Author: forge

It is already a piece of cake to add any product link to your product lists, being an affiliate or not!

A much requested feature though, was to prevent duplicate links in your library and to be able to add those links at the very start of your list (any of your lists)

These two features have now been implemented:

As soon as you click on the bookmarklet, if the link exists in your personal library, you will not see that “Link exists” dialog anymore. 

The new functionality allows you to choose the list to add the link to and the position (first or last) in that list. Long gone are the days where you had to add the link and then edit the list to drag it all the way up to the top. It is just a click now. 

Moreover the first/ last placement functionality made its way to the links that are added for the first time as well. So in effect, you can now append or prepend any link you add from the bookmarklet, regardless of whether this link is new or was already there!

Great isn’t it ?

If you want to help us make more like this, please share this post on your social media. Your voice is our means of growing and adding more functionality to make your life easier regarding making an income from your affiliate links!

Somehow, we’ve reached Black Friday again, arguably the biggest shopping day of the year, which is also regarded as the beginning of the Holiday shopping season.

Consumers (aka your readers) are in a frenzy and you know what that means…

It’s a great time for a boost in your affiliate sales!

Here are five simple ideas to increase your profits during this period!

 

• Get advantage of the huge deals that retailers offer these days and find the best discounts across the holiday period for your audience. Utilize your newsletter to send them offers straight to their inbox. Notify them again when a new deal is coming up! Outshine the competition and increase your chances to earn more by releasing your newsletter promptly. Remember, your readers are already searching for these products so hurry up and put those sales in front of their eyes before anyone else.

• Share deals from selected small merchants that don’t have many affiliates, so you can stand out and get a bigger slice of the pie.

 

• You know better than anyone your audience’s preferences so entice them by posting holiday-themed promotions that will suit their needs.

 

• Look for new products that are exclusively available this time of the year to create urgency. Share them on your social media.

 

• Creating Gift Guides can be an amazing help for your audience (eg. 30 Gifts For Craft Lovers). Feature these guides on your homepage or side bar, where they would get visibility and don’t forget to email them to your subscribers.

 

THE BLACK LINKDELI FRIDAY OFFERS

New Linkdeli users: Subscribe now, get a free month

Thinking of getting a Linkdeli subscription?

Get the first month on the house!

Subscribe now! 

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Existing Linkdeli users: 100% comission up to $45 per sub

Are you a Linkdeli user?

This is a great opportunity to promote LinkDeli through our affiliate program and get 100% of the earnings for their monthly subscription.

Quick example: A newbie subscribes for the Gold plan, through your affiliate link, pays $0 (Black Friday – Cyber Monday offer), you get $30.

Just be quick, this is only available until Monday 23:59 EST.

Join our affiliate program!

Happy sales!

The Linkdeli Team

Explore the new features that were added in recent Linkdeli update to make your affiliate linking exprerience even more easy, communicate better, save time.

Name of list in the code

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Since some users may have more than one list in their blog posts, knowing which is which, might be a pain. For this reason, we added the name of the list as a comment in the code you pick up. This way, you can easily search for the name of the list in your blog code and find it! So simple!

More support options- Online chat

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Need to contact us for help? Now you can talk to us online, by clicking on the small dialog icon on the bottom left! Of course, chatting to us on Facebook, sending us an email or opening a ticket are still great ways to get in touch!

A fix for the Email code

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We don’t know for certain how many Linkdeli users experienced overlapping link problems on their newsletters, but since in some cases  images appeared big and overlapped with the links, we wrote a fix.

The image above shows how a Linkdeli list with thumbnails should look like on a newsletter.

Update payment information

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A long-requested feature and we are happy to finally have it available. Now, you can update your payment information from the interface. Simply go to your Settings > Subscription tab and add your new credit card and/or paypal account, if your old one is expiring!

Explore and discover all the great features of Linkdeli!

Want to see more?

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Send us your suggestions!

The Linkdeli Team

Affiliate marketing is an evident trend in online industry and one of the most effective and lucrative ways for bloggers to diversify their income. On one hand, more and more bloggers are getting involved in affiliate marketing to monetize their blogs and channels, and on the other hand, more and more merchants are getting involved in this affiliate relationship looking for partners to promote their products or services. As affiliate marketing is blooming, the real challenge for affiliate bloggers is to find ways to stand out in online marketing and maximize their affiliate revenues while keeping the minimum risk.

So, in this competitive industry, how can a blogger become successful as an affiliate partner and avoid failure?

The following key points will help you get on the right track before starting any affiliate relationship.

Get Involved With Proven Affiliate Programs

While searching for an appropriate affiliate program to join, you will soon discover that there are thousands of similar programs out there. Some of these programs operate through big affiliate networks, while others are independent and run in-house.

But how will you discern which ones are reputable and can bring you results (aka money in YOUR house)?

To help you out with this, we have compiled a list of the most important qualities that an affiliate program should have:

 

Product Range And Quality

In affiliate marketing the key for a blogger to be successful is to promote only the best products that are relevant to his audience’s needs. Not all programs offer quality products nor do all affiliate networks list quality merchants. Poor product quality leads to a high refund rate and ultimately to unsatisfied audience. So, you need to be careful while choosing programs to join. If you really want to be successful in affiliate marketing, you need to search for programs which offer a large variety of products that fit your niche, and at the same time, offer those products at reasonable prices.

 

→ Read below about how you can check quality of products

 

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Most affiliate programs require an approval process before joining them. Although, this may be deterring for a new blogger, it is also a mechanism that ensures quality and security regarding products, merchants and affiliates.

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Commission Rate

Affiliate marketing is known for its convenience and it is considered one of the most lucrative business models, but still, it can’t make you rich overnight. So, it is better not to get dragged away by programs that are trying to lure you with fake claims. Make sure to search for those programs that are proven and reliable and offer high commission rates for products in your niche.

Commission rates vary from product category to category, so you need to look for the most profitable deals for you.

 

Here are a few things you should pay attention to!

You may come across affiliate programs – usually independent – that offer very big commissions, but in the end, you won’t get paid! Another bad practice to watch out for is the different commissions for people you bring in. Some merchants offer e.g. 10% of the sale for clients that come for the first time in their shop through your affiliate link, but for any subsequent sale, they drop the percentage to e.g. 2%.

As you may realize, this technique is just a way for the merchant to pull in new clients rather than their will to support relations with their affiliates and to benefit affiliates that actually generate these sales. For these reasons, before joining a specific affiliate program, make sure it is an established merchant which has an affiliate program for at least a year.

If you want to play it safe, it’s better to join an affiliate program of a trusted company or via a reputed affiliate network, even if their commission rates are lower.

 

Keep also in mind that different programs offer different types of commissions:

• one-time commissions which is referring to products or services people buy once
• recurring commissions that are subscription-based products or services that keep on paying regularly, long after the initial sale
• high-ticket sales funnels which are based on additional offers.

So, you need to pick those that work for you best.

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There are affiliate programs that offer extra incentives to affiliates who perform well and bring in results. Look for them!

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Cookie Period

Cookies are small pieces of data retained on computers by browsers which contain various pieces of information regarding a specific website visit. In the case of affiliate programs, most include a 30-day cookie or longer, meaning if someone clicks your link and visits the site, you’ll still get paid as long as they return to the site and make a purchase within 30 days. Most of the times, you can get a commission even if the visitor purchases other  products on the same site, products which are different from those recommended by you as an affiliate.

 

Sufficient Support

When you join an affiliate program, you will be confronted with various issues, so it is important that the affiliate program can provide you with technical and service support as well as practical advices on everything related to your affiliate relationship with them (affiliate links structure, commissions, etc.)

 

Tracking

The key in affiliate marketing is to get the right offers in front of the right people, and to do it in the right way. So, it is absolutely vital for you to have all the information you need, to be able to track your traffic sources, and to have a clear data about which products are selling and which are not. A real-time reporting will help you make appropriate changes and optimize your results.

 

Payout

It takes a lot of effort and resources to promote a product and the last thing you want to face is not getting paid for your efforts. So, you need to ensure that you’re getting paid on time for every referral you get. Some affiliate programs have instant payments (usually through PayPal) and some may pay out when you reach a minimum payout threshold. Make sure the commissions and the pricing structure of the program you are about to join are clear. Plus, check if the payout method is available for your country. You don’t want to promote a product only to find out you can’t get paid.

Here are three of the best and most reputable affiliate networks that you can join:

Shareasale

One of the largest and most popular affiliate networks with thousands of merchants listed. It includes several big brands, many of which can be found in this network exclusively. Their commission ranges from 5% to 20%.

ShareASale is a great place to unearth new profitable niches.

If you consider joining it, click here.

Commission Junction (CJ) Affiliate

It is considered to be the biggest affiliate platform. You can find hundreds of brands and advertisers in every category and an unlimited range of digital and physical products. It is a great place to start for newbies since their approval process is fast and doesn’t require any fees.

Rakuten

It has some of the top brands and advertisers on board and many high-quality products can be found here. To become a Rakuten affiliate, you need a proven track record; they don’t approve affiliate marketing beginners.

 

Choose The Ideal Merchants

The merchant you are affiliated with will be your business partner. For this reason, before closing a deal with them, it is recommended that you gather all the information you can possibly find about their business. Of course, the qualities that make a merchant ideal are associated with the quality of the corresponding affiliate program they run. But apart from commission rates, tracking system, cookies, etc. that all depend on a specific program or network in general, there are plenty of other factors that a merchant is exclusively responsible for.

So, before closing an affiliate deal with a merchant, check out if it meets the following:

 

Products Quality

Finding the right product(s) to promote is a big part of affiliate marketing, but the key to being successful is to establish credibility and foster confidence with your audience. Once you find a merchant to collaborate with, the next crucial step is to check the quality of their products. There are thousands of shops that offer similar products online. If you want to preserve your blog or a channel as a trustworthy source, before you promote the products to your followers, you first need to test the products. An unreliable product can ruin your audience’s trust in you, so try to recommend only products and services that you truly believe in.

 

Stock Availability

If you promote products from large e-commerce stores (and of course, you won’t be their only affiliate partner), you should expect that products might be out of stock when a visitor of yours eventually decides to click on an affiliate link to make a purchase. This happens all the time, especially during big sales periods or new releases. An established affiliate can negotiate an exclusive sale of a product or may have a good relationship with the merchant so that a merchant informs the affiliate about the availability of its products. You and many other affiliates may not have these privileges so here are some good tactics you can follow:

 

• Offer your audience the option to purchase from more than one merchant. Linking to two or three merchants for the same product will get you out of the risk of out-of-stock products, and consequently, unsatisfied followers.

• Before adding a product to your recommended supply list, visit merchant’s site and check the availability of the chosen product.

Most sites clearly indicate that there are limited quantities of a specific product so customers can know which products will soon run out of stock.

Also, it is a good idea to regularly check your product links. You might have linked to a product that no longer exists and your link will now direct to an error page.

Should the product only be temporarily unavailable, there is no need to change the affiliate link to that product. But should the product remain unavailable for a significant amount of time, it is essential to search for an alternative product or merchant and link to new products.

 

Efficiency In Shipping Management

Once an order has been placed and paid for, the merchant should take care of managing the packaging and the shipping. At that stage, it is really important for an affiliate partner to check if the shipping and delivery times are met and if the products are getting properly to customers. Don’t underestimate this point since a bad delivery can mean losing the client and future sales. 

 

What you can do to avoid losing future sales:

• Put yourself in the shoes of a potential customer and check not only product quality but also the whole procedure your audience need to go through once they decide to buy a product you recommended.

• Check the ratings of the product and customer reviews

• Check shop’s return policy and see if a customer receives a refund or a new product in case he is not satisfied with the product delivered

 

Support

Nothing is more frustrating than facing an issue and there’s nobody who can help you to solve it. In e-commerce relationships where the merchant could be thousands of miles away, it is important to have dedicated customer support that can provide answers about questions related to products, shipping or payment procedure, and it is equally important for you to have support regarding affiliate links, commission deals, new releases, etc.

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Select small merchants that don’t have too many affiliates so you can stand out from other affiliates and achieve results more easily.

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Now, taking the discussion a little further, you have some things to take care of and are exclusively your responsibility as a blogger:

 

Be Transparent

As a blogger, you promote affiliate products in various ways using links and banners on your blog, YouTube, social platforms, etc. If you want to keep nurturing honesty with your followers, you need to let them know when a link is an affiliate one. In the end, as a blogger, your aim is not to deceive them, but to gain their trust and make them feel confident that you will promote only something of a value – and not just to get a commission.

Additionally, it is required by law to place an affiliate disclosure in obvious areas in your blog posts. Disclosures are not only a legal necessity but also ensure a fair business practice.

After the new law about data protection has come into force, GDPR, affiliates should be more focused on compliance and transparency than ever before. (GDPR doesn’t make sense to you? Read here to clear the picture).

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Affiliate marketing should be a win-win scenario for all participants. Merchants, affiliate partners and customers can all benefit from this relationship. The key in this relationship is creating value. The more value you can create for your audience, the more chance you have of succeeding as an affiliate.

Now, go out there and promote your lovely and profitable products!

Have any questions or suggestions? Submit your comment below!

One of the challenges that a small online shop faces is keeping up with the big rivals. While it may seem quite difficult to compete with them in terms of marketing and sales, these days e-commerce represents unique opportunities for smaller retailers to build their brand awareness not only in the local community but also globally. If you run a small online shop and you are looking for a savvy way to increase your sales without a big budget, then affiliate marketing might be just the right option for your business.

Affiliate marketing represents a great lucrative revenue funnel for any online merchant who sells products or services and wants to expand his business reach worldwide.

But what is affiliate marketing?

The term “affiliate marketing” or “performance marketing” refers to online marketing and advertising programs in which advertisers (a.k.a. “retailers” or “merchants”) pay affiliates (a.k.a. “publishers”) when a qualified action is completed. Affiliates are bloggers, website owners, YouTubers, or people who are active on social platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or Pinterest who have applied to become affiliates and have been accepted as such by the owner of a specific affiliate program. Affiliates earn a commission only if their promotion results in actual required action. The required action is most often a sale, but can also be submitted personal info in case of CPA (Cost Per Action/Cost Per Acquisition).

Performance marketing also means that the publisher (blogger/ YouTuber/ Instagram celebrity) is paid by results rather than upfront. And by results, we mean that the total they receive is a percentage of the sales they generate or are paid a fixed fee but only after a required action has been fully completed.

What does this mean for your business? This means that any business can set up an affiliate program and hire an army of affiliates to work for them without paying anything before results start to trickle in. You as the owner of an affiliate program for your online shop pay only if and when very concrete results of your affiliates’ work start to show.

That is why it is one of the most powerful marketing techniques especially for businesses with a low spendable budget.

The whole process can be explained rather simply, through an experiment:

For the sake of argument, let’s say that you run an online shop where you sell sejoufls.

A sejoufl is an imaginary product and sells for $40 a piece. You opened up a shop just a few days ago. Your shop is small and you want to advertise. But sometimes reaching the right people that will become your customers is a tricky process.

Running AdWords or Facebook Ads campaigns will probably cost a lot, and without proper guidance, it will surely burn through more money than it will generate. So, you decide to turn to a famous blogger to promote your awesome sejoufls to his audience which you know it fits the profile of your customers.

So how do you pay the influencer that you want to promote your products? Either upfront, which does not guarantee anything regarding sales, or based on performance, which essentially means you will be paying them depending on how many sales they will bring to you through their blog post, video, etc.

And THIS is exactly how performance marketing works!

So, here are the numbers:                

Your sejoufl sells to the client for $40 and you have, let’s say, a profit margin of 50%. So when you sell one, you get $20 in your pocket.

Now, you bring in an influencer in the equation, so they can promote the product.

Let’s see how things work when you use classic paid advertising.

If the influencer in our example asks for $1000 in advance to promote the product. With a quick calculation, you realize that you need to sell 50 sejoufls just to break even with the amount you paid for promotion. Selling 100 of them, would give you a profit of $1000 (100pieces x $20net profit per piece) – $1000marketing expense = $1000total

Essentially, in this case, you’re selling each sejoufl for $10 profit per piece instead of the original $20.

As you can see, with classic paid advertising you need to pay upfront while the results of the promotion are unpredictable. With affiliate marketing, you spend nothing upfront and you pay only after the sales have been completed.

I’ve put together a small google sheet so you can play around putting in numbers. You will see that the point at which the paid promotion and the affiliate sales perform the same is rather high for our example. Your numbers, of course, maybe totally different. Another benefit of using affiliates to promote your business is the scalability of this kind of promotion. If you want to go big, it’s easy to do it since you pay only for results. This means that the blogger will get paid AFTER you have completed your sales so you do not need to allocate a budget for this. You just share a piece of money that they brought in instead of paying up front. And if the campaign does not bring anything, no need to worry, you pay nothing!

In our days, sales are all about influence. This is most obvious on Instagram where the big names get paid thousands of dollars to use or be photographed with specific products.

As big names want big money, this is where their interests and the interests of business converge. Performance marketing is the way to go for small shops that do not readily have a big budget to spend on promotion.

So, if some bigshot blogger brings a lot of people to your online shop, they will get compensated depending on their performance rather than how much money you can spend upfront. And this is not only good for you, but for the bigshot blogger as well. It’s a mutually beneficial relationship.

Affiliate Marketing vs. Paid Posts. You Will Only Pay For Results.

Affiliate marketing comes in contrast to paid posts where a celebrity requests an amount upfront to promote a product. Although this might be the preferred method for those merchants who want to build their brand awareness, when a shop wants to generate leads and by extension incremental sales, affiliate marketing can result in a much more affordable return on investment.

For example, you may shelf out $1000 to a famous YouTuber to mention your product at the start of his video but no one guarantees any sales after that. And the more famous the YouTuber is, the more money he/she asks for.

So, when it comes to affiliate marketing, the risk moves from the shop to influencers, since they don’t get any commission if they don’t convince their audiences to buy.

Affiliate Marketing vs. Ads. Which Will Be More Profitable?

There are two main cons regarding classic ads. First, most consumers generally have a negative stance toward ads. They find ads annoying since advertisers usually use cheesy ways to attract visitors’ attention and distract them from the main content. Moreover, consumers know when they are trying to be advertised to, which makes it more difficult for someone to click on a distracting banner ad compared to an affiliate link that has been placed by someone they already follow and appreciate.

Second, advertisers need a big budget and a professional who knows what he is doing in order to actually have a positive return on investment and not throw money in the ads pit without results.

Placing ads is an art in itself and targeting the right audience is harder than it may seem. If you target possible clients the wrong way, you just throw your money away to uninterested netizens. On the other hand, if you pinpoint your targeting too narrowly, you might be losing sales to other interested parties.

In contrast, when you have an affiliate program and affiliates working for your shop, they do all the targeting for you. They have their own audience to speak to and to send them to buy from you. You don’t really need to go after their audience yourself. They will do that for you and if the match is good, both you and the influencer get paid.

Why Is It Bad To NOT Have An Affiliate Program

Affiliates already have a network of loyal visitors that could prove to be a great base for your business to expand into new markets that you might have previously overlooked. These affiliates can help expand your reach using their own audiences. Their loyal audiences already follow the affiliates and are more likely to trust their opinion on the content produced by a shop. Affiliates can also help merchants scale their shop traffic, since the more websites link to their products, the better rank the site gets in search engines.

Furthermore, having an affiliate program enables you to diversify your revenue streams and become more competitive. If you don’t offer an incentive to affiliates to link to your brand, they will seek to link to places where they can get paid and these will be your competitors.

Why Bloggers Will Want To Promote Small Shops

Big shops are saturated with big bloggers, and due to how affiliate programs work, in big shops, your cookies are much more likely to get stepped over by the big players.

Here are the rules of most affiliate programs:

The sale must be completed within a specific time frame (e.g. within 30 days). This is tracked with cookies that must be enabled on the user’s browser. If the sale is not completed within a specified time frame, it will not be credited to the affiliate. (check out more here)

The user will get your affiliate cookie when he clicks on your affiliate link. Affiliate cookies remain in a user’s browser until they expire or are overwritten by a different affiliate’s cookie. When your affiliate cookie is overwritten by the cookie of another affiliate, that other affiliate gets the commission in case of a sale. Your cookie gets overwritten when a user that has clicked on your affiliate link previously also clicks on the affiliate link for the same product of another affiliate at a later point in time and only after that buys a product. There are some rare affiliate programs that credit the sale to the affiliate whose cookie first got installed into a user’s browser.

If you are a small e-commerce business though, it is more likely that you’ll get sales through a smaller blogger. Micro-influencers who can get consistently higher rates of engagement on their content can yield better results for your shop for a much lower cost-per-sale.

The opportunities of the affiliate model for up-and-coming retailers are unique. By establishing the right affiliate program for your business, you can increase your reach and generate more sales. As a small retailer, you have the benefit of much closer relationships with your consumers than what big companies can achieve with their own consumers. Start with your loyal audience to recruit the right affiliates for your program. These people will be the first influencers who will endorse your brand, create content for your products, and help you establish your brand reputation.

Money Making Monday – Part Two

Joining an Affiliate Program + Five Tips on Closing the Sale

Money Making Monday (MMM) is a blog series that will show you all the information you need in order to take the first steps into making your craft profitable. This series is coming out twice a month, so make sure to subscribe and like our Facebook page and you will get the latest stuff that works!

In this second part of the MMM we will be looking into joining affiliate programs and how an affiliate program connects you with the shop so you can earn commissions.

At the end of the blog post we include FIVE proven tips to make people buy from your affiliate links!

If you haven’t already, please read the Part 1 of the MMM showing you how to start making money from your craft blog and also giving you a simple explanation about what affiliate links are.

Affiliate Terminology

Let’s start with some lingo to make sure we’re on the same page:

Commission: a percentage of the selling price or flat fee given to you from the shop or the product owner as a payment for bringing in a customer. In order for you to get a commission a person must buy a product or a service using special links that you provide.

Commission Example: a 10% commission means that if a viewer clicked on your affiliate links and shopped for $400, you will be getting $40 as a payment from the shop, for bringing the sale to them. In some cases, the commission can also be set as a fixed fee regardless of the price of the product.

Affiliate: You! Well, this is you, combined with the agreement for the commission above. A person that is promoting products or services using his/her affiliate link and who gets the commission.

Affiliate link: A unique link to a shop or product or a service that contains additional information regarding who the affiliate that generated the sale is. Any affiliate gets commission by getting people online to click on his/her affiliate link and then buy or perform a required action.

 

Example of the affiliate link:

Ordinary non-affiliate link to a product may resemble something like this:

https://www.scrapbook.com/store/pw-t-prs.html

An affiliate link that includes the information needed to assign the commission to the affiliate would look something like this:

http://www.shareasale.com/r.cfm?b=33184&m=7429&u=382789
&afftrack=linkdeli&urllink=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.scrapbook.com
%2Fstore%2Fpw-t-prs.html

 

By the way, the mentioned product is this cut out:

 

Deep link: A link that points directly to a product instead of pointing just at the shop’s first page. Affiliates use deep links to take a visitor directly to a specific product instead of taking them to a shop or a large group of products/services.

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The Process of Becoming an Affiliate with a Shop

Let’s say you want to receive commissions and get paid from the fictional shop we’ll call conveniently SHOP. You redirect people there to purchase stuff, through your blog posts and YouTube videos.

 

• You find SHOP’s dedicated page on the Internet where you express your interest to become their affiliate and apply to their affiliate program.
• SHOP accepts your application and informs you of their terms which usually includes the commission percentage and the cookie duration.

From that point on, you are an affiliate of SHOP! Well done!

Note: First you need to get approved in order to earn commissions. You fill out the application form on the website of the SHOP. Usually, you need to enter your name and one of the following: your blog, website or any social page. Usually, you also need to describe how you intend to promote products, SEO, Facebook, social accounts or in some rare cases paid advertising. It’s easier than it looks, just find an affiliate program, fill out a form and you get approved. Then you can start using your affiliate links and earn money.

 

Real example: Scrapbook.com

Scrapbook.com has a publicly available affiliate application page which can be found at the bottom of their main page.

If you apply, you are asked a few simple questions and your application goes through an approval phase.

As soon as you are approved, you can pick your affiliate links from ShareASale, the affiliate network that Scrapbook.com uses to track sales. You get your affiliate links and put them in your blog post.

Scrapbook.com is also fully integrated with LinkDeli and you can search and find all products without ever leaving your LinkDeli dashboard

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What an Affiliate Must Know About Affiliate Links and Programs

There are a few dos and don’ts when using affiliate links. Here is a small list to start with. We will be expanding the dos-and-don’ts theme further in future MMM posts.

 

• Origin of sale: The sale must originate from you blog/YouTube channel and/or social accounts (not through paid ads in most cases)
• No paid ads to drive traffic: shop doesn’t allow affiliates to place paid ads containing the shop’s affiliate links. For example, you cannot place an AdWords Ad on the Internet, putting as the target link an affiliate link to SHOP. This is what most affiliate programs don’t allow, but there are some which do.
• Cookie expiration: The sale must be completed within a specific time frame (e.g. within 30 days). This is tracked with cookies which must be enabled on the user’s browser. If the sale is not completed within a specified time frame, it will not be credited to the affiliate.
• Last-click policy: If someone clicks on your affiliate link and then clicks on someone else’s affiliate link, the sale will be credited to the last affiliate that placed the sale cookie. This is a good reason to use the 5 tips at the bottom of this page to close the sale as quickly as possible.
• Whole basket: If someone clicks on your chewing gum affiliate link and ends up buying a whole television, you get credit for the whole sale and your percentage comes from the price of the television (and the chewing gum, if they ended up buying that as well)

So What is So Awesome About Affiliate Marketing and It is THAT Better Than Placing Ads on Your Site?

Affiliate marketing is not only about placing as many affiliate links as possible and hope someone is going to step on them!

In the DIY/crafting scene, it is actually like doing product review marketing as the products you sell are presented through your content.

If you create enticing and well thought of content, and present the shop’s products in a proper way, you will significantly increase the clicks to the shop. This will respectively increase your sales and commissions.

If the content is not presented well, or does not focus on how the products will help the viewer to achieve the same results as in your presentation, click numbers will suffer. The viewers will try to find more examples of the use of the product on other blogs/channels and leave. This usually means someone else will step over your affiliate cookies, and thus, you will be losing sales.

So, content you present on our blog needs to be of high quality and also needs to present key product’s benefits. Some products have unique attributes or qualities that should be mentioned explicitly. For example: “Only with product X you can achieve this result because product X is made out of component Y”. You need to answer the questions that a viewer might have if they were to buy it right here and now.

And why not use ads?

Placing ads on your page is a different type of monetization, depending mainly on the traffic volume rather than quality. Moreover, the payouts are much lower than what an average crafter makes through her affiliate links. We will be comparing ads and affiliate product review marketing performance on a future MMM!

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5 Tips to Close the Sale as Quickly and Successfully as Possible!

1. Use deep links: Deep links navigate directly to the product itself avoiding the noise that a store’s main page would introduce! You want your readers to fill their basket ASAP!
2. Use shop-provided coupons: This makes it easier to close the sale here and now and prevent viewers from hunting for bargains on other shops leaving the shop webpage where you own the cookies!
3. Subscribe to the shops’ affiliate newsletter: Most shops have a newsletter available only to affiliates. This is where you will find enticing upcoming deals and coupons to pull readers in, mentioned above in the number 2.
4. Link to more than one shop: Your readers have preferences over which shops they like. Providing them with affiliate links to two or three shops gives them the power of choice and makes it easier to shop where they feel most comfortable.
5. Ease their minds about affiliate links: Always mention to your visitors that you will be receiving a small commission for their purchase that will come out from the shop’s cut, not from them. They will feel they support you without spending a dime!

So, here’s what you’ve learned from this article:

• How to join an affiliate program
• Most important terminology and affiliate lingo
• Rules of affiliate programs
• 5 tips on how to close affiliate sales better quickly and successfully
• An example of a real application of affiliate model

We will be expanding our Craft/DIY money-making horizons even more on our next Money Making Monday!

If you wondered at some point if it is better to have non-affiliate ads placed all around your website and let YouTube display ads in your videos instead of using affiliate links, your question will be answered in our next MMM!

If you liked the article, it will help a LOT if you share it on Facebook, so please do!

The case of the Pink ATG

So let’s say you constantly use an ATG Gun (the double-sided glue tape dispenser pictured above) for every project you do. And people start asking you, where they can find the gun to get one! Instead of just sending them to search for a shop to pick one, you provide them with a (special) link so they can go directly to your chosen shop’s page where they can pick it.