Affiliate Marketing management companies are also called, CPA networks: Cost Per Acquisition ( or Action ). They usually have a large amount of advertisers and publishers in their network. And the publishers can browse and choose for the advertiser that they want to promote.
Affiliate Marketing works this way: The merchant (advertiser) agrees to pay the affiliate (publisher) a finders fee for sending traffic to the merchant’s website, and if it converts to a sale (or other desired user action like a download, free trial, etc) the affiliate gets paid a commission. Usually a percent of the sale, or a specified dollar amount.
The CPA network manages the affiliate marketing process. The advertiser pays a retainer to the CPA network. The CPA network acts like the middleman in this scenario, and tracks all the traffic, click-thrus, and conversion data. Once the sale, or desired user action happens, the CPA network pays out the commission to the affiliate from the merchant’s retainer.
Affiliates drive traffic in many different ways. Some affiliates use their own permission based email lists. Some use search engine marketing, and, some only use banners on their websites. Others integrate the offering into their shopping carts. While others create some sort of review site.
How can affiliate marketing affect SEO? Link Connector has a unique offering called “naked linksâ€?. Instead of using the affiliate network tracking url, they use the advertiser’s “nakedâ€? url without any tracking code or parameters. This is a huge benefit for SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Depending how many affiliates use the advertiser’s offer, this can be a huge lift for the advertiser’s link popularity and link relevancy by drastically increasing the amount of inbound links, (or backlinks).
Below is a list of a few affiliate marketing networks.
1) Link Connector
2) Linkshare
3) Commission Junction
4) Azoogle
5) NetBlue
6) The Useful
7) CyberBounty
AdDrive
9) OptInBig / CPA Empire
10) SubscriberBase
11) MaxMedia Marketing
12) Search Cactus
13) Vendare Media
14) Web Cannon
15) eUniverse
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{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Naked links are indeed a positive for SEO – howver you want to ensure and keep control over what sites are using this technique. Spammy or sites that do not appear to have a relevance to your site might not be a good target for naked links.
I suggest a dual strategy for selectively giving out naked links to sites that are relevant to your space and give the un-washed masses the generic affiliate link.