product Director for internet.com's Refer-it.com affiliate directory. She coordinates advertising, site development, and conference planning. Cynthia helped grow Refer-it.com from a small directory of Affiliate Programs to the Web's leading resource for information about affiliate programs. She also currently maintains KidsTown Direct, a shopping portal for parents and young families. Cynthia can be reached at carko@internet.com.