Affil­i­ate Ad (make believe):

 

If you’re like me, when I first heard about affil­i­ate adver­tis­ing, I con­jured up a vision where­in a blog­ger, pod­cast­er, or YouTube video mak­er some­how put togeth­er a list of adver­tis­ing prospects and then con­tact­ed them one by one to solic­it adver­tis­ing sup­port.

But affil­i­ate adver­tis­ing is not like that at all. Affil­i­ate adver­tis­ing is divid­ed into two par­ties: the adver­tis­ers who want to adver­tise on web­sites and in online dig­i­tal pub­li­ca­tions, and the pub­lish­ers of web­sites, web­books, ebooks, and oth­er online pub­li­ca­tions who want to cre­ate a stream of rev­enue from adver­tis­ing to sup­port their online pub­lish­ing activ­i­ties finan­cial­ly. Thus, the adver­tis­ers (retail­ers, mer­chants) and pub­lish­ers (affil­i­ates) are the key par­ties. The key busi­ness for affil­i­ate adver­tis­ing is affil­i­ate ad bro­ker­ing; that is, a bro­ker is the mid­dle­man between adver­tis­ers and pub­lish­ers. And today affil­i­ate ad bro­ker­ing is a huge busi­ness.

Affil­i­ate ad bro­kers do not use the term bro­ker. They call them­selves affil­i­ate net­works. The affil­i­ate adver­tis­ing net­works sim­ply take list­ings from adver­tis­ers. A list­ing sim­ply states what is to be adver­tised, the guide­lines for using the ad, how much is to be paid to pub­lish­ers, what results are required for pay­ment, and oth­er arrange­ments. In oth­er words, the list­ing is an offer­ing to all com­ers, even though an adver­tis­er might be selec­tive as to who it will ulti­mate­ly per­mit to insert the advertiser’s ads into pub­lish­ers’ online pub­li­ca­tions. In addi­tion, an adver­tis­er pro­vides the HTML code to pub­lish­ers to insert the advertiser’s link into the pub­lish­ers’ online pub­li­ca­tions.

Thus, the list­ings make up a cat­a­log (data­base) of poten­tial ads for a pub­lish­er to insert in order to receive adver­tis­ing rev­enue from the adver­tis­ers. It’s a very imper­son­al sys­tem that requires no per­son-to-per­son con­tact or nego­ti­a­tion except on rare occa­sions. In oth­er words, you as a pub­lish­er can eas­i­ly and effi­cient­ly select and use affil­i­ate adver­tis­ing rel­e­vant to your con­tent to gen­er­ate adver­tis­ing rev­enue.

There are dozens and dozens of affil­i­ate adver­tis­ing net­works. Some are open to every­one, and some are exclu­sive. For those that are exclu­sive, the exclu­siv­i­ty is typ­i­cal­ly based on the amount of traf­fic a pub­lish­er has and the sub­ject mat­ter of the con­tent. The more traf­fic you have as a pub­lish­er, the more like­ly the you are to be per­mit­ted to join some of the more suc­cess­ful affil­i­ate net­works.

An affil­i­ate ad is a link that takes a web­site vis­i­tor from the your online pub­li­ca­tion (e.g., web­site, blogsite, web­book) to the advertiser’s ad on the advertiser’s web­site. The advertiser’s ad typ­i­cal­ly includes a call to action, such as a call to pur­chase or a call for web­site vis­i­tors (poten­tial cus­tomers) to pro­vide infor­ma­tion about them­selves (e.g., fill out a form). Some adver­tis­ers pay for every click (on an ad link) that vis­i­tors make. Oth­er adver­tis­ers require fur­ther action such as fill­ing out a form pri­or to adver­tis­ing pay­ment being earned. Still oth­ers require that a sale be made.

An adver­tis­er can list an ad with an affil­i­ate adver­tis­ing net­work very quick­ly. It’s just a mat­ter of inputting a small amount of infor­ma­tion. Adver­tis­ers don’t have to look for prospec­tive pub­lish­ers to run their ads. They leave that up to the affil­i­ate adver­tis­ing net­work (the ad cat­a­log).

If you’re a pub­lish­er look­ing to insert ads into your web­sites, you can sim­ply browse through the cat­a­log of ads avail­able and choose the ones you want. The cat­a­logs even have search func­tions to enable you to make your search­es for appro­pri­ate ads easy and effi­cient. That makes it sim­ple to come up with an assort­ment of ads that you can insert into your web­site con­tent to gen­er­ate rev­enue.

Search the Catalogs  You don’t have to stick with one affiliate network. There are specialized search engines that search through many affiliate advertising catalogs to find ads that you can insert into your online publications (e.g., OfferVault, http://OfferVault.com). When you find an ad that you want to insert, you simply go to the specific affiliate advertising network and use the listing.

Dif­fer­ent affil­i­ate adver­tis­ing net­works have dif­fer­ent poli­cies to col­lect adver­tis­ing pay­ments from adver­tis­ers and dis­trib­ute such pay­ments to the pub­lish­ers. Typ­i­cal­ly, an affil­i­ate adver­tis­ing net­work does every­thing: col­lects pay­ments, dis­trib­utes pay­ments, pro­vides account­ing and sta­tis­tics, oper­ates an online cat­a­log, and admin­is­ters an orga­ni­za­tion with rules for par­tic­i­pants. It’s a third-par­ty that pre­sum­ably you can trust. As a pub­lish­er, you can at least trust the net­work more than you can the adver­tis­er.

The rule for effec­tive and effi­cient adver­tis­ing is, of course, to include in your pub­li­ca­tion only affil­i­ate ads that are rel­e­vant to the sub­ject mat­ter of your con­tent. Gener­ic adver­tis­ing such as Coca-Cola, Ford, or Cen­tu­ry 21 are not effec­tive adver­tis­ing for 99% of all web con­tent. They might be effec­tive for food web­sites, car web­sites, or house web­sites, respec­tive­ly. But such web­sites are very small part of the total con­tent on the web. Irrel­e­vant adver­tis­ing doesn’t work well on the web.

Small Percentage  Affiliate advertising covers a very wide scope of products and commercial arrangements in the digital world. This book makes no attempt to cover all. Indeed, this book is dedicated to covering only a small percentage of commercial arrangements: specifically, those that involve digital books and similar online content.

So, the sto­ry of affil­i­ate adver­tis­ing is quite sim­ple but illus­trates the myr­i­ad oppor­tu­ni­ties avail­able to all pub­lish­ers regard­less of size or pub­lish­ing genre. It is unfor­tu­nate that the 500-year tra­di­tion of print pub­lish­ing has blind­ed most authors and pub­lish­ers to the huge affil­i­ate adver­tis­ing net­work indus­try that seems to oper­ate well below the radar of most authors and pub­lish­ers. Read my blog post Adver­tis­ing in Books to learn more about this new poten­tial rev­enue source for dig­i­tal pub­lish­ers.

The moral of the sto­ry is that it may be much more lucra­tive to pro­vide your book (ebook, bookapp, web­book) free and sup­port it with affil­i­ate adver­tis­ing.