Affiliate Marketing and Affiliate Networks
Affiliate Window launched their own blog.
It’s nice to see that one more affiliate network joined the idea of having their own blog as an additional opportunity to keep in touch with their affiliates and merchants.
I would like to wish Affiliate Window good luck with their new blog and hope it will be constantly updated with useful information.
In my previous article “Which affiliate network?” I listed the main
requirements/criteria that are important for me when I choose an affiliate network.
In this article I’m going to list the UK affiliate networks that I prefer to work through.
I would highly recommend them to the people who are looking for reliable networks but haven’t signed up yet being not sure of their choice.
Note: Please, have in mind that the links below are affiliate links (of course each one affiliate marketer would put affiliate links, would this business exist if we don’t use them 
).
Paid On Results (POR)
One of my favourite UK affiliate networks. I’ve never had any problem with tracking.
They offer great tools (easy deep linking, content units, free feeds, commission
payments via PayPal, fast and helpful support, 2nd Tier Commissions …). What more do you need from an affiliate network!? Ahh, yes … well converting merchants.
Well, POR doesn’t have thousands of merchats, but most of the merchants
they work with convert very well.
Affiliate Window (Digital Window)
After a short “nap” AffiliateWindow took their well-deserved position in the affiliate market. For the last year they have made many improvements of their affiliate
system – new (or improved) tools, free feeds, fast support, fresh ideas, good number of merchants.
I easely added them to the group of my prefered UK affiliate networks.
One thing that would be nice to see them offering more options for commission payments for their international affiliates – PayPal or Direct Deposit.
Affiliate Window is one of the affiliate networks that requires a payment of (5GBP) to sign up (if your account is approved the same amount will be added to your affiliate commission balance). I’ve never regret that I’ve paid this money and started working with them.
Webgains (now a part of Adpepper company )
The network that I always deal with with a pleasure.
Great support, good affiliate tools (iSense Ad Creator, deep link generator, free data feed url generator), “problemless” tracking.
Cons – no PayPal or Direct Deposit commission payments for their International affiliates.
Buy.at
Another leader on the UK affiliate marketing.
During the last year they also made many positive changes – new management area v.3, new affiliate tools (Creative HTML, Content / Link Engine), product feeds, improved stats, very good tracking. Recently I started working with Buy.at more actively and I will do more often exactly because of the changes they made.
Cons – Sometimes you might have to wait TOO long to be approved for some of their
merchant programmes. And again – no PayPal or Direct Deposit options available for their International affiliates.
I’ve read many articles and forum posts about WordPress plugins that can make your life as an affiliate marketer easier. Most of them are really useful but it’s possible that some of them can harm your Google PR and maybe even your SERP positions. What I mean?
I made an experiment with two of our WP blogs – Cooksites and Photoaccent installing Alinks. Last several months everything was fine from affiliate point of view (the blogs generated nice number of Amazon sales) and Google “Judged” strong PR2 for both blogs. But after the last Google PR update (from the previous week) the page rank was dicreased to N.A. for Photoaccent and to PR0 for Cooksites. The only two blogs of all our blogs with dicreased PR were exactly these two blogs where Alinks plugin was installed. Of course I need more time to analyse to make sure that that’s exactly the reason for the page rank loss. But having in mind the widely recently discussed rumour that Google announced unofficially “war” to websites that have a large number of paid links then there is some logic that using Alinks can affect your Google PR.
Edit: Please, note that I’m not against adding paid links on your blogs/websites at ALL! We’ve got many paid / affiliates links added on our websites and all of them have “nofollow” attribute added – don’t see any problem with Google in this case!
I would like to hear your comments.
Below is a list with several WordPress Plugins that we often use on many of our blogs:
aLinks (deactivated for now)
… many other plugins.
Each one affiliate has “prefered” or say “favourite” affiliate network.
How do you choose which affiliate network to work mainly with?
For me personaly there are few main requirements/criteria that are
important when choosing an affiliate network:
Sales tracking
Good stats tools
Affiliates tools (especially SEF and content rich ones)
Direct deposit or PayPal Commission payment options
Fast and helpful support
Fast approval (at some networks it can take months you to be approved/rejected)
2nd Tier Commissions
Well Converting merchants
Free Feeds
You may think too many requirements!? Well, there are many affiliate networks that
cover most of them. I’ll write a separate article about it within the
next days.
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