gurunet

 

Affiliate dope

Affiliate marketing meets two needs:-

1. the need for merchants to reach a larger market and
2. the need for webmasters to integrate revenue streams into their websites.

There is something unsettling about affiliate marketing - like it is evil and eats babies. But still its a necessary evil. The internet user demands more content and more information but resents having to pay for it. They hate online ads and popups, they resist and attempt to circumvent any system that requires payment. A case in point is our personals site. Members constantly try to find new ways of hiding their contact details in their profiles to avoid having to pay to make contact with others (the best I've seen is "I'm so hot right now it's not funny and men flock to me" as code for hotmail).

Anyway I've decided it is time to start dabbling in the black arts and go affiliate.

First step is to install the osC Affiliate module into our shopping cart to allow others to resell our web hosting services. Resellers will be able to choose to take payments or, if they host with us, they can accept a rebate on their own hosting costs. Hopefully by the end of January we'll have our Internet Guru Hosting affiliate program up and running.

The other step is to identify products in affiliate programs that may suit our existing audience and carefully place links to these products and services into our sites. Oh I'm feeling dirty just thinking about it.

In the meantime here are a few resources for the potential affiliate:-

AssociatePrograms.com Forum
ABestWeb Affiliate Marketing Forum
osC Affiliate
clixGalore affiliate networks - has a range of Australian affiliate programs