Introduction to

Affiliate Marketing
Examples of affiliate websites

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Introduction to Affiliate Marketing
A good way to learn about the various ways of making money as an affiliate is to look at affiliate sites
themselves. In this eye-opening lesson we show you examples of affiliate websites.... and we dig down to
show you how they’re making money.

Examples of affiliate websites

Example 1: http://www.gain-weight-muscle-fast.com

The first site we’re going to look at is a nice example of an affiliate site promoting affiliate products with a
smattering of Adsense. It’s quite a large site with a lot of things going on inside it.

When you first look at the site it seems like information overload: Where should I go, what should I read
first? But if you click around the site and read the articles you’ll see that eventually all roads lead to the
product review pages, or to affiliate programs directly.

In this site they’re promoting weight-gain programs on one page, and health supplements on another
page.

www.affilorama.com
Let’s take a look at the weight-gain program
reviews page.

At the top of the page the affiliate has a

box displaying the “5 Star Weight Gain
Programs”.

Clicking on the product name takes you

directly to the merchant page through the
affiliate’s link.

By the way, he’s stopped most of his affiliate

links being displayed in the status bar when
you hover over them by using a small piece
of javascript. This makes the link more attrac-
tive to nervous clickers who might be scared
away by the complicated looking URL, and
also helps to prevent link hijacking.

If you don’t directly click through to the

merchant site, you might choose to read the
affiliates “short” or “full”reviews. The short
reviews appear further down the same page,
while the full reviews have a whole page to
themselves.

If you don’t directly click through to the

merchant site, you might choose to read the
affiliates “short” or “full”reviews. The short
reviews appear further down the same
page, while the full reviews have a whole
page to themselves.

So how much is he earning from these

links? If you click on “No Nonsense Body
Building” you’re taken through to the mer-
chant site. Scroll to the bottom of the page
and you’ll see a link to the affiliate program
page.

If you can dodge the popup box and wade

through the sales pitch for the affiliate
program, you’ll see that they pay 75%
commissions on the product, which costs
between $77 and $107.

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If you go back to the reviews page and click on one of the other top-reviewed products, “The Truth About
Building Muscle” there doesn’t seem to be an affiliates link at the bottom of the page. However if you were
paying attention when you clicked, you would have noticed that you were redirected to the merchant’s site
through a ClickBank link.

So if we go to ClickBank and visit the Marketplace we should be able to find this product. Type in the
keyword “Muscle” and you’ll see all the usual suspects right there at the top of the page. The top three
products for muscle building are all featured in this affiliate’s “ recommended” list. You can see that for
“The Truth About Building Muscle” this affiliate is earning 51% of the sale price, which works out to be
$39.95 for the affiliate for each sale he refers.

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So if we go to ClickBank and visit the Marketplace we should be able to find this product. Type in the
keyword “Muscle” and you’ll see all the usual suspects right there at the top of the page. The top three
products for muscle building are all featured in this affiliate’s “ recommended” list. You can see that for
“The Truth About Building Muscle” this affiliate is earning 51% of the sale price, which works out to be
$39.95 for the affiliate for each sale he refers.

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So why would an affiliate review products if he doesn’t get anything out of it?

Firstly, it makes his other reviews look credible. Simply listing a whole bunch of products that are “really
great” seems a little unbalanced.

Secondly he’s able to attract people who are searching for those particular products in the search en-
gines. If they search for those products they might end up on one of his review pages, where they would
read his negative review of the product. “Oh dear,” they might think. “Thank goodness I didn’t buy that...
what a huge mistake that would have been! Well if this program is no good, what are the alternatives?”

Fortunately the affiliate has anticipated this response, and placed a number of his high-earning “five star”
recommended products at the bottom of the page. Readers of the review can click through to his favor-
able reviews of these products, or simply go through to the merchant site directly. This is pretty clever.

If we get out of the reviews section now and take a look at one of the articles on this site you can also see
that this affiliate is also earning money through having Adsense ads on his site.

www.affilorama.com
(You can tell these are Adsense ads because they say “Ads by Google” down the bottom there.) You’ll
notice that the ads are pretty relevant to the content on the page. That’s all automatically worked out by the
ad network, which in this case is Google.

If we go back to the home page and scroll to the bottom of the page you can also see that the affiliate has
a signup box for his “Get Big” ezine.

This twice-monthly publication is apparently full of “informative articles, a question and answer section,
site updates and more.” I’m thinking this affiliate will either use this ezine as an additional place to promote
affiliate products, or he will use it to get his readers back to his website by providing snippets of new
articles with a “read more” link. By getting readers back to his site he’s able to expose them to more
promotions.

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Example 1: http://www.jiffyspanish.com

The next site we’ll look at is one we visited in the last lesson. It’s a search engine optimized site that ap-
pears on page 1 of Google’s search results for the very popular search term “Learn Spanish”.

One of the first things you’re hit with when you visit this site is a popup box that offers you a package of
free online lessons. All you have to do is enter your name and email address.

The affiliate has also given these lessons a dollar value -- “Valued at $37, but yours free!” -- People love
thinking they’re getting a great deal, so adding dollar values to things that might never even be sold as
individual products is a very common tactic for internet marketers.

This “free lessons” offer is variation of what we saw in the last site: It’s a newsletter signup box. By offering
people something concrete (free lessons), as opposed to something vague (for instance, “our informative
newsletter”) you essentially reduce people’s anxiety about signing up for something.

This is why you’ll see so many “six-part mini-courses” littered around the internet. Not only is it a mini-
course as opposed to a newsletter, but the visitor only needs to commit to six lessons, as opposed to
potentially unending subscription. If you can lower the perceived commitment involved in signing up for
something, you’ll find that people are more willing to give you their email address.

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So what happens when you sign up for these free
lessons?
This affiliate will probably send out a Spanish
lesson every day or every couple of days for a set
period of time. The lessons will probably direct the
reader back to the website so that he or she can
be exposed to more promotions and affiliate ads
in addition to their “free lessons”. Then, once the
reader has received all the free lessons, they will
likely be added to the affiliate’s “regular” newsletter
list. Unless they unsubscribe they will receive
occasional news or promotions from the affiliate, but
less frequently than with the lessons. If this affiliate
is smart he will continue to provide good content to
his list and not just use it as a vehicle for pushing
affiliate products. You need to give your readers
good reasons to open your emails and not just send
them straight to the trash folder.
If you close that box and look on the front page you
can see that right away the affiliate has launched
into affiliate product reviews. He’s written a glowing
review for Rocket Spanish at the top of the page,
and given it five stars.
If you hover over the “Visit Site” link you can’t tell
right away that it’s an affiliate link because it points
to a page on the affiliate’s website. If you visit that
page, however, it will automatically and instantly
redirect to the merchant site through the affiliate
link. This is a very popular technique, not only
because it looks less artificial to a nervous clicker,
but also because it can help prevent link hijacking.
Back to the front page you can also see that the
affiliate has reviewed two other “Learn Span-
ish” products. Both of these also have affiliate
programs. If you click on the “Learn Spanish Like
Crazy” link and scroll down to the bottom of the
page you’ll see a link to the affiliate program where
it says “ powered through ClickBank”. You can see
that Learn Spanish Like Crazy pays similarly to
Rocket Spanish: 75% of $97, which works out as
$67.13 after ClickBank extracts its own fee.
So that’s where the money is coming from, but
how is this site appearing so highly in the search
engines when there doesn’t appear to be much
content on it?
If you go back to the JiffySpanish site and scroll to
the bottom of the page you’ll see that despite first
impressions, this affiliate does actually have lot of
content on his site.
There are a number of free Spanish lessons, and
each page has the “Top Learn Spanish
products” displayed down the bottom and a box
about the “Free lessons” newsletter list on the left.
This affiliate might have chosen to create lessons
based on popular search terms, but it’s also pos-
sible that he’s just trying to boost his “relevance” in
the eyes of the search engines by having a lot of
content appropriate to a “learn Spanish” or “Span-
ish lessons” website.

So how much will this affiliate earn if I buy Rocket

Spanish through his link? Let’s find out.

If you click through to the Rocket Spanish site and

scroll to the bottom of the page you’ll see a small
“affiliate program” link. If you click this link you’ll
be taken to a page of information about the affiliate
program. You can see that Rocket Spanish sells for
US$99.95, and affiliates earn 75%, which works out
to be $68.59 per sale. Not too bad!

www.affilorama.com
Affiliates should be gently directing people towards the action which makes them the most
money

When you’re looking at affiliate sites like this one, and indeed when you’re planning your own affiliate site,
ask yourself what it is the affiliate is trying to make you do. (Or what you want your visitor to do.) What is
the desired action that the affiliate is pushing for? Do they want you to read their articles? Sign up for their
newsletter? Click on their ads? You’ll often find yourself being gently directed towards a certain action in
one way or another. This will be what the affiliate determines to be the course that will eventually get him or
her the most money!

In this case we can see that the affiliate is

promoting his newsletter list very heavily. It
appears as a popup when you first visit the
site, so he obviously wants you to sign up
for that before you do anything else.

Once you’ve either signed up for the news-

letter or closed the box you’re presented
with his recommended Spanish products.
He’s ranked Rocket Spanish as the best
product, so that’s the one he really wants
you to click through to.

Learn Spanish Like Crazy is the next best

option, although according to his review it
apparently pales in comparison to Rocket
Spanish.

Pimsleur comes in third but, again, can’t be

recommended over Rocket Spanish. So you
can see that he really, really wants you to
click through to Rocket Spanish. I’m guess-
ing that Rocket Spanish is the most lucrative
“learn Spanish” product for this affiliate.

Once you’ve reached the bottom of his

reviews there’s that newsletter signup box
again. Just in case none of those reviews
tickled your fancy, he doesn’t want to let you
leave without at least giving him your email
address. (Don’t forget that these lessons are
valued at $37, and they’re yours for FREE!)

www.affilorama.com
He’s put a lot of effort into getting you to his site in the first place, you’re not escaping so easily!

So what about all those lessons he’s provided?

While he has provided a lot of content on this site, it’s not where he wants you to go if you happen to arrive
at his front page.

How can you tell? He’s shoved the links to all his content in the ghetto, way down at the bottom of his
page, where a lot of people won’t even see them. What this affiliate is saying is that if you happen to arrive
at one of his content pages because it appears in the search engines, fine. He can promote to you there.

But the page that he thinks converts to sales the best is the review section of the front page. He’s also
obliged to link to his content pages from his front page so that the search engines can get through to the
content.

Of course all this is assuming that the affiliate has even considered these things! Sadly, a lot of affiliates
don’t put much thought into how their visitors flow through their sites, so they’re not able to make the most
of their traffic.

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Adsense Sites

So far we’ve looked at two sites that are primarily set up to make money from affiliate programs. The next
couple of sites we’ll look at are set up primarily to earn money from cost-per-click context ads like Google
Adsense.

To refresh your knowledge, you might remember that context ads earn you money for each person who
visits your site and clicks on the ads. The ads are automatically generated by the ad network and you
insert them into your site just by pasting a small piece of code. The biggest context ad network is Google
Adsense, so a lot of people will use the word “Adsense” when they’re really talking about “context ads” in
general.

Sites that earn money primarily from these context ads do so by capitalizing on either high traffic in that
particular market, or high revenues for clicks. (Of course the best situation would be to have a high traffic
market with high paying ads. If you can find one of those markets and rank well for it... even better!) Here
are three ways your site could earn $40 a day through context ads:

500 clicks @ $0.08/click

125 clicks @ $0.32/click
20 clicks @ $2.00/click

One site earning money off low-paying Adsense ads but high traffic is
http://www.haircutadvice.com. The “hair styles” market has a huge number of people searching on it
each month, but relatively little in the way of affiliate activity because there aren’t many high-paying affiliate
programs for this market.

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You might ask why there are few good affiliate programs for such a popular topic. Well, when you think
about it, people searching for “hair styles” just want hair style pictures and advice, really.

Not only that, but they don’t want to pay for anything.

They consider that this information should be free. If there’s nobody willing to pay money for things in this
market, there aren’t going to be many products with affiliate programs. This also means that the Adsense
ads for this market don’t pay a huge amount either: There’s not enough competition to drive the prices up,
and no justification for paying a large amount.

But this site still manages to earn a modest amount each day, purely because it’s built around such a
highly searched for topic.

You can see that this site has a lot of content and a couple of sections with ads in them, with a telltale “Ads
by Google” note at the top.

You can have a maximum of three ad blocks on each page of your website.

The ad blocks on this site have also been styled

so that they blend in with the rest of the site and
don’t sit there screaming “I’m an advertisement!”.
You can also put pictures next to the ads to make
your ads look more appealing, so long as they’re
not misleading.

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This site also promotes a couple of affiliate programs as well, but not very heavily.

www.affilorama.com
Blog Site

A lot of people consider a blog to be an extra “something” you tack onto the end of your website, but there
are many affiliates out there running blogs as their main affiliate site. Instead of creating articles, they write
blog posts. Over time these can build into quite a large body of work.

One good example of this kind of affiliate marketing is http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com

The author of this blog earns money by:

»» Discussing affiliate products

Rather than simply writing reviews or pasting ads on his site, he uses his blog to discuss affiliate products
that are newsworthy. In this format the news takes center stage, while the affiliate link becomes secondary.
See this example of a blog post where he discusses AWeber.

(Take a closer look here)

Sure, he recommends AWeber, but it’s not the primary purpose of the blog post. Often in the course of
discussing things related to internet marketing, you need to mention products that just happen to have
affiliate programs.

The author of site also earns money through other activities which wouldn’t typically be classed as “affiliate
marketing” since they’re not pay-for-performance, but we’ll take a look at them while we’re here:

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 »» Writing reviews for ReviewMe.com

This is review writing with a twist. While this affiliate might write reviews with an eye to promoting affiliate
products, he also earns money by writing reviews through ReviewMe.com. This site matches reviewers
(often blog owners) with people wanting their product or website reviewed.

The person receiving the review pays an amount of money to ReviewMe.com depending on the “price” of
the review, which is determined by the quality and popularity of the reviewing site. For a lot of sites looking
for reviews, the cost of getting reviewed might well be less than the cost of purchasing a link from a popu-
lar website. For the reviewer... well... they get money. And adding reviews to their site gives them content.

»» Placing text-link ads on his site through Text-Link-Ads.com and through private text-link
campaigns and banner campaigns

Text-Link-Ads.com is kind of a cross between traditional link buying and selling and ad networks like
Google Adsense. Text-Link-Ads.com acts as a go-between for publishers and link-buyers: You insert a
snippet of code into your site and Text-Link-Ads essentially sells space on your site.

The ads appear on your site, and you get half the amount that the person buying the link pays. Unlike
Adsense, this isn’t a cost-per-click ad system: You get paid regardless of whether anybody clicks on the
link. This is because the primary reason for buying a link through Text-Link-Ads.com is to gain a link back
to your site to help your search engine optimization efforts.

On the other hand, private ad campaigns are simply private arrangements between the site owner and
another site: You link to me, I pay you. This could be arranged on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.

I admit that I’ve cheated a little with this particular site analysis: The author of this blog has conveniently
written an article covering this subject himself!

http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com/687/make-money-online-blogging-2/

Lesson summary

In this lesson you’ve seen five different affiliate sites earning money through a variety of methods:

»» Product reviews

»» Newsletter subscriptions

»» Context ads (like Adsense)

We’ve also seen a couple of methods of making that wouldn’t traditionally be classed as “affiliate market-
ing”:

»» Selling ad space on your website

»» Joining link-brokering networks like Text-Link-Ads.com

»» Writing reviews through review brokering sites like ReviewMe.com

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