Now that you understand the basics of the affiliate
relationship a couple of questions are probably starting to occur
to you. First, how in the world can a company identify where a lead
comes from? That's actually easier online than in traditional businesses
and is the reason affiliate programs are used so prominently on
the web.
Once you sign up to become an affiliate you will
be given a unique code to identify you. You will use this code when
promoting the business and it will be used to track the leads or
sales you generate. The basic method of transferring the lead to
the business involves a link to the businesses site from your site
or email, etc. with your affiliate code embedded in the link. The
website you are an affiliate of will have code on their site to
read the link and give you credit for anything that particular customer
buy while on their site.
An obvious question is what will happen if you send
someone and they don't purchase anything rigth then, but later come
back to place an order. As an NCSA affiliate we will do everything
possible to ensure you still get credit for the sale. First, if
the customer creates a login, even if they don't make a purchase,
the affiliate who referred them is stored in our database and credit
is when they come back to place an order. Even if they don't do
anything our site places a cookie on the visitor's computer identifying
who the affiliate referrer was. (a cookie is a small bit of information
stored on a web visitor's computer that can be read back by the
site if the visitor returns) The only way to lose your position
as the referrer is if the customer deletes their cookies or clicks
directly on another affiliate's linking code.
The way you will embed your linking code as an NCSA
affiliate is in part of the URL (uniform resource locator) or website
name. For example, to create a normal link to our site you might
use the following:
http://www.ncsacademy.com/affiliatesignup.cfm
To create a link that would identify you as an affiliate
you would simply append your affiliate information to the URL as
shown below:
http://www.ncsacacemy.com/affiliatesignup.cfm?ref=1
As you can see all we have done is added a '?' after
the webpage and a small code 'ref=1'. The' ?' tells the website
that the webpage name is complete and to get ready to receive additional
information. What's left,' ref=1', just tells the computer that
the affiliate who referred this customer was assigned affiliate
ID number 1. Once you are an affiliate you can create a link to
our site just like this substituting your unique affiliate id for
the number 1.
Now we just need to learn how to get people to click
that link and start earning money!
Continue reading Web
Promotion 101?