How to start an affiliate program

 

How to start an affiliate program

In affiliate programs, it's a special URL that contains the ID or username of the affiliate. This URL is used by the advertiser to track all traffic the affiliate sends to the advertiser's site as a part of the affiliate program.


Here are some ideas for you to optimize your own affiliate program to try and get some SEO benefit from the links.

1) Use of a Dedicated Landing Page for Big Affiliates
The principle is that you look at who your biggest affiliates are in terms of SEO value, as well as traffic. Then you create a dedicated landing page on your domain for that affiliate to use. You can even do this so that they can still link to their own versions of deep pages such as categories or product pages.

2) Make Sure Affiliates Link to the Correct Page
Contact all affiliates and ask them to update their links to the latest version of the URL. Some affiliates may not want to go to the effort of doing this, however you should point out that linking to a paid that goes via multiple redirects like this, could sometimes strip off their tracking code and not credit them for sales.

3) Help your Affiliates Make Their Content More Valuable
If you have videos available to you, it is worthwhile adding clean links and encouraging your affiliates to embed the videos on their website. This has three benefits -

1 - Your affiliates are adding more value to their own sites by having relevant, helpful videos on their site, therefore potentially increasing the click through rate to your site

2 - Embedding these videos will help the overall strength of your YouTube channel

3 - You get a nice additional link to your website

4) Add More Value to Widgets and I frames That Affiliates Use
Links within the i frame couldn't be seen by the search engines, nor could they see the content, so there was no SEO value at all. A solution was to add a HTML wrapper around the i frame which contained a link to the client and the affiliate could also add some content which the search engines would see.