The Benefits of Affiliate Marketing

An Introduction to Affiliate Marketing

Originally Published on 29th June 2005

I used to write articles for a website called A Best Web which is closing down and I have decided to pull my articles from there and give them a new home here for posterity. 

Offline Marketing

Most manufacturers lack the knowledge, ability or capacity to sell their products to a level of market saturation. i.e they only sell to people in their neighbourhood, city or county. By using retail outlets, franchising or distributing through third parties, they are able to achieve far greater sales volumes as new people market their products further afield creating new markets that did not previously exist.

Online Marketing

In online marketing we have exactly the same scenario and manufacturers and suppliers need for increased sales is filled in a few different ways. The problem with selling stuff online is actually getting people to come to your site (traffic) which suppliers soon discover is the hardest part of the game.

Affiliate Marketing

Enter stage right, affiliate marketing. I am not going to harp on too much but to me affiliate marketing is the best win win distribution model between manufacturer/supplier and publisher in existence anywhere.

Manufacturer Benefits

• The manufacturer increases his sales force at an exponential level and has people selling for him that he has never met. 
• The main benefit is that sales delivered via affiliate marketing have practically no costs attached as the first contact the supplier has with a customer is when an order or product query arrives.
• Most sales have a Cost Per Sale (Action) arrangement and thousands of affiliates marketing their products whom only require payment if a sale has been made.
• The affiliates cover all hosting, design and marketing costs and although affiliates are paid a tiny percentage compared to offline retail outlets, this is balanced by other benefits.

Affiliate Benefits

• The win win side of the coin for the affiliate is being able to create huge online shopping sites with practically unlimited products lists
• never having to pay for stock
• never having to deal with shipping, returns or customers

The wonderful nature of the web being that it is borderless and products are either delivered to customer's doors or downloaded online making the location where the customer first clicked through to make their purchase irrelevant.

So based on this description it is clear that each and every affiliate site that sells products performs a clear and tangible service both to the supplier and the customer.

Customer Benefits

The customer benefits as the affiliate has sourced and delivered information about the product(s) the customer was looking for and transferred the customer directly to the place of purchase.

An Affiliates Requirements for Success

The single most important talent of any affiliate is their ability to stay ahead of the pack and get their product pages listed first whether in generic internet search engines or via PPC. If anyone learns this skill and maintains it through research and experience then the online world is their oyster. Of course there are many other aspects to selling but with experimentation these will fall into place once an acceptable traffic level has been achieved.

Because there are a very large number of spammy sites selling similar products out there and they appear to be proliferating at an alarming rate, search engines have no choice but to filter out a lot of them to maintain some kind of integrity.

Most search engines do it on a macro level as the sheer volume of Internet pages makes human intervention on a large scale daunting. These macro filters catch out many ethical, quality websites that are confused with spammy sites or have duplicate content due to copying and/or 301 hijacks, intentional or otherwise.

Correct Datafeed Manipulation

I would like to share a few tips on handling datafeeds in such a way as to get the most benefit out of them while doing well in the search results and remaining in them.

Put random text such as related quotes that update on every page load to protect against duplicate content filters and pagejackers. If someone does copy your site or the dupe filter comes calling your page is never the same as the last visit.

Use mod_rewrite to pretty up your URLs. Used in conjunction with preg_replace and urldecode($QUERY_STRING) you can hide your database queries inside your URLs.

Learn to use and love preg_replace and Regex. It is an extremely fast and versatile multiple term search and replace tool. You can create a huge word list and it will swap out all these words dynamically on the fly letting you keep your feed unique. Use it on all your datafeed text, product names etc. Although you will have to learn Regex (Regular Expressions) which can be daunting, the benefits are endless.

Write a redirection script to handle all your outgoing links and mask any URLs that may be on search engines watch lists. Use mod_rewrite, preg_replace and urldecode($QUERY_STRING) to rewrite product URLs to the exact product name for best SERP results, pass them on to your redirection page which will look them up in your database, add the link code and change the header location to match that of the target URL.

e.g. http://yoursite.com/details_royale-beach-towels-in-purple.htm has been rewritten with preg_replace and strtolower from the product name Royale Beach Towels (Purple).

mod_rewrite has been told to watch out for the string 'details_' and pass all requests to a page called details.htm without changing the URL as it appears in the browser and converting the URL into a query. This is achieved in .htaccess like this:

RewriteRule ^details_([^/]+).htm$ /details.htm?$1 [L]

Which gives us

details.htm?royale-beach-towels-in-purple

The details.htm page then uses urldecode($QUERY_STRING) to extract the query and then preg_replace and strtoupper to convert it back to Royale Beach Towels (Purple) which is queried from your database and the correct product link is extracted.

This product link is then updated into the current page header like so:

$URL="Location: ".($row["YourLinkColumn"]."&afsrc=1&sid=".$row["ProductName"]);
header($URL);

In this way your affiliate URLs are never exposed. Use robots.txt to block a directory from all search engines and place your redirection script in there.

To build navigation, use MySQL "Select DISTINCT" to auto build menus from a brands or styles column in your database. Don’t forget to pass your menus through preg_replace and really work on those word lists to keep your sites unique.

If you have not used redirection, consider adding rel="no follow" to all your products HREFs.

Have a good think about your link exchange structure. Is it effective? Consider buying a good sounding URL that you can sub-domain to house all your other sites link exchange programs. In this way your site only has one outgoing link to your separate links domain. This should prevent your site from receiving penalties for linking to bad neighbourhoods which is an easy trap to fall into as they can be hard to spot. The links you gain this way are better for all concerned as they are one way.

If you build more than one site for the same product range mod out your word list a lot. Use a completely different naming structure and whatever you do, make sure to change all your page names, titles and H1s so you are not competing with your own site but expanding your market by targeting different word combinations for a brand or product.

If anyone finds it useful in some way, I would be honoured. Also if anyone wants help with any aspect I have explained above or a simplified working example, just drop me a line and I will write working code and add it in a future article.


All the best and happy marketing,


Dirk Gardner