LINKS leading to customers

'Affiliate marketing' offers commissions for sales

These spam-mails, riding the tail of notes for body-part augmentation, free legal advice and reduced mortgage rates, usually meet with a sigh of disbelief and a quick tap of the delete key.

But this time, it's legit.

Several Boulder residents have found a way to make money on the Internet that is all the things it claims to be: Cheap! Easy! Little time commitment!

"It's very simple," said William Brown, owner of Harman Research, a Boulder-based computer-consulting business. "There's no smoke, no mirrors. I'm sure there are a lot of people making a living doing it."

The concept has been around since people began using the Internet to market their goods, and, on a large-scale basis, is how Amazon.com officials make their millions: Rather than offering their own goods, they help people find what they want to buy, then link them to that Web site.

It works like this: A person sets up a Web page, visits several sites that offer "affiliate marketing" links to those sites and waits for the money to come in. If a person visiting the Web site links to the other site, say Match.com, and signs up, the person who linked to that site receives a commission. Some people work a little harder by writing reviews about the products they're linking to or by purchasing keywords on search engines, such as Google, that cause their Web sites to show up first during searches.

For example, a person who wants to sign up for AOL's e-mail service goes to Google.com, searches for "sign-up for AOL" and gets a list of sites with those keywords. One of those sites is likely to be

Brown's because he bought those keywords from Google.com. If the person then links through to AOL from Brown's site, Brown makes a commission.

"So all I've done is put a bunch of advertisements on my site and let the search engines find them," Brown said. "I just keep adding more sites."

After his wife had a baby earlier this year, Brown began as an affiliate to bring in additional income for his family.

"With the kids and the family, I don't have a lot of time to do customer service," he said. "With this, you just click through my site and you're done. That's what fascinates me is you can spend so little time and make money."

Pamela Metivier, author of "Affiliate Selling: Building Revenue on the Web," said there are thousands of affiliate programs, from Match.com to Netflix.com, and they've been around since about 1996.

"There are tens of thousands, probably millions of affiliates," she said. "Just about anyone who has a site with a lot of traffic is an affiliate."

Affiliates begin by visiting a Web site that allows them to choose affiliate programs. Those sites include www.befree.com, www.linkshare.com and www.commissionjunction.com.

"You sign up for free," Metivier said. "They give you a piece of code, and you can paste it into your Web site or e-mail. You don't need anything but basic HTML."

David Besnette, who runs the Web site for Pedestrian Shops shoe store in Boulder, became an affiliate for SpamArrest.com out of loyalty to the product.

"I'd go away on vacation and get 300 e-mails for vicodin," he said, adding that he would never need that much pain medication. "A friend of mine signed up for SpamArrest.com and told me about it."

He adds a link that describes the spam-guard product to all of his e-mails and his Web site, and, if people link through and sign up, he makes a commission.

"It hasn't been a gold mine by any means," he said. "I've made about $100 in three months, but I haven't been very aggressive."

Metivier said a Web-site owner's belief in the product as well as the customer's interest in finding it is what makes affiliate marketing effective.

"What's improving through affiliate advertising is that rather than pushing information, you position your site so you're at the right place at the right time: intent marketing," she said. "Web sites are using less banner advertising, so you happen across advertisements while you're looking for that information."

As an example, Metivier said a camera aficionado could use his or her digital-camera Web site to link to the cameras he or she recommends. Both the affiliate and the person selling the camera benefit because the affiliate makes a commission, and the person selling the camera can control the percentage of the sale that goes to marketing.

"If I just buy $5,000 worth of ads, I might not get a single sale," said Metivier, who said she has about 100 affiliates linking to her Web site, www.mygoals.com. "This is like having a billboard on the side of the highway, but I only have to pay if someone pulls over and eats at my restaurant."

People who link through affiliate ads generally already are looking for that information, unlike spam mail or pop-up ads that assume all people want mini-cams for home security even if they're browsing for information about the Amish lifestyle.

"If you want to buy a camera and you type in, 'buy a camera,' you want to see those ads," Metivier said. "If you're reading about giving birth, you probably don't want to buy a digital camera."

She said some people work as affiliate marketers full time by either creating text to interest people in their Web sites or through buying key words through search engines so people will link to their pages more often.

"You can make tens of thousands of dollars a month," she said, "and these are small home-based businesses."

There are some issues to avoid, she said. Don't buy search key words that might be more expensive than what the affiliate site offers in return. Don't try to market the product as your own. Don't try to mislead people by saying the link leads somewhere it doesn't.

"What's most important to the merchant is the business relationship," Metivier said. "And they'll check. You shouldn't have to trick people into linking to the site by making it look like a game. Merchants do check for trademark and copyright abuse, so you need to reference to the actual true merchant site."

And, she recommended linking to sites the marketer likes.

Consultant Brown, who also owns www.stopthejunkmail.com, sticks with reputable sites and sites he uses.

"I just link to stuff that I like — stuff that I use in business every day," he said. "There are lots of ways to make money. Now I know why spam is such a problem."

By Kelly Kennedy, For the Camera
January 2, 2004