What is affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketing is a growing and highly profitable segment, both for advertisers and for affiliates. The idea is marketing through others, where you pay based on results.

Affiliate marketing quickly emerged on the internet, and the concept is quite simple. It’s about using webmasters to promote your product or service and paying for the results (in one way or another). A common example is travel agencies that pay for each booking you can secure through your travel guide.

Payment models in Affiliate Marketing

There are several different models for how affiliates are paid. It’s always based on performance in some way. The following payment models exist:

1. Paid per Sale (CPA, Cost Per Acquisition or Cost Per Action)
   The affiliate is paid when a sale is made or a specific action is completed by the referred customer.
2. Paid per Lead (CPL, Cost Per Lead)
   The affiliate is paid when they generate a lead, such as a sign-up or submission of contact information, for the advertiser.
3. Paid per Click (CPC, Cost Per Click)
   The affiliate is paid based on the number of clicks they generate to the advertiser’s site.
4. Paid per Impression (CPM, Cost Per Mille, Cost per Thousand Impressions)
   The affiliate is paid for every thousand views of an ad, regardless of whether the user clicks or takes action.

Affiliate Networks

Today, there are several affiliate networks, and their function is to connect advertisers with potential affiliates. For this, they take a percentage of the payment, and some also charge setup and fixed fees. A few examples of affiliate networks are:

• Tradedoubler
• Awin
• Adtraction
• Adrecord

Affiliate Marketing and Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Affiliate marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) go hand in hand. Often, product and service sellers fall short in SEO, which is an area where affiliates tend to excel. Virtually all successful affiliates work with SEO in one way or another, even those who are now larger brands. Sometimes, this can cause problems for the advertiser using affiliate marketing, as affiliates can become somewhat of a parasite rather than a profitable source of customers. By targeting those who were already searching for your brand or product, affiliates can easily convert visitors into customers (since they had already decided to buy from you) and thus eat into your margins.

Two phenomena where affiliates and advertisers may not agree

Many online sellers of services or goods have a large number of affiliates. In addition to being a good model for increasing sales, there are opportunities to leverage this for SEO. It’s not quite the same as it was a few years ago, as Google is now better at recognizing ads, for example, but I still wanted to share two methods.

To understand these methods, it’s important to grasp how an affiliate link works. There are many different systems, and most people probably use some external software or service. To fully take advantage of these methods, you need to have your own system. Typically, an affiliate link works by directing you to a partner-specific landing page where a cookie is set, and then you’re redirected to the page you were originally heading to. However, this doesn’t always happen; sometimes you aren’t redirected at all. Instead, or in addition to the cookie, you might receive an ID in the URL path.

Model 1 – Biting the hand that feeds you

I’ve chosen to call the first method “Biting the Hand That Feeds You” because the goal here is to cannibalize the website’s brand traffic. In this model, you are the affiliate and are paid by someone to drive traffic, sales, or leads to their site. The model relies on someone having made an SEO mistake for it to work, and here’s how it goes:

When someone implements affiliate tracking incorrectly, it’s entirely possible to take their own rankings away from them. What’s required is that they have a system that doesn’t redirect affiliate traffic but lands on its own URL, for example, with an ID in the path (e.g., site.com/?ID=mytraffic or similar). If they’ve also forgotten to set a noindex or canonical tag on the pages created for the affiliate traffic, they’ve opened themselves up to significant problems. This isn’t uncommon and seems to happen on many sites.

What you, as the affiliate, can then do is link properly (from a wide range of strong pages) to the affiliate URL created for you. With enough strength, it will show up in the search results instead of the base pages when, for example, searching for the brand you’re affiliated with. All traffic from search results will be tagged as traffic from you, and therefore you’ll get the credit (and money) for the conversions that come from Google.

Model 2 – Biting back

The second option is when you have affiliates. This model also requires your own affiliate system rather than using one of the networks.

The most common situation is that affiliates set Nofollow tags and/or go through some kind of redirect loop that’s difficult to track in the links. However, this isn’t always the case, and if you have many affiliates, you can expect a large percentage of sites to link to you via your affiliate system. The problem for you is that these links don’t get counted by Google, often because they’re pointing incorrectly, to the wrong site, or similar. A few common issues:

• Some other form of redirect is used on the affiliate links (other than 301)
• Links retain their ID in the URL on the site but have a noindex on the pages
• The link redirects through another domain (affiliateportal.com/redirecttoyoursite)
• And more

By removing such obstacles and ensuring that you set the affiliate cookie (for tracking) and then redirect with a 301, you’ll be able to gain power from all these links. The risk now is quite high for these links, as they are not Google’s favorites, but they can provide a significant boost.

Use with caution

Finally, I would like to raise a warning: these methods are a bit in the gray area and carry certain risks. They can be technically fun, but it’s worth thinking twice before jumping into these approaches.