Affiliate Programs

What is it  ??

Everyone talks about making side-hussle money by way of affiliate links. What the heck are they, how do you get them and how do you use them ??

In short, affiliate links are your way of being a secret salesman for any given product you’ve written about in your blogs, or talked about in your videos, posts or live streams. If you send traffic to a seller’s website, and someone buys a product because they came there using YOUR links, then you receive a small commission on the sale. You could talk about a certain product, a service or anything at all that is paid for on the internet. If you send them, you get paid.

Is it effective ??

Not very, unless you have some way of directing a large amount of traffic to that site. If you do not have an actual following of readers, subscribers or listeners to your program, you will likely not get much, if any, results from any affiliate programs. If you do not generate much traffic to the affiliate you’ve partnered with, you could even could even find yourself being removed from their affiliate program.

It’s kind of like being on the payroll of several companies at once, as a commissioned salesman, of sorts. If there are no sales, you’ll eventually get fired. And so there is an awful lot to do to prepare for being successful in this line of ‘work’. At the very least, you’re (hopefully) following your passion in regards to writing or talking about the things that you love most.

Firstly, you need a platform by which you can connect to large numbers of people. Think of your Youtube channel subscribers, your Blog readers, your Facebook page followers, or Instagram, Twitter (X), TikTok followers and fans. The reason some people are called ‘Influencers’ is because they have an uncanny ability to get people to buy something or to at least get people to visit a buyer’s website & look around.

How Do I Become an Affiliate?

There are Affiliate programs galore on the internet, at almost every large retailer, marketplace, or manufacturer’s website. Whenever you visit a website you are interested in, just search that site for words and phrases like  ‘Affiliate Program’ or ‘Partner With Us’ or  ‘Join Our Team’. Typically, if you do not find such a program listed at your website of interest, they may have partnered with a business entity that is effectively an Affiliate Partnership company, where all they do is operate the Affiliate Programs of hundreds or thousands of assorted businesses, so that those businesses can focus on their main goals instead of having to employ droves of tech-savy payroll/I.T. personnel to figure out who came from where, and who gets what. It can completely oerwhelm a company that is not heavily invested in the technology needed to track every sale and every Affiliate.

Some of the Affiliate Partnerships I have been in are:

• AWIN   (Access to thousands of companies)
• Impact  (Access to thousands of companies)
• Amazon (Access to unlimited sellers)

Some of the singular retail Affiliate Programs I’ve been in are:

• Thomann Music
• Walmart
• Web Hosting Service Providers
• Various Courses, Classes and Lessons

By joining a few of these and other programs you may find, it’s pretty easy to get into Affiliate Programs, but it’s another thing altogether to figure out how to use them effectively and to get some traffic flow going on. Remember the only way you’ll end up making any money is IF you can send people to a place, and they BUY something there.

How Do You Use The Program ??

If you’re in an Affiliate Program, you’ll be provided with a way to create a special link to a buyer’s page that contains a very long code attached to the web adress of the item to buy or to the sellers website. That long code tells the seller that it was YOU that sent that person to buy a thing, and it’ll stay active if they come back some other day to buy it instead of right now. (Usually within 2 weeks-30 days window) Commisions are all over the map, depending on what & who you’re dealing with. You could get 2% or you could get 18% commissions. It’s always stated in any partnerships you’ve ageereed to.

So, once you’re in an Affiliate Program, you’ll likely spend days or weeks trying to figure out their system and their processes for creating the links correctly, and you’ll need to place those links somehow into your content at places that are relative in some way to the items you’re attempting to help sell. You may get some pushback if you just post unrelated links to unrelated products into unrelated content. There’s always a lot to learn in order to get everything right.

So How Do You Get Paid ??

Generally, you’ll be required to ‘Fill Out The Forms’ that make everything all legal in whatever country you’re in. You may need an actual Business I.D. or Tax Identity number of some kind, so that any & all taxes are handled properly and legally. They won’t be able to send you any money unless you’re legitimate. There are W8 or W9 forms if you’re operating from one country to some other country, Terms & Conditions Agreements, Privacy Policies, and Affiliate Disclosure statements you may need to comply with at every level. There’s a learning curve you’ll need to climb in order to not break any laws. Then you’ll need to also share your actual banking information with the program. They’ll need your Account numbers, branch numbers, physical adress and maybe more, so that there’s complete & accurate records.

Once all that is complete, you can go ahead & embed your Affiliate Links into your content & (hopefully) someone will find your content and click on your link, go visit the seller’s website & actually buy something within the allotted period of time. The Affiliate Program will take care of the rest.

What else do I need to know??

There’s no end to what you’ll need to know at least something about. For instance, all kinds of people, when they’re about to buy something online, may have installed an app on their computer that purports to save you money at the last minute before buying. You could install an app that puts an icon on your browser that if used, will search the internet looking for an alternative place to buy that item a little cheaper. It might find another site where you’ll save $5 or $10, or it might come back saying it found nothing. But even if it finds nothing, that app will ALWAYS steal the sale, and hijack it for themselves. It replaces the Affiliate Info with it’s own data so that any commisions go to THEM, whoever they are. That’s the reason the app is free. It doesn’t care about YOU saving money, it’s just there to STEAL the commision. There are several active class action lawsuites in the works.

Such Commision Theft apps are:

• PayPal Honey
• Capitol One Shopping
• Phia
• Microsoft Shopping
• Rakuten
• RetailMeNot
• Ibotta
• SlickDeals
• SwagBucks
• Coupert
• Piggy

These are all commission theives that act just like a slimey salesman who hangs around the checkouts, runs up to you & says ‘Oh Hey – Can & help you find anything else? Ok then, have a nice day’ and then tries to claim the commission for whatever items you had already decided to buy.

So, Why Even Bother ??

It seems like there is far more grief than it’s worth in the field of Affiliate Link income. Who knows if it’s worth all the bother, unless you really enjoy all the work you’re putting in and maybe you’re getting other rewards out of it all, such as running YOUR OWN store, selling YOUR OWN merch and products … and finding other lucrative returns for your efforts.

So, put lots of thought into what you choose to do, because in the end, your time is worth only what you decide it’s worth.