An Overview of Affiliate Programs
By Mark of Seriousbondage.com
I am not an 'expert' on the subject of affiliate programs, but would like to share what I have learned and observed as a result of running my own web site - whose main revenue is generated from affiliate program income. My web site is free access, and features a news-style format covering serious bondage play and the associated gear. I generate my own photo, video and text content, and also use the content from other producers and web sites.
It's my belief that affiliate programs are the 'next phase' of the Web's marketing and commerce growth (along with 'micro-payment' systems and cost/revenue based advertising with search engines like Google, which I do not cover here). This is why I decided to experiment with creating a free access web site. Granted, similar approaches were tried during the year 2000 "dot-com boom" without much luck, but the difference between then and now is: 1) my web site is aimed at a very narrow market which is growing quite quickly, 2) today's affiliate systems are stable, reliable, easy to use, 3) the rapid deployment of broadband around the world puts more users on-line each day who gravitate towards mature marketing and advertising approaches rather than the 'wild west' functionality of the earlier Internet, 4) the ease at which credit card transactions can be processed and converted between currencies, and exchanged over the Web to any country via companies like Pay-Pal.
As more adult websites come on-line, affiliate programs enable web site operators to aggressively market their content by sharing the profits with other sites who display their banner. These days, the typical affiliate share is 50% of a membership (or 5-20% or more of a product sale). Although some webmasters are not fond of sharing their profits with other web sites, there are hidden benefits to using affiliate programs which I have observed. These include:
  • Affiliate programs can be more effective than spending your time contacting other web sites and asking them to display your banner or link to you (the traditional method of marketing). Even after another web site agrees to display your banner or link, they have little or no incentive to maintain that link. On the other hand, if they in your affiliate program and receive a share of your profits from the memberships they send you, they are likely to place your banner in a more visible position on their site, and actively promote your site. Your banner or link will not be relegated to their 'Links' page, but instead will be aggressively displayed on their entrance page, home page or higher traffic pages.
  • Although you will share your profit with a particular affiliate for a new member signup, when that new member tells other people about your site those people will go directly to your site to sign up. As a result, those additional profits from new members are not shared with affiliates.
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  • Any member who signs up through your affiliate, then later cancels, then rejoins again, will usually join directly at your site. So, their membership profit is not shared with the original affiliate the second time around.
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    As I see it, the Internet is becoming more crowded each day with new fetish websites, so the only way to effectively market your site is to associate (or 'affiliate') with other sites of a similar genre.
    Naturally, an affiliate program is no substitute for good content. Good content will always attract new members on its own, however, an affiliate program will help increase the visibility of your web site. Here are a few of my observations about operating an affiliate program:
  • As a webmaster displays more affiliate banners or links on their site, they will start to examine the profit they make from each affiliate program, and will more heavily promote the affiliate banners which create the most revenue for them, and move the less profitable affiliate banners to their back pages with less traffic. Webmasters begin to view their traffic has having income generating potential beyond their own web site.
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  • All affiliate programs provide administration pages to both the owner of the web site and to each of the affiliates. The owner of the web site has an overall view and can monitor the amount of traffic sent by each affiliate and the respective payouts. This allows the owner to see which affiliate sends the most traffic and creates the most new memberships.
    • The affiliate administration pages provide provide a lot of information, including a ratio of traffic to members for each affiliate, usually called the 'click-to-buy' ratio. This is a number that indicates how many people came to your site from an affiliate verses how many people actually signed up to become a member. This is a very important number to watch, because it indicates what kind of traffic an affiliate is sending you. As an example, if your affiliate runs a web site about rock climbing, then the traffic that affiliate sends you will probably not become a member of your kinky web site. This traffic is 'unqualified' traffic, meaning it consists of visitors who are not specifically interested in the subject of your site. On the other hand, if your affiliate runs a kinky web site whose content is similar or identical to your web site, then that traffic expects to click on banners to similar web sites and and as a result are much more likely to join your site. This is 'qualified' traffic. So, the best type of traffic to get from an affiliate is 'qualified' traffic, where a relatively high percentage of that traffic becomes a member of your web site. The 'click-to-buy' ratios run anywhere from 1/100 meaning that 1 out of 100 visitors becomes a member to your site (a good ratio), to 1/2000 meaning 1 person out of 2000 becomes a member (a poor ratio). These ratios are similar to traditional 'mass advertising mailings' sent by snail mail. As a result, you can either receive thousands of clicks to your web site and hope that someone becomes a member, or you can affiliate with web sites with similar content and have a higher percentage of traffic that become members. If you think about it, each approach can work well depending on the conditions. E-mail spam is an example of soliciting traffic from completely unqualified viewers, but if the cost of sending 1 million spam e-mails is only $75, and you receive .001 purchases, that's 1,000 sales, so it may be worth it.
    In any case, I'm sure no one will argue that associating with similar genre web sites and receiving qualified traffic is a far more efficient way to approach promoting your affiliate program.
    I hope this information helps you in evaluating the pro's and con's of starting an affiliate program, or joining an affiliate program to generate more revenue from the traffic which you may be receiving on your existing web site.
    Revenue Sharing
    Most affiliate programs these days are called "reoccurring", meaning that the affiliate not only gets a cut of the initial signup, but they also receive a cut of the automatic monthly rebilling. As I said above, most of the affiliate programs these days pay 50% of the initial signup, and 50% of the rebills. If you see the words like "50% initial plus reoccurring" on an affiliate advertisement page, that's what it means. For the affiliate, this means that your monthly income from the affiliate program will represent both new members for a given period plus all the rebills that occurred during that same period. It also means that if you stopped sending new traffic to the affiliate program, your monthly income would not stop instantaneously but would taper off as people dropped their rebilling memberships.
    Some affiliate programs only share the initial membership fee and no reoccurring fees, but this is usually do to technical reasons and not because the affiliate program is greedy.
    Affiliate Systems, Tracking Visitors, Affiliate Links, and Cookies
    The software behind an affiliate program is rather complicated, so web site operators don't usually build and maintain their own systems. That said, kink.com has built their own system, but this is rare for kinky website operators. Most affiliate programs are provided and operated by the same company who does the credit card processing. An example of this would be CC-Bill. However, there are also companies that specialize in providing 'third party' affiliate systems that interface with both the credit card processor and the web site. An example of this would be AffiliateTracking used with the HouseOfGord's affiliate program. Third party affiliate systems are used when you need to add affiliate tracking to a credit card processor who doesn't support affiliate programs, or integrating more than one credit card company into one affiliate system.
    There are usually four main components to consider when learning how an affiliate system works. These are: 1) the visitor and their computer, 2) the affiliate's web site where the banner or link is displayed, 3) the affiliate/credit card processing company like CCbill, 4) the kinky website who wants new members. Lets walk through the process in the following diagram.
    1. First, the visitor browses the Seriousbondage.com website and sees the pupett.com banner.
    2. The visitor clicks on the banner and is momentarily directed to CCBill where a cookie is deposited on the visitor's computer indicating that he came from Seriousbondage.com and is going to Pupett.com.
    3. After receiving the cookie, the visitor's browser is redirected to the entrance of the Pupett.com website. The process of obtaining the cookie from CCBill happens very quickly so the visitor doesn't notice.
    4. The visitor browses the Pupett.com web site and decides to join. The visitor enters his credit card information and chooses a login/password on the signup page.
    5. The visitor's credit card, login/password and cookie information are sent to CCbill. CCBill records the transaction, reads the cookie and credits Seriousbondage.com 50% of the signup fee.
    6. The visitor's browser is then redirected to the membership entrance of the Pupett.com website.
    This is a simplified description of events for a member signup. Behind the scenes CCBill has control of the password file of the Pupett.com web server, which enables CCBill to add or delete passwords based on whether members join, renew or cancel their memberships.
    At regular intervals CCBill distributes the funds to Pupett.com and the affiliates. CCBill pays every week, Gord and Kink.com pay every month. All affiliate companies pay by mailing paper checks, however some offer options of paying by Pay-Pal or direct deposit.
    It's usually fairly easy to spot a banner or link that's associated with an affiliate program, because when you mouse over the URL it points to an affiliate company web site rather than the web site which is advertised. Here are a few examples below, notice what URL is displayed when you mouse over these banners and how fast the link takes you to the affiliate company then redirects you to the appropriate web site:
    Similarly, the banner below go to customized affiliate tracking system at kink.com that's integrated into the web server, so when you mouse over this banner you will see the URL of the appropriate web site but there will be an extra code at the end of the URL indicating which web site the traffic is coming from:
    Affiliate Programs for Marketing Affiliate Programs
    Another interesting feature of some affiliate programs is their ability to pay a percentage to an affiliate that sings up another affiliate to the program. This is usually 10%. So, in other words, if I sign up a webmaster to be an affiliate of, say, kink.com, they pay me 10% of any new members that the affiliate generates. So, the idea is that affiliate programs can be used to market affiliate programs to other webmasters. The revenue share is 40% to kink.com, 50% to the affiliate, and 10% to the affiliate that signed up the affiliate. This may sound like kink.com is getting the short end of the stick, but remember in this scenario everybody wins, and kink.com gets fantastic marketing exposure - far beyond what they could generate by asking other sites for a banner exchange. And, the result is that kink.com receives more members who come directly to their site so they don't pay any affiliates for those new members.
    NOTICE - BondageAffiliates.com assumes no responsibility for the legitimacy, functionality, accuracy, lawfulness, trustworthiness, results or content of the sites and affiliate programs listed on this web site.
    This website was created solely as a resource to adult web site webmasters in hopes that successful fetish web sites will continue to grow and prosper in the future. Do not use or rely any content presented on this web site as the final and only information available on the functionality of affiliate programs, associated marketing programs, or web sites.
    If you associate and participate with the web sites and affiliate programs listed on this web site, do so at your own risk. BondageAffiliates.com takes no responsibility for your actions, affiliations or results - financial or otherwise.