Most of the time when people talk about affiliate marketing they are describing a system where site A advertises products from Site B and gets paid each time someone makes a purchase after clicking a link on Site A. However this article is describing a slightly different scheme – basically link exchanges. Site A will link to Site B and Site B will link to site A. It may be because the two sites are friends, own related websites or simply want to recognise each other. Either way it’s an easy way to get some free promotion for both websites – a free linkback and plenty of hits.
Getting an image
Most affiliate and link exchanges require a small image – typically 88×31 pixels. As most affiliate sections on websites have many of such images its best to make yours stand out. If you’re good with Photoshop or any other graphics package this should be easy, however for those that aren’t there are a number of communities who will happily create one for you either for free or for a few pounds. Some of these forums include:
Whilst it’s best to upload the image to your own server sometimes it may cause a large increase in traffic – remember that the image could well be seen by millions each day if you pick the correct websites. As a result it is sometimes better to use a free image hosting service to host your affiliate image. A few good ones include:
Placing affiliates on your site
Remember that this is a two-way system and so you’ll need somewhere to place partners links on your website. You’ll need to put it somewhere so that it’s clearly visible so people will want to affiliate with you, but be sure that it doesn’t interfere with the rest of your sites content. Most of the time it’s best to have a simple table or area on your frontpage or in your websites footer. Here are few examples of affiliate implementations:
Getting affiliates
This is probably the hardest part of promoting your website – getting people to affiliate with you. First of all you want to look for sites related and relevant to yours. This is not only a good SEO technique but it also means you are more likely to get interested traffic.
Once you have found a website the next step is to see if they already have an affiliate scheme or link exchange system – many websites do and will allow you to contact the owner in some way to apply. Other websites may not have such a system in place and you may have to contact the owner directly. Don’t sound desperate and explain to them the benefits of a link exchange between yours and their websites.
It is also a good idea to affiliate with forums and blogs too as these can add a different type of traffic to your website.
5:06 pm on 04/11/2009
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