I have registered several hundred domain names in the hope of making
money through affiliate programs. I want to put together a one page
website for each domain name and put links to other companies in order
create revenue. I have searched the internet tirelessly trying to find
the way of going about this. There seems to be a glut of information
yet I am trying to determine who the "experts" are. I have heard of
Declan Dunn, Corey Rudl, and Ken Evoy though I am not sure what their
expertise is. I want to find out from the most elementary point of
view how to go about doing this. I don't want to sell a product, I
want to link to others who are selling products. Is it best to sign up
for many different affiliate programs or under the umbrella of a
company that handles many affiliates. What are the different types of
programs and why is one better than the other. How can I be sure that
I am going to be paid for those that come through my site. What about
receiving $'s for customers sent to their site long after they
originally came through mine. Are there experts that I could talk to,
one on one, and in person for some type of fee. I have technical
people that will put the sites together, I need to figure out the
business aspect of this. Finally I am not looking for someone to post
a bunch of links for me to go out and research, I am looking for
someone on here that understands what is going on or can get to the
bottom of it for me.

Thanks,
Joel

Hi again Joel,

Apart from this research gig, most of my time involves running
websites that derive all of their income from affiliate schemes. In
answering this question I've combined my personal experience with a
few web searches...


MANY DIFFERENT PROGRAMS OR UMBRELLA COMPANY?
============================================

Umbrella pros:

- The best online tools for analyzing ratios related to clicks, sales
and impressions. Commission Junction allows you to compare your web
sites with each other, compare each of the advertisers, compare how
your links are doing compared to average affiliates and so on.

- One check. Most umbrella companies (BeFree is an exception) will add
up all the commissions from different advertisers, and send you one
check for the total.

- They aren't about to become bankrupt. Commission Junction, BeFree
and LinkShare have been around for a few years, and appear to be
making money. Whenever an advertiser has gone broke, each of them has
always honoured any commissions owed to me.

- When they have a new advertiser, they let you know. This is by far
the easiest way to find out about new affiliate schemes - especially
for businesses you might otherwise never have heard of.


Umbrella cons:

- Companies that use them pay for the convenience. Very broadly
speaking, this means commission rates are going to be a little lower
than with a company that runs their own scheme.


Individual schemes pros:

- Companies that choose to run their own affiliate scheme are more
likely to be "hands-on", and consequently you are more likely to
receive good service, better promotional material and encouragement.

- Room for negotiation. If you are sending a company lots of business,
you can ask for a better commission. Umbrella companies tend to have
fixed, non-negotiable commission rates, whereas individual schemes
often have different payout tiers to reward higher-achieving
affiliates.


Individual schemes cons:

- Minimum payouts. Most have a minimum you need to earn before
receiving a check. Typically it is $25 or $50, occasionally $100. If
you have to wait longer than a month or quarter to receive a check,
there is increased risk that they will end their scheme or go bust in
the meantime (see "Trust" below). It's also possible that you never
reach the minimum.

- Too many cheques. Do you want to receive lots of little cheques from
all over the country arriving every day, or a couple of large cheques
per month?

- Reporting of sales figures can be poor. Some places send you an
email when you make a sale, and that is all. Often it is impossible to
get details of the number of visitors you supplied them.

- Online businesses go belly-up. Almost all choose to ignore their
affiliates when this happens. You find that you can't log in to check
sales figures and they don't respond to your emails. Unless they owe
you thousands, there aren't many practical options for getting your
money.

- Clauses in contracts. Almost universally the affiliate must agree to
a large page of rules and disclaimers, including "we can change the
rules of how this scheme works without notice". As an Australian this
has caught me out in the past, when they have decided that foreign
websites no longer qualify.

- Administration. Keeping track of many different schemes can be very
time consuming.

- Graphics. Some small schemes require you to save all graphics on
your site. This significantly increases the bandwidth used by your
site, and can cost you more to host it.


DIFFERENT TYPES OF PROGRAMS
===========================

Percentage commission:
After following a link on your website, the customer makes a purchase,
and you receive a percentage of the sale. If they return the product,
you lose the commission.

Fixed $ commission:
Usually companies that have only a handful of products will offer a
set amount per sale, rather than a percentage.

Residual / Ongoing commissions:
Many subscription based businesses or web-hosting services will give
you commissions for years if the customer stays a customer.

Per lead:
For example - "get 25 cents for each person who joins our mailing
list".

Per click:
You get a cent or two each time someone clicks on a link. Can create
fraud problems, with crooked affiliates automating clicks, and honest
affiliates being accused of the same.

Per search:
Most pay-per-click search engines give a percentage of the bidded
amount to third party sites that host their search box or page of
keywords.

Multi-level:
Some affiliate schemes offer two levels of commission, where you also
get an ongoing minor percentage if someone else joins the scheme via
your site. I prefer to get a fixed fee for referring a new affiliate,
and I steer well clear of any scheme that has more than two levels.


TRUST
=====

How can I be sure that I am going to be paid for those that come
through my site?

- Mostly you can't, and you have to trust them. This isn't as bad as
it sounds, and the same rules apply here as with any non-cash offline
business. You make a judgement about whether the other party seems
trustworthy and you take a chance. Occasionally you might have to
write-off a bad debt, just like banks do. You are probably going to
have more problems online, but the type of loss is different - when
someone follows a link from your site and then buys a product, what
has it cost you? Unless you are spending money on advertising to get
people to your site, your expenses should be extremely low, and any
lost commissions are paper losses only.

- Participate in forums where affiliates swap stories and ask
questions. Often the people there make a living from affiliate
schemes, and word soon spreads if a company is ripping them off.

      alt.www.affiliate (part of Usenet) is okay, but is biased
towards the UK

      The Internet Affiliate Marketing Association is brand new, but
very busy and educational:
      http://iafma.org/forums.html

      Webmaster World has a forum for affiliates:
      http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum20/

      Revenews - well-written free advice:
      http://www.revenews.com/advice/

      Open Directory lists many more useful sites:
      http://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/Internet/Web_Design_and_Development/Authoring/Webmaster_Resources/Affiliate_Programs/Resources/

- Use link tracking software. This is what Yahoo does. Each link is
indirect, and before it gets redirected to the final destination, a
program has counted the click and stored information about the time of
day, the page it came from, matched it with other links the visitor
has clicked on etc. Using one of these programs you can compare the
clicks you believe you have sent, with the clicks they say you sent.
Typically you will send 10% more than they receive, due to people
changing their mind before they get there.

- Remember that most businesses that run affiliate schemes are happy
to pay commissions - the more commissions they are paying, the more
sales they are making. The original (?) major affiliate scheme was
Amazon's, and just last week they increased commissions, and it has
been running for many years.

- Look at the site that is offering the scheme:

      Would you buy from them? 
      How long have they been in business? 
      What level of reporting do they offer affiliates? 
      How hard is it to find the affiliate log-in from their home
page?

The last question is my favorite test - if you have to email them to
find out where the log-in is, something is very wrong.


COOKIES
=======

What about receiving $'s for customers sent to their site long after
they
originally came through mine?

Most schemes use cookies to keep track of visitors. If they go away
and come back a month later, the cookie should show that they
originally came from your website, and you get he commission. This
usually means that if they followed another affiliate's link prior to
following yours, they get the commission. It also means that any
customers who have their cookies turned off can cost you money.

Cookies have a duration built into them. Affiliate schemes have cookie
durations lasting anywhere from one day to a year and occasionally
cookies that don't expire. Expect a few days, a week, a month or 45
days.


EXPERTS
=======

I don't wish to sound too cynical, but many online "how to make money
using the internet" experts are telling the truth - they are making
lots of money, but only by selling lots of well written copy to people
who want to make an easy buck. They never just sell the book; they run
an affiliate scheme and get you to sell the book for them. I have yet
to find a good book on this topic in a bookstore.

Just like someone who sells horse racing tips, or a psychic who
predicts lottery numbers, you have to ask yourself why they aren't
doing it themselves.

Commission Junction has a sub site called CJ University. Here are the
titles of some of the articles they have there:

-  Email Marketing - Tactics for Success  
-  Preparing Your Business for the Fourth Quarter  
-  The Basics of Ad Testing  
-  Increase Conversion Rates with Contextual Selling  
-  Best Practices of Top Publishers 
-  Using the Account Manager to Find Advertisers and Links  
-  Access Advertiser Links within Frontpage 
-  Practical Applications for EPC  
-  Developing Partnerships with Advertisers  
-  Calculating Your Account Balance  

I have not bought any e-books on this topic, but I presume that the
free advice CJ offers will be quite similar. Companies like CJ want
both parties to be successful.


Are there experts that I could talk to, one on one, and in person for
some type of fee?

I had not previously been aware of Declan Dunn, Corey Rudl, or Ken
Evoy. I didn't even make it to Rudl's website, because from the Google
search...

://www.google.com/search?q=%22Corey+Rudl%22&num=30

...I saw the link entitled "Corey Rudl's Latest eBook Complete With
Resale Rights!!!!" and that put me right off. I would think twice
about any advice about two-tiers being better than one, and any tables
of numbers showing how much money you can make.

I was unable to find an expert on making money from affiliate schemes
for hire. However, there are some experts who sell their services to
companies wishing to start their own affiliate scheme - they are bound
to have the knowledge you require. Here are two affiliate marketing
experts who might be able to help you:

Linda Woods
http://www.myaffiliateprogram.com/linda.asp

Fox Tucker
http://www.foxtucker.com/affiliatemarketing/services/index.shtml


THOUGHTS ON YOUR PLAN
=====================

The thing about affiliate schemes is that almost anyone can sign-up
for free. Consequently there are probably millions of single page
websites out there doing exactly what you are planning. These sites
can score highly in search engine results by cheating, but typically
do not. The most successful affiliates tend to have large sites, which
have lots of content and information.

Obviously you don't wish to share your plan here, and it's bound to be
a new way of doing things, but in my experience there are only two
ways to make money using single page affiliate sites:

1) Trick the search engines
2) Pay the search engines 

Any other method for getting visitors to your site probably costs too
much.



Search Strategy:

"affiliate marketing" consultant hourly
://www.google.com/search?q=%22affiliate+marketing%22+consultant+hourly


As always, if any of the above is unclear or lacking, ask for a
clarification

Best wishes,
robertskelton-ga

---

Request for Answer Clarification by joel1357-ga on 08 Oct 2002 16:08 PDT

What is the (industry standard) % success rate, i.e., how many out of
a hundred visitors to my site will:
 
    -    click through my site to one of my advertiser's sites?
    -    click through and sign up on the advertiser's mailing list?
    -    click through and make a purchase?
 
Please estimate: Assuming an average (middle of the pack) search
engine ranking, how many average visitors per day to the average
single page (affiliate advertising click through purpose only) web
page?
 
Any idea what the average internet purchase price is (for all products
from all sites that have affiliate programs)?
 
Approx how many total companies/advertisers are there that use a
broker? (I saw approx 1200 on Commission Junction) a. Include porn
related sites  B) Exclude porn related sites.
 
Approx how many total companies/advertisers are there with individual
affiliate programs that don't use a broker?
 
I've heard that a huge percentage of the internet is porn site
related; do your answers include or exclude porn related
companies/sites. If exclude, modify answers to
 
Most of the info I have seen about the affiliate game is from the boom
period (pre-March 2000) and is very optimistic (to say the least). But
times have changed dramatically since the dotcom bust in 2000, as you
know. How lucrative is the affiliate game now? Assume I currently own
twenty good single generic word domain names that were each valued for
between $10,000 to $100,000 during the boom I want to put up a single
page (affiliate advertising click through purpose only) web page for
each. I'm not going to market any of the web pages. My traffic will be
contingent upon people entering the domain name in either the address
line or in a search box. How successful can that approach be? How much
can I expect to make if I put four advertisement clickthroughs on
each.

---

Request for Answer Clarification by joel1357-ga on 09 Oct 2002 16:26 PDT

robertskelton...I was extremely pleased with your answer like I said
in my rating. At first I wanted to probe more deeply with you on the
additional subjects I listed below. The reason I did this was because
I knew that if I posted the additional questions as a seperate
question I wouldn't have been guaranteed that you would have been the
one to answer it. After additional thought I realized that to ask you
to answer my additional questions would be going way beyond what I
originally asked and that in itself wouldn't have been fair. I am
being a bit loquacious but I don't want you or anyone else to feel
like I was trying to take advantage of you. Finally you might have
noticed that I posted the additional questions below in an additional
question. Hopefully if you are not the one to answer it I will receive
the same in-depth response that I received from you.

Thanks,
Joel

---

Clarification of Answer by robertskelton-ga on 11 Oct 2002 17:36 PDT

YOUR PROPOSAL
============

I'm not aware of any studies about entering single generic word domain
names directly into the browser, but it could do quite well.
Search.com would definitely receive traffic that way.

Via a search engine like Google your proposal wouldn't fare as well,
without either content or quality links. As a random test I searched
for "romance".

- romance.net comes in 5th - it redirects to www.eHarlequin.com which
has a Google PR of 7

- romance.com has no content and doesn't appear in the top 150 results

- romance.org is a page of affiliate links and doesn't appear in the
top 150 results

However, the cost of setting up the page and hosting it would be very
low, and worthy of experimenting with. Domain names are very important
in Google search results. Perhaps you could set up one domain with
multiple pages and some content, and a dozen with just the four links
as you described, and compare the results.


CLICK-THROUGH RATES
===================

My sites sometimes have a click-through rate of only 0.1% - however
there are dozens of links on each page (many non-affiliate), and each
visitor can only click on one.

My figures from CJ show an average 11.57% click-through rate
(distorted by a couple of high-performing links - the median is 0.1%),
but for each 10,000 clicks, there were only 41 sales and 25 leads.

If you have four links on a page, the highest click-through rate will
be 25%.

If you owned amazon.net, you would assume every single visitor was
hoping to visit amazon.com. A single link to amazon.com would have
close to 100% click-throughs. A single link to "get cheap viagra" on
the same site would have a very low click-through rate.

A study by LinkShare in 1999 showed:

Text Links: 1.80% 
Storefront Links: 1.43% 
Email Links: 1.41% 
Search Box Links: 1.22% 
Product Links: 2.18% 
Banner Links: 1.12% 
http://www.net-sponsor.com/articles/beyond.html
http://www.revenews.com/advice/revenue/convert.html


BROKERS / NOT USING BROKERS
===========================

As you know, Commission Junction has roughly 1200 advertisers.

LinkShare has 250-300 advertisers
BeFree has roughly 200 advertisers
ClickXchange has 298
TradeDoubler say they have 4000 (I don't use them, and couldn't
verify)

** Many advertisers use multiple brokers.

"Companies/advertisers with affiliate programs that don't use a
broker"

Very hard to tell, but most sites that do have an affiliate scheme
would have these words on their site:

"sign up" affiliate

A Google search for the above has over 1 million results, but Google
only displays the first 861 (the rest are basically duplicates). My
estimate would be somewhere between 1,000 and 10,000 sites.


OTHER FIGURES
=============

Getting industry information on:

- click through rates
- sales per click
- average internet purchase price

would be extremely difficult / impossible. I couldn't find such
figures using any of the tools on the broker sites, and I figure they
wouldn't want to share such information.


PORN
====

I have no experience in this area. From what I have read, porn-related
affiliate schemes typically have a multi-level marketing structure.
One article I read stated that all the income for porn sites can be
traced back to a couple of dozen big revenue companies, with a pyramid
of smaller sites scoring minor percentages of that revenue. Probably a
more complicated version of this:

Big site - keeps 30% of revenue
Next level - 10 sites keep 3% each
Next level - 100 sites keep 0.2% each
Next level - miniscule amounts

Here's an article at Wired on the topic:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.02/sex.html?pg=1&topic=&topic_set=

I appreciate the depth of your answer it was very helpful.