Strategizing Your Survival Through Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a form of online marketing that uses one website to drive traffic to the other. This sort of marketing could turn out to be an exciting or frustrating experience. People who want to make a living out of this have to be very patient and should always be prepared for the unexpected. The road to success is long and hard and full of challenges.

Affiliate marketing can prove to be an enjoyable way of earning a living. However, it is important for one to learn to differentiate between an honest and dishonest merchant. One must build strategies on the basis of which he can act in order to maximise his earnings through affiliate programs.

One might sign up with what seems to be a great affiliate program that suits his target audience. The right strategies have been made; banners and ads have been put up on the site. Tutorials, articles and reviews on subjects related to the merchants to lead people to examine their services have also been put up. However, in spite of all the time and effort put in, there is no return on the investment. There could be various reasons which could have lead to this.

One of the most prominent reasons could be the use of soggy cookies. Many merchants use cookies to track the affiliate’s referrals. In relation to affiliate programs, a cookie is just a small text file sent to the visitor’s computer and stored to track which site referred them and tag them in case of future referrals. However, cookie tracking methods face a lot of problems. For instance, the person the affiliate refers might flush out the cookies on a regular basis or if the person referred has a cookie blocking software. In both these cases, nothing much can be done and there can be no way in which the referrals provided by the affiliate can be accounted for. It has also been seen that in some cases the merchant’s affiliate program software does not function correctly and doesn’t set any cookies at all. Merchants who understand affiliate programming well use more than just cookies to track referrals. They use IP and session tracking as additional fail safes.

If an affiliate joins a program through a network that processes payments on behalf of the merchants, it is common for the merchants in such cases to offer multiple payment methods. This method is good for the merchants but not the affiliates.

Before one begins advertising any product or service as an affiliate of a network that also processes payments for the merchants, he should check the merchant site very carefully. If in doubt, the affiliate should contact the merchant personally before expending any more energy.