AffiliatesNeeded.Com What's New In Affiliate Marketing

At every Affiliate Summit I’ve attended there is always a new company who is doing something exciting, and disruptive in the space. This year one of the industry’s highest profile veterans, Jeremy Schoemaker aka ShoeMoney, had all the buzz. In a two-part session at Affiliate Summit, Jeremy unveiled his link shortener, A/B tester, and so much more: Link Control. I sat down with Jeremy, after Vegas, to discuss what makes Link Control so potentially disruptive. Enjoy.

Why did you decide to launch Link Control?

In the affiliate industry, everyone tries to optimize on the front end—banners, landing pages, and all this stuff—but nobody focuses on the back end. Affiliates find an offer they’re happy with and try to figure out how to get more traffic to that offer. That makes sense but there’s a lot of inefficiency with that process.

Another reason is affiliates simply don’t trust affiliate networks. Because thanks to the networks the one thing about being an affiliate marketer is that you don’t know shit. You don’t know crap about the strength of an offer. I figure there are basically 600 affiliate networks that have at least 100 affiliates (not counting the thousands using DirectTrack). So, as an estimate, let’s say there are 600 affiliate networks. Now let’s say half of them have the same Netflix offer, but all of them say they have the best payout with the best conversion. As an affiliate, you really don’t know who to believe, and you spend a lot of time figuring out what the best offer really is.

We set out to create a product that eliminates the guesswork of being an affiliate, that ensures you’re getting the highest payout from affiliate networks that you work with.

But let’s say you have the best offer, there are still a lot of inefficiencies. Let’s say an offer goes down, you’ll often never hear about it. If you’re doing a whole bunch of PPC and an offer goes down without you knowing, even for two hours, you’ve just burned through a couple thousand dollars. You know that’s lost money.

With Link Control, if any offer goes down, we’re going to divert that traffic immediately for you. We’ll keep checking until that offer comes up and you’re going to get notified. There will also be options allowing you to tell us where you want that traffic diverted to so none of your traffic is wasted.

What platform is Link Control built on?

The whole thing is powered by PHP and MySql. It’s based on a system that we built internally for our own stuff, which is why I think we’ve been the top affiliate for several different networks. For the last five or six years we’ve been basically optimizing between networks to make sure we have the best offer. I wanted to take the basic tools we’ve been doing really well with and that have given us a huge advantage over our competition; but make it available for all affiliates.

Why now?

Three years ago I sold the company called AuctionAds, and at that time, I signed a non-compete…I think the language was an “owner-operated” affiliate company or advertising network. So my hands have been tied for three years. I’ve wanted to do this for a while.

With Link Control, does the optimization still work if the network links that are encrypted?

Absolutely. Link Control logs into your account, and all it cares about is maximizing the earnings you’re getting per click. So each offer is weighed on an EPC basis. Now if you go a step further, we have an algorithm that learns from your traffic and where your traffic originates. So if Facebook’s Farmville converts better to the Azoogle’s dating offer than it does to Neverblue’s dating offer for the exact same company, it will direct your traffic to the better converting offer for that traffic type.

The system learns from how well different landing pages work, from types of traffic, from geolocation, and even which web browser performs better. If we see, for example, that Unix users in your traffic are converted better with one style of landing page than another, it will automatically divert that traffic towards the better converting page.

We are not quite fully automated yet, but we’re trying to have full automation in place by Q2 for everyone. Right now setup is very quick. You go in, set the offers you want to go through Link Control, and weight each offer with how much traffic you want to funnel to it. At the bottom you can set all these targeting rules.

For example, if it’s a mobile device, I can tell it to override all other rules because maybe I want to capture the person’s name and email. That way I can market later to those folks because as we know, most people don’t bother to buy yet from a mobile device. They wait until they’re at their computer to buy. We’ll just capture their email real quick because it’s easier to get an email from somebody on a mobile device than having them fill out a full form with their credit card information. Even with nuances like that, Link Control can do the targeting.

That sort of answers my next question. Will Link Control work via mobile device, via video content, etc?

At its very essence Link Control is a link shortener on crack for affiliate marketers. It takes one link and allows you to pass Aff IDs, Sub IDs and whatnot through it. We can send them to every affiliate network that you have accounts with, so if you want to use it on video content or whatever, people can click on them, and we can do the magic behind the scenes.

Tell us more about the multi-targeting function that you talked about in the Link Control intro video. How does that function work exactly? Does it create different links for each target?

Let’s say you’re doing ringtone offers, you’ve got all these ads, and you’re pretty happy with your Neverblue offer, so you’re running all your Facebook ads in one place. You’ve got a funnel set up where emails are going out, you’ve got pay-per-click coming and going, and you’re dealing with Yahoo, Google, and then you’ve got a landing page you have to optimize.

All of the sudden ClickBank comes to you. They have the exact same ringtone offer, but a different landing page they claim converts a lot better and, of course, it pays more…because every network says that. With Link Control, you can go to the dashboard, add the new link for the ClickBank landing page, and test it. Link Control will automatically pass the same variables,  and you only have to give it a very small percentage of the traffic (weight) from that link you’re already rocking on. You don’t have to change anything with your links. You’ll now just divert a percentage to other offers to test them. Then, instead of taking the network’s word for it, you can look at you EPCs and see which one is paying more.

From my standpoint, Link Control may be more valuable as an A/B testing tool in terms of saving time. That to me, frankly, is the sexiest part.

Thanks. It’s a definite A/B tester that optimizes your traffic source. Most people do mutli-variant split testing. Front-end testing is more about what is giving you the best conversions. I think that’s the missing piece in optimization. What if the red button converts better than the orange button? But guess what, people are still buying on that red button more than the orange button. How do we optimize for them? Maybe they all come from one source. So now you can do multi-variant split testing, but you can also see where the traffic is coming from, and then you can optimize on an even higher level.

You keep focusing on offers, so I want to confirm: Does Link Control focus at all on retail SKUs and product links? Or is it solely offer focused?

Link Control is 100 percent focused on CPA networks. Our system will work with traditional affiliate networks like Commission Junction, but where it really shines is with CPA networks. In part that’s where our experience is and we’ve been doing really well in that space. I’m not saying we won’t expand our focus in the future. LinkShare and ShareASale are two companies that we are meeting with currently to explore ways we can integrate with them.

Will working with Link Control increase an affiliate’s chances of being “Google Slapped?”

There’s nothing to indicate that Link Control will introduce any new problems.  Obviously Link Control provides people with a tool set that they could easily cloak through Google, showing Google one thing and then doing something else.

It obviously can be used for Facebook, too. Our systems is Facebook compliant. Now, obviously, it would be very easy for someone to break the rules. We have all these serves all over the country, we have all these domains, plus you can even add your own domain and there is nothing tied to a specific domain so that Google would be like, “Oh everything from this domain is bad.”  If you want to put yourself at risk that’s your deal. I’m not the police of the Internet.

But we’ve actually worked with Facebook and Google and they both really love the technology from the standpoint that it is really good and can clean up the industry than because it’s going to get rid of the crappy, scammy networks that are stealing from affiliates.

Why should affiliates trust you with their data if they already don’t trust the networks?

I don’t know if you know this or not, but I was the lead Unix security administrator for Wells Fargo. I have a really good understanding of encryption and the overall structure for data protection. I also have a lot of contacts in the security world, and I’m on a first name basis with some pretty high up federal auditors with the Federal Reserve Commission.

On Link Control everyone’s data will be held to ten times the actual standard of what a Federal Reserve auditor holds banks to. We’ve already contracted with Price-Waterhouse-Cooper, the leading data auditing firm in the world. They’re going to do a routine random audit, at least once a month, to make sure that all employees’ access will be logged and that user data is safe. On a personal level that is obviously a huge concern to me when I work with anybody who sees my data.

Let’s be honest: as affiliates how many times have you been doing well with an offer when you start to see the network itself doing the exact same thing you are doing? And you think to yourself, “What a coincidence!” I know that trust is a big concern, so we’ve done everything in our power to insure users’ data.

Also, if you look at our board of advisors, I think they reflect that philosophy. I specifically did not want anyone who is associated with a CPA network, right? So Missy Ward, co-founder of Affiliate Summit and my friend Andy Liu, who owns Buddy TV and I Can Has Cheezburger?, are two of our advisors. They are all very smart people who have their own expertise, but none of them are tied to a network.

When will Link Control move out of beta?

Our goal is by next summer. But I really don’t know that it’s in “beta” per se, at least not when it comes to functionality. It’s in beta now due to scalability. When we had AuctionAds, we had one site come in, like Pirate Bay, and we had to drastically increase our size immediately.

With Link Control, the stakes are higher because affiliate marketers who are spending thousands of dollars a day are working with us, and they’re entrusting us with their traffic. There’s no margin for error. That is the biggest reason we’re rolling it out slowly. Downtime is not an option. We’re not going to implement anything that we don’t trust 100 percent.

Let’s put it this way, I have all my PPC stuff running through it, so if Link Control is down, I’m losing a lot of money personally. I’m not going to let that happen to me, let alone the people who trust us with their traffic and business.

What is Link Control’s motorization model?

I’m privately funding Link Control, and over the years I’ve done pretty well for myself. I don’t expect Link Control to make money in the first year. What I want is to get users’ feedback on the product. We’re going to listen to our user base and evolve according to their needs. Eventually, we’ll take a small percentage of the transactions, I think one percent. From personal experience that’s more than fair.

Let’s be honest, people are not going to do something that will cause them to lose money. When they try Link Control’s A / B testing, they can see how much more effective doing that sort of split testing is with us. They can see how much better their conversion is with Link Control versus just sending it directly to multiple offers. They are going to find that it saves them time and that it’s incredibly better.

We were just playing around with a campaign the other day. We turned it on for three days using our Link Control algorithm for a PPC campaign, and it generated a 17 percent increase in conversions. I don’t want to say that’s typical, but that is my exact number. So I think a one percent fee is very, very fair if we can increase our users’ conversions by even five percent.

Where do you want to see Link Control a year from now?

I want to integrate every possible CPA network. This is so our magic sauce can take over. There are a zillion things that we do for the affiliates which will really make a huge difference to their bottom line, and our feature set will only improve.

By 2012 I would like to see us have an excellent product that revolutionizes the affiliate industry and helps everyone. One of my goals is to clean up the industry and, specifically, the CPA space. So by the end of 2012 we will have made a huge impact on the affiliate world, developed a great user base, and helped affiliates make a lot more money.

As part of the ReveNews 2011 Affiliate Industry Preview Series, I interviewed industry leaders to get a sense of their plans and goals for 2011. Today’s interview is with Yaz Iida, CEO of LinkShare.

How do you feel about the health of the Affiliate Industry overall?

Last year we saw sales in the LinkShare Network grow overall by about 38% so we’re still greatly outpacing overall e-commerce growth.  We’re seeing advertisers invest more in the channel and we continue to see incredible innovation from publishers.  So overall I feel our industry is in great shape because it’s delivering for advertisers and there are growing opportunities for publishers to earn commissions.

What adaptions will be necessary as commerce moves to mobile?

Mobile is finally gaining traction.  I think this is the year that many advertisers and publishers will have to make some decisions and invest more in their strategy.  In order to adapt, advertisers really need to understand their customers and what they want to do from a mobile device (e.g. transact vs. check inventory vs. shop and compare) and then build a mobile site that’s designed around a great user experience.

I think what’s really interesting about mobile and affiliate marketing is that advertisers have a great resource in publishers that are trying new things with mobile.   Advertisers can work with publishers to test different mobile promotion strategies, implement a mobile application, and to drive traffic to their mobile sites.   As a network, we are working to ensure LinkShare tracking is maintained through mobile transactions as advertisers and publishers fine-tune their strategies.

How will the FTC’s “Do Not Track” policy impact the industry?

I think it’s hard to say.  But if you look back at when Microsoft released “InPrivate” browsing there were a lot of concerns that the new features would mean significant lost commissions for publishers.  But it turned out that shoppers did not bother to run in that mode.

I think browser enhancements may make it easier for users to opt-out of tracking but I also think consumers will quickly realize that tracking in relation to online shopping can be really valuable and we know consumers these days are looking for value.  Through organizations like the Performance Marketing Association, advertisers, publishers and the networks all need to work together to find ways to provide transparency and instill confidence and trust with consumers to promote the idea that not all tracking is bad.

A high profile story this year was the over $20 million dollars in cookie stuffing fraud allegedly committed by eBay affiliates. What can the industry learn from that event?

Unfortunately there are some people in our industry that are very innovative when it comes to fraud and cookie stuffing.  It really hurts the overall perception of the channel.  Certainly as a network this is something that we manage and work to prevent on a daily basis.  There are also a lot of honest publishers out there.  I think as an industry we have to find ways to promote ethical affiliate marketing practices and to elevate the status of those publishers that adhere to them.

In what ways did LinkShare improve in 2010?

In general we improved our ability to listen to the needs of advertisers and publishers.  This is a very competitive industry and we know we need to exceed expectations on a regular basis.  We also need to be sensitive to the needs of publishers and understand what they require to grow their business.  Our great results this year reflect our ability to bring advertisers and publishers together to identify and then achieve mutual objectives.

We’ve also made some great enhancements to the platform this year including the introduction of a completely redesigned interface for advertisers that includes significant reporting enhancements.  We continued to innovate with the introduction of the LinkShare Lightning beta, which provides advertisers and publishers with a new way of working together through automatically optimized ad units.  Another area we’ve invested significantly in is the backend infrastructure of our systems to accommodate the incredible growth we’re seeing in network traffic.

LinkShare’s involvement in Rakuten’s deal with Baidu is huge; can you tell us more about how that has evolved?

LinkShare itself is not directly involved in this joint venture but I can tell you that Rakuten is very optimistic about the market opportunity in China.  Thousands of advertisers are participating and Chinese consumers are benefiting by having a trusted place to shop online. Rakuten is poised to capitalize on global trends in e-commerce, which will open up opportunities for advertisers and publishers in the LinkShare Network.  It’s something that really makes LinkShare unique from other performance marketing networks.

What are LinkShare’s goals in 2011?

Our goals are tied to the goals of our advertisers and publishers.  First and foremost, our goal is to meet and exceed the objectives of our clients.  Secondly, we will continue to deliver enhancements to our technology and services that are designed to grow sales and to help make advertisers and publishers be more productive.  LinkShare Lightning in particular is really exciting because it will fundamentally make performance marketing easier though ad units that are automatically optimized based on a variety of parameters.  And finally, we will deliver on our strategy as Rakuten’s global performance marketing platform.

The beginning of a new year always signals an opportunity to create new growth and positive change. With the economy signaling a recovery and the increasing expansion of the digital world offline, 2011 holds a lot of promise. In preparation for the premier affiliate industry event, Affiliate Summit West, I sat down with industry leaders from Commission Junction, LinkShare, Google Affiliate Network, and ShareASale to provide you with their insights as to what’s ahead in 2011. The interviews focus on:

• the state of the affiliate industry
• opportunities mobile will bring in 2011
• how the FTC’s Do Not Track legislation will impact marketing
• what network advances each are working on
• what their plans and goals are for the current year

The goal of these interviews will be to provide an insight into what each industry leader feels is key to the industry’s continued success and a preview of what they are focusing on in 2011. Stay tuned!

It’s a critical thought explosion here at ReveNews.  Hot on the heels of Alan Mitchell’s analysis of how the pay-per-click affiliate model is flawed I’m back with the final 5 “hidden dangers of affiliate marketing.”

Affiliate Marketing Legend Wayne Porter‘s idea to present the world with a book titled 15 Hidden Dangers of Affiliate Programs for Merchants was a dandy one.  And reviewing his guidance serves advertisers well today.  It also shows us how we’ve dealt with the tough issues over the last 7 years — or not.

So far we have:

1) Control over brand experience
2) Control of marketing messages
3) Competition in pure SEO environments
4) Competition in the paid search market
5) Discount or coupon “stacking”
6) Cross-channel promotion confluence
7) Training customers to discount
8 ) Transfer of loyalty to cash-back or other incentive sites
9) Escalation in retail costs to compete in ultra-competitive markets
10) Sales concentration risks

All of which we discussed in our earlier article.  Here are the remainder of Wayne’s warnings.

11 & 12) Control of partnerships — who owns them?  And “exclusive” contracts.

Aaah, yes.  The age-old “exclusivity” concern.  Ever since affiliate networks were born out of the minds of young business folk (and lawyers like LinkShare’s Steven Messer) there has been a constant fear of replacement.  In the end, affiliates are middle-men.  But affiliate networks are middlemen controlling the middlemen.  Of course, that makes “CPA networks” middlemen of middlemen of middlemen.  But that’s another article.

Affiliate networks have always tried to prevent advertisers from arriving, discovering the best affiliates in their network and running for the hills — removing affiliates from the network by brokering direct deals with them.  Networks have created “exclusivity clauses” legally attempting to prevent advertisers from “going direct” with affiliates.

These agreements disallow “working around the network.”  There will be no pushing, no shoving and no removing affiliates an advertiser discovers through network — no taking them to another network.  Which, of course, is fairly ridiculous since most affiliates work with all networks.  But it also bans “one-off” (direct, non-networked) tracking and reporting of referrals and commissions.

I vividly recall the first time the issue was publicly discussed.  The practice was labeled commonplace by Marty Fahncke who was, at the time, running Thane International’s affiliate program.  Fahncke got everyone’s attention while on an Affiliate Summit cruise when he revealed that he actually got away with the trick… discussing why and how he did it.  People actually gasped.  Wayne Porter and I were actually leaving the room and we sat back down in a hurry!

Perhaps most entertaining was my discussion with a network executive in 2002 where I learned of a classic form of circumvention.  The affiliate network I once worked for had merely signed NDAs with a competing network’s customers — advertisers restricted to whom they could work with and where. This is a version of “go ahead and ask but I cannot legally tell” that infuriated the Chief Executive I was chatting with.

Here’s how it works:  If the restricting network were to accuse the offending advertiser of pilfering affiliates or, worse, engaging another affiliate network at the same time the accused advertiser simply replied, “I cannot confirm or deny that with you because I cannot legally discuss it without breaking an agreement.”

But Wayne was also concerned over an advertiser’s ability to negotiate separate, free-standing terms with the affiliate.  And to this day the industry hasn’t much worked out the affiliate ownership issue.  Most affiliate networks are not litigious — nor are they in the position to be.  Of course in the early 2000′s that was quite different with LinkShare because of their corporate environment.  But even then it was far more bark than bite.

If you want to extract relationships from affiliate networks it’s entirely possible to accomplish.  Then and now.  And if advertisers want to negotiate affiliate terms (and vice versa) outside of the affiliate network’s standard legalese that is also possible.  And commonplace.

13) Fraud and its many forms

It’s difficult to remember (especially for aging guys like me) the days where advertisers were called marketers because, well, most didn’t advertise.  You needed to have seven figures to do that.  And AOL was the king of the hill.  You were a marketer and you were waiting for affiliate marketing to come along.  “Performance based marketing” we called it.  And you could pay per click or per “action” — per sales transaction (commission) or per lead (bounty).

Yes, per click.  Affiliate programs came out of the gate selling clicks.  And boy did that go over poorly.  Pay-per-click was rampant with click fraud.  Most programs lasted mere months — some less.  This also further delayed marketer’s eventual entry into pay-per-click search advertising — to the dismay of GO Network/Overture (now Yahoo Search) and, of course, Google.  Marketers were soured to pay-per-click advertising by affiliates.

Slight tangent: Yes, affiliates rushed in to buy pay-per-click ads in the absence of marketers.  Born were Goliath affiliates like CouponMountain, credited with being the first to buy the word “coupon” for pennies on the dollar; and “arbitrage affiliates” (so-called DTM or “direct to merchant”) who act as pure performance-based, outsourced search marketing guns-for-hire.  Do not miss Alan’s write-up and outstanding comments contributions in this week’s post.  Alan is spot-on in terms of where we’re at today.

Of course, cost-per-action (CPA) fraud also made its way onto the scene.  This realm runs the gamut from illegal activity to affiliate “cookie-stuffing” (earning undue commissions without making legitimate referrals).  Today, fraud is an accepted cost of doing business — and that includes doing business with Google (Adwords/Adsense).  It’s a managed reality.

Which is not to imply we are dealing with trivial amounts of fraud. If the lawsuit against Digital Point Solutions, Kessler’s Flying Circus, Thunderwood Holdings and BrianDunning.com, and subsequent indictment of Shawn Hogan and Brian Dunning for allegedly committing over $20 million dollars in cookie-stuffing fraud shows anything it is how significant fraud can be when no one is paying attention.

14) Parasitic software and long-term effects on affiliate force

It seemed like this subject was one that would never go away.  But somehow it has gotten a bit quieter.   And Kellie Stevens is quick to help ReveNews readers keep up on all the details.

Adware, spyware and the like have long been a source of aggravation for advertisers.  The “parasites” (as affiliates prefer to call them) are businesses ranging from very visible affiliates like iGive, eBates and Upromise to relatively invisible affiliates, scam artists and assorted “scumware.”  All an affiliate need do to be included in this jolly assortment is set an affiliate referral cookie in a legitimate or illegitimate manner.

And boy, defining legitimate took a long time and, even today is not clearly defined.  Yet I think this obstacle seems cleared for affiliate marketing as an industry.   I don’t see advertisers abandoning affiliate marketing over the risks, just adjusting expectations.  And occasionally adjusting their affiliate base.

Some affiliates are clear “bad actors” while others use tool bars, or other software devices, to aid their shoppers/members in earning loyalty points/cash back/miles.  They place cookies in browsers of shoppers as a convenience, so as to avoid needing to go to an affiliate’s site and click to earn their reward.

Mind you, all nefarious activity comes at the benefit of affiliate networks.  And, again, I can state this definitively.  Anyone who’s worked at an affiliate network can.  Why? Because networks get a cut of everything. The more sales commissions — duly or unduly earned — the better for the affiliate network.  Years ago, all affiliate networks reluctantly set up “network quality” departments and tools to monitor for these pesky affiliates.  Well, pesky to the advertisers at least.

And I would be crazy to not cite Ben Edelman‘s work in this area as groundbreaking, if not fascinating.  But again, the issue seems to be deemed “under control” by advertisers who buy affiliate marketing services/leads/sales.

15) “Fox guarding the hen-house syndrome”

Yes, these were Wayne’s exact words.  And what he’s describing is what I just began describing.  Affiliate marketing, then and to a large degree today, remains very much like letting a fox loose in your hen-house.  If you’re not careful affiliates will, under the not-so-always-mindful-watch of an affiliate network, engage in dozens of acts that will bring harm to your brand or your budget.  I’m not being “glass half full.”  I’m being realistic.

And as Wayne said, “Most networks are not given incentive to control these issues.” Of course networks like Commission Junction have instituted programs where advertisers can pay $5,000 a month to have the network’s compliance team “actively” monitor an advertiser’s program for compliance and fraud issues. Think of it as sort of a “protection racket.”

But, again, for the most part it seems to have settled down these days.  Affiliate programs have been so cut back by large brands that networks and affiliates seem content with what they have to work with.  Gone are the days of most brand-based affiliate marketing arbitrage (where affiliates merely shuttle navigation-based Google traffic for pennies on the dollar).

Affiliate marketing co-exists with all the other Web marketing strategies.  And affiliate networks seem to have earned the respect and continued investment of advertisers.

Well there you have them.  The 15 Hidden Dangers of Affiliate Programs for Merchants.  Thanks Wayne!

Since releasing its phone tracking technology platform in 2007 RingRevenue has experienced strong growth within the affiliate industry. Today its call technology provides pay-per-call tracking for the majority of affiliate networks including LinkShare and Commission Junction. Perhaps most notably their technology is used on the Google Affiliate Network (GAN), since Google has the resources to engineer such tracking but choose instead to go with RingRevenue as a vendor.

Today RingRevenue continued its streak of success announcing it has secured a $4 million round of financing to accelerate its growth. The financing is lead by GRP Partners and Rincon Venture Partners.

RingRevenue estimates nearly 25,000 publishers are using its technology to drive call-based sales to advertisers generating over $100 million in revenue. The technology allows advertisers to direct call-based campaigns online to drive high-value calls to their call centers including such metrics as call length pricing and keyword ROI tracking as well as providing fraud prevention. It also helps solve the issue of phone numbers on a merchant’s website being seen as “leaks” by publishers concerned about not getting credit for sales they are driving.

Jason Spievak, CEO of RingRevenue, was understandably pumped about the financing:

“We’re excited about the opportunity this financing brings. It will allow us to more rapidly grow our partnerships and our team so we can deliver more value to more advertisers and publishers. For advertisers selling big-ticket items or more consultative products and services, pay-per-call has proven to be the best-converting channel. Calls convert at rates of 30 to 50 percent, and the average order value of a sale that closes over the phone vs. online is about 2x.”

RingRevenue will use the financing to expand their technology offerings including taking advantage of new trends in the tremendous growth in mobile use, as well as facilitate the opening of an office in the UK.

What’s LinkShare, And Do I Need To Use It?
Online affiliate marketing is one of the most effective, cheapest and fastest ways to promote merchandise. With millions of people getting access to the Internet everyday, there’s a great chance for a merchant to introduce his products and services to a wider market, thereby, maximizing his revenue.

Likewise, affiliate marketing is an excellent way to generate full-time income for a home-based affiliate marketer. For someone who is jaded of going through a grueling eight-hour work routine, affiliate marketing offers a great opportunity to earn big without wearing himself out—physically, mentally and emotionally.

In affiliate marketing, both parties are benefited since as the merchant earns from each item sold, the marketer likewise earns a commission.

If you are interested in affiliate marketing but are finding it hard to look for affiliate programs, affiliates or merchants, you can start by checking sites of various affiliate networks. Many affiliate programs in the Internet are being offered through an affiliate program network, which acts as a link between the merchants and individual affiliates.

Among the most popular is LinkShare, it is through it that merchants and affiliates meet. LinkShare maintains and manages affiliate marketing programs for a great number of merchants with various kinds of businesses, products and services. It also has over 6,000 affiliate site members in its network. It gains profit from the set-up fees, monthly account maintenance fees and commissions.

Joining networks like LinkShare can be of great help in establishing your online marketing business. Whether you are a merchant or an affiliate marketer, you need to research well on your partners in order to choose the best for you.

LinkShare provides the facility of acquiring access to a large network of advertisers (merchants) who offer their affiliate programs to publishers (affiliates) who are willing to promote their products. In the same manner, it gives the merchants access to a large network of affiliates who are searching for affiliate marketing opportunities.

LinkShare is especially beneficial for an affiliate in choosing his partners since he can find his options all in one location. It would be easier for him to compare products, commission rates and other benefits given by the merchant. The merchant usually just waits for interested affiliates to sign up in his affiliate marketing program but being in the network increases his chance to promote his products to a larger market, thus, maximizing his potential to gain huge profit.

To help you decide whether to use large affiliate networks such as LinkShare or not, let us try to look deeper into its positive and negative sides. The primary advantage of LinkShare to you as an affiliate is convenience.

As earlier mentioned, you find different pieces of information about your choices simultaneously all in a single location, so you save time and effort looking for affiliate programs or merchants.

It’s also easier to track your business partner’s performance through monthly reports and statements, as well as its sales and commission rates, so you know whether the affiliate program is still worth continuing. If you have signed up for several affiliate programs, you can check all your statistics for each merchandiser you are affiliated with by logging in just once.

LinkShare helps you manage and maintain all records of your visitors’ click-throughs and sales transaction. It takes care of your commissions and gives it to you monthly in lump sum. Especially when you have more than one merchant partner, it would be easier for you to manage your accounts and track your earnings when you are affiliated through a marketing program network.
Furthermore, every information you get is accurate and secured, so you are protected from all the risk you might encounter. Above all, you can enjoy LinkShare’s benefits for free. You just have to go to their site and register your website. Instantly, you get access to a great variety of affiliate programs available for you.

So, what’s on the negative side? Although, it is indeed helpful to join affiliate marketing networks such as LinkShare, there are some disadvantages, too.

For one, merchants offer lower commissions to affiliates who partner with them through the third party program network. This because they still have to pay for the use of service and the technology provided by LinkShare.

Direct partnership with the merchant cuts costs of advertising through the network and so the affiliate has bigger potential to earn more. Moreover, it is possible that your payment may be delayed for a month or more since program networks would pay you only after the advertiser or the merchant has paid them.
 
Do you need to use LinkShare or other networks? It depends, actually. You can opt for direct partnership with the merchant, but this choice is not applicable all the time. There are a lot of merchandisers who offer their affiliate program only through affiliate program networks and thus, you have no choice other than joining the network to get into the affiliate marketing program.

So you are faced with “take it or leave it” situation. But LinkShare and other program networks are not that disadvantageous. After all, whether you join it or not, earning big would depend more on your promotional strategies and persistence.