You can earn money with your website in different ways. Affiliate marketing is one of them.
Affiliate marketing is when you promote other people’s services or products.
If you sell a service or product through your website, then you receive a commission.
If you for example sell a hosting party subscription, you would for example get 20% of what that subscription costs.
So you don’t have your own product, but you promote other people’s products.
Also read the article Creating an affiliate website, how to do it.
And the article Placing affiliate links on your website automatically.
Revenue model
You can earn commission on a click, a lead or sale of a product.
With PPC (pay per click) you get commission when a visitor clicks on the advertisers link on your website.
With PPL (pay per lead) you get commission when for example a visitor enters a prize competition and leaves their information with the advertiser.
With CPS (click per sale) you get commission when the visitor has bought the product.
But which are the best affiliate programs of this moment?
We will give you an overview of the options.
Affiliate networks
One of the most well known is Tradetracker. I myself use this affiliate program and it has a wide selection of businesses, from IT to travel organizations.
Tradetracker is one of the first to work with Real Attribution, a new method to divide the earnings amongst the publishers more fairly.
Affilinet is an affiliate partner which is working its way up and has a network consisting of more than 3500 participating businesses.
It is an international operating affiliate partner, but has a smaller selection than for example Tradetracker, which is more active on the Dutch and Belgian market.
TradeDoubler was a big player within affiliate marketing more than ten years ago, but doesn’t have such an interesting selection these days. I myself hardly use it anymore.
Daisycon was founded in 2000 and has a long standing history of service. With a wide selection of advertising businesses it is one of the largest affiliate networks in the Benelux.
They also help the publishers with maximizing their earnings deriving from websites and email files.
Finally there is Awin, a combination of the previous Zanox and Affiliate Window which fused in 2017. A network with more than 4.300 international advertisers.
Individual affiliate programs
Besides above mentioned affiliate networks, businesses or organizations also offer an affiliate program themselves.
I offer products from Siteground and ThemeForest on the deals page.
These two businesses are not affiliated with a network, but have their own program.
Another large individual provider is the online shop Bol.com which also has it’s own program. But this is a network on its own, because Bol.com offers really a lot of products in many branches.
Many casino companies also provide individual affiliate programs, where you can earn quite some money. But make sure you link to legal betting companies. CasinosBelgië.be only links to affiliate programs in Belgium, which operate under the legal Belgian licenses.
Conclusion
Affiliate marketing is a very specific way of earning money with your website.
There are both affiliate networks and individual programs. The benefit of a network is that you can choose from many different companies, whilst the billing goes through a network like Tradetracker.
If you have many individual programs, then the financial administration is a little more cumbersome.
A few tips to start with affiliate marketing:
- Make sure that visitors click on affiliate links as much as possible. The cookie of a click often lasts 30 days. When the visitor buys the products within 30 days after the click, you will also receive commission for this.
- Promote products which sell well. It is a waste of time promoting a service or product which doesn’t sell very well. You can also monitor this. In the affiliate partner’s system you can see how often the links are being clicked.
