THE AFFILIATE MARKETING PRIMER

The short answer:  think creatively!!... Find your own unique niche... And track your experiments to see which work best (if well enough isn't good enough for your purposes).

But let's back up a bit first. Initially, you'll have some setup to attend to. You'll have to spend some time selecting, then downloading, banners/links and placing them on your site, and so forth... Rest, if you need to! When you have the energy, face the next step:  making your affiliate program/s come alive.
 

CHOOSING AFFILIATE I.D.s:

One little point that can make a big difference...  When you're invited to choose your own affiliate "I.D.", use a word or phrase that's descriptive of your business or, better yet, of the affiliate program itself (i.e., the product or service you're promoting).

You might think that it makes sense to choose some word you happen to like for your I.D. (as you might with a password).  I did that at first...  And now I'm stuck with it!  (I wish someone had given me that excellent advice I just gave you.)

...Because oftentimes, that I.D. is used as part of your affiliate coding.  Which may be visible to those clicking on your link.  And you might as well make use of every chance you get for impressing on people the validity of the link they're clicking on...  Hence the choice of keywords that reflect back something about the link's object.

This is comparable to choosing a descriptive domain name rather than using an undescriptive business name for your URL.  For instance...  

In my free e-seminar, I talk about the excellent software "Postmaster Express", which allows one to set up unlimited autoresponders from one's own computer (it's also superb as a contact management database).  Since I'm emphasizing the autoresponder feature of this product, doesn't the affiliate URL "http://www.post-master.net/rs/autoresponder" look reassuring? - especially since the company's chosen domain name doesn't explicitly describe that aspect of the product.  If I had chosen the name of my favorite something-or-other for the I.D. instead of "autoresponder", I would have lost that chance to influence my readers to go ahead and click on that link.

...Nor does it hurt that my context-sensible I.D. made the link look less like an affiliate link!  If people happen to take that for a subject-related subdirectory of the affiliate site, so much the better.

Sometimes you don't know enough to think ahead (sigh). ...Learning from my mistakes is a lot of what this website is about!
 

INSERTING AFFILIATE LINKS:

You can normally put in whatever you want as the link that's visible to the site visitor and use the special affiliate-coded URL link in the HTML coding. But...

Most affiliate clearinghouses have very complex affiliate links, each element of which must be put into your pages exactly as given... And sometimes the offerings might not coincide precisely with what you'd like to show. So you'll have to rethink how to use the affiliate link on your site. (Some companies don't even offer a basic company name link, which is a little annoying! - I don't at all like being coerced into displaying their endorsements as though they were mine - hmmph.  Nor am I at all grateful for having a company's link show only the domain of their affiliate clearinghouse or affiliate program software.)

If you are also (or instead) using a banner image, you must link that to the same specially-coded URL (again, you might have to accept the affiliate company's version only). (The image actually links from a specified point on your webpage to the image file itself, which must be in the same directory on your computer as the page it is to show up in... Likewise, it must be in the same directory on your webhost's server.) After setting up the links, you would then reload your pages to your webhost's server, uploading any image files separately as well (in binary format, if there's a choice).

If you use a WYSIWYG ("what you see is what you get") HTML editor to create your webpages, BEWARE!!! Your editor may very well change the HTML coding you think you are diligently copying exactly. (Even unto changing it after you've carefully added it to the HTML source code... The next time you open the file in your editor, there it goes again!)... And you may not get credit for the click-throughs.

Look for deletions of phrases, changes in word order, changes in capitalization... Your editor may be translating code into its own standards - it will all work, because there are different ways of coding; but the affiliate clearinghouse won't be able to track what they need to record the links from your site with their computer algorithms.

When this is the case, the only way to absolutely ensure that the coding isn't changed is to add the HTML coding directly to your notepad. (Meaning, don't get into the notepad from your WYSIWYG editor, but call it up directly from your desktop, or wherever it resides on your computer.) ...Then upload the file to your webhost's server before you ever try to view that page again from within your editor. In other words, this is all a big fat hassle (!) unless your editor makes it possible to "wall off" selected code.

Having very little money at my disposal, or time to learn HTML, I had used Netscape Composer to create my first site's webpages.  With more than one affiliate link on a page, I found it just too difficult to keep track of what was going on and ended up buying Microsoft FrontPage 2000 because it could "arrest" changes to added codes (this is called "supporting absolute positioning").

However, the switching from one editor to another cost me much time in fixing the other things that went awry (HTML head information missing, the wrong drive being listed in the links, ".htm" pages instead of ".html"... sigh!). I'm here to tell you that, if you possibly can, it's much better to do it right in the first place!

Other non-HTML-damaging WYSIWYG editors reviewed in June 2000 by PC World are: DreamWeaver 3 by Macromedia (with FrontPage 2000, rated best), Adobe GoLive 4.01, Namo WebEditor 3.06, and NetObjects Fusion 5.0 (all given secondary ratings).
  

Okay, there's a way to avoid having to worry about how the affiliate link comes across; and I've saved it until now, because you won't necessarily want to use it (or might not want to use it everywhere) - there are, again, issues that might crop up later on to make you wish you'd known enough to think things through a little more thoroughly.  (ESP would sure come in handy sometimes, wouldn't it?)

But, first we'll talk about link masking ("cloaking" commonly refers to hiding a page from the search engines)...  You can use another link that automatically loads your affiliate link into the clicker's browser - and a simple way to do this is via a "redirect page".  The main advantages to doing this might be:  1) People won't be able to "steal" your affiliate link by just typing the merchant's domain into their browser, or by substituting their own affiliate ID for yours in hopes of purchasing the product at a discount.  2) People won't know that it's an affiliate link (i.e., they might think it could, at least, be just another page of information on your site) and therefore wouldn't be so apt to shy away from what they might perceive as advertising.  [Aside:  Ahh... perhaps this sort of cut-throat competitiveness in the world of savvy affiliates might encourage you to select a niche where "nicer" people thrive?  Really, there are already so many webmarketers marketing to webmarketers...  Look for your special niche! - targeting non-marketers?]  3) You can shorten long URLs (which is especially useful for including them in ezines, where a long URL may not fit on one line, making the clickable portion incomplete).

This "mask link", as I think of it, can be any URL - but what affiliates with websites usually use is a link that includes their own website domain name...  The premises being that A) they want to hide their affiliate link; B) the more times people see your domain name, the better, as far as psychological impact goes - it gets "branded" into their consciousness; and C) if your domain contains a keyword that's emphasized on the page where the link is, this will help a bit in your search engine ranking for that page.  You would create a special page or subdirectory for the mask link, and this would transfer the clicker to the affiliate-coded URL.

Going back to my Postmaster Express example, I could choose to "house" the redirect link page on this site and simply set up a redirect page for it... whose URL might be "http://www.AffiliatePrimer.com/autoresponder.html" (or ".../postmaster.html", if I already had a page about autoresponders I'd used that word for).  Or I could set up a subdirectory whose URL would be something like "http://www.AffiliatePrimer.com/autoresponding/" or "http://www.AffiliatePrimer.com/pm/", if making it shorter outweighed the desire to use a meaningful keyword.

If you'd like to go ahead with masking some or all of your affiliate links (and your webhost doesn't offer an automated link masking feature), here's the simplest way to take advantage of it:  This HTML-type (as opposed to CGI and Java script versions) redirect page creator - "META Refresh Creator" - is free and easy to use:  http://www.affiliatetoolkit.com/metacreate/  Or you can see how to create the basic HTML page yourself here:  http://davesite.com/webstation/html/chap15.shtml - see the "Auto-refreshing" section of the tutorial.  (The page will appear blank - the information goes in the HTML header.)

However, against the possible advantages of this practice I would place some possible disadvantages...

• You've got to keep track of what you've decided to call the phony pages or subdirectories - so you can use the same masked link the next time you want to refer people to that affiliate product.  If you're doing this for a lot of affiliate links, it really adds to the complexity of your webmastering task.  (And if you add too many such cool tricks to your webmarketing efforts, you might wake up one day and realize that you're overwhelmed - I speak from experience!)
• If you have more than one website, do you use different mask links for each site, or the same one for all your sites?  Using a link for another of my sites on this one could add to my readers' awareness of my other site, and would be of some use in terms of adding to its link popularity... but is it appropriate to "water down" the attention paid to this site while you're reading here?  And if you ever decide to back out of one of your websites, let's hope it's not the one you chose to use as the host for all your redirection pages. :^)  But if I set up redirection pages for all my sites, that really adds to the tracking complications.  
• Do you choose to use redirection links in your ebooks?  If so, you'd better hope that you never wish to get rid of the site you host your mask links on.  Ebooks can be around forever, even when your site is no longer existing - or belongs to someone else, who has deleted your pages... or changed your affiliate IDs to his.  If your links suddenly don't work, the ebook has lost value to the person who owns it and might want to use it again (God forbid that it's a viral ebook that this person is passing on to others for you!).
• If your own domain name is already long, adding meaningfully-named pages or subdirectories is going to make it really long! - which is cumbersome.
• Some older browsers that may still be around don’t support the auto-refreshing command, so a viewer could get "stuck" on the redirection page.  (You could always include a direct link on the redirection page as a back-up if you're worried about this.)
• The search engines reportedly don't like totally automatic redirection pages - i.e., where the timing is set to zero seconds... unscrupulous people used them to scam searchers who thought they were going to one site but were willy-nilly being diverted to another.  If you mask your links with an HTML "auto-refresh" page (the easiest way), you must set the delay for at least one second.  And hope that the search engines won't take a dislike to that!
• While many websearchers these days may be familiar with redirection, others may be a little put out at the little bit of deception involved.  If your site caters to old-hand webmarketers, fine; if not, the whole endeavor to psychologically manipulate your clientele may actually not be worthwhile if it detracts from your overall effort to establish yourself as a trustworthy adviser.

So, you'll likely want to do some considering about what your future plans might look like before deciding on whether or not to mask your affiliate links.  (Certainly for now, there's no need to do so - that gives you time. :^)  Many webmasters do choose to use redirect links just so as to prevent link theft (especially for ClickBank links) - and some feel that this can definitely be financially rewarding (i.e., particularly if they promote many ClickBank products).  Others won't want to be bothered with the rigamarole.

If you're the kind of person who is interested in pursuing that kind of detail in order to maximize your affiliate success, this next section may be for you as well...
    

AFFILIATE TRACKING - TRACK YOUR RESULTS/EXPERIMENT FOR BETTER RESULTS:

There are a couple of major aspects to affiliate tracking/experimenting, each of which is solved by a nifty bit of software I can recommend.

The first thing to wonder about is how people are getting to your site... That wondering is answered by "The Ultimate Link Tracker" (free with Ken Evoy's "5 Pillar" affiliate program sign-up, at the SiteSell site, while that opportunity lasts - but you can see information on the original version of the product at the website www.cgitoolbox.com/cgi/uat/index.html... the price there being $49US, and the name there being "The Ultimate Ad Tracker").

This will tell you precisely what web-based effort led to your getting that link - i.e., where the person who eventually came to your website came from... Email? Another website's links page? A web classified ad? A search engine? This will give you guidance in adjusting your efforts to get people to your site.

(The Ultimate Link Tracker software was further adapted when SiteSell produced Site Build It!, the fantastic theme-site-building, webhosting, domain-name-registering service that is making waves on the web as you read. Great tracking and help with pay-per-click SEs are just two of the many usually-expensive features that Site Build It! brings to webmasters in one inexpensive, integrated package. In fact, SiteSell keeps adding more and more powerful features, without charging extra for any of them.  If, after reading about SBI! on the site, you're interested in winning a free Site Build It! site, there's a monthly sweepstakes!)

Another, similar, way to track your advertising efforts is via affiliate program management software. No, you don't need to operate an affiliate program to make use of it!... You can just use a cheap version to code each of your ads (including affiliate links) with an affiliate ID number. SimpleAffiliate is a good basic program that costs under $30US. While it's not what I'd recommend as affiliate program management software for most people (see "Setting Up an Affiliate Program, Part 2" for that), it's just fine for this purpose. (If you don't want to position yourself for the free form of tracking above!)

Once they're there, you're interested to know which affiliate links are attracting the most people...

That's where the Affiliate Assistant software can come in. As mentioned earlier, it tracks click-to-referral ratios (and earnings) for all your affiliate programs, and it allows you to track and analyze a specific marketing campaign. By keeping track of how many results you get per click (or impression), and then factoring in the amount of money you earn per result (be it click, sale, whatever), you can see which programs you're benefiting from the most. If you want to limit your ad space, you'll see which programs (or banner choices within a program) can go by the wayside - after trying something else to see if you get better results. (You know how they say "it takes money to make money"? - sometimes it takes hardly anything, in this case only $27US.)

Site Build It! also tracks CTR ratios for the links placed, or ending up, there.  Even if you are already hosted somewhere else, you might think of switching to SBI in order to take advantage of its array of add-on components. ...I did! - and I was very happy with the results.  SBI is an especially good choice for the first year or two of hosting, even if you decide later on to transfer to a different vendor - because it is so good at "training you up right" as a webmaster, and at bringing traffic to your door.

[By the way, expert affiliate (and other) marketer Michael Campbell has some excellent advice more loosely related to "tracking"...  See his article "Top 10 Tips To Avoiding Affiliate Program Glitches" for warnings largely about monitoring affiliate merchants' tracking of you.]