Affiliate schemes and marketing explained (how affiliate schemes work)
Dynasty asked "One thing i don’t get, how will i get money if i put links on my site to say amazon or any other site, if a user then clicks on it, how will i get a share of the profits? amazon won’t know that the user came after visiting my site. How does it work?"
Well my friend, this is how it works:
You sign up with someone such as Amazon
You sign up and are assigned a unique identification number so that the vendor can recognise you. Whenever linking to products or services that vendor will give you the syntax to form the link.
You create your affiliate links using the provided syntax and ID
"http://www.vendor.com/product_1.html?affiliateid=123456789" for example. This means that the vendor knows it's you who referred me (when I click on your link).
How will they know it was me?
Initially they know this purely from the URL that the user entered their site on. They'll know that the user with affiliate ID 123456789 sent me to their site. However, a lot of affiliate schemes use 30-day cookies - this complicates things slightly.
30/60 day cookies
When I've clicked on your affiliate link and been sent through to vendor.com, they set something known as a "cookie" on my computer. This is a file that sits on my hard drive with your affiliate ID stored. This means that any other times I visit vendor.com, they'll still know that I found the site through you originally and therefore you're still eligable for some money.
How do I get money?
It's simple logic really - if I buy a product from vendor.com with your affiliate code still in place then they'll give you a small percentage of the profit. Why? Well without you I wouldn't have made my merry way onto their site so giving you *some* money and them making *some* money is better than not making any money at all...
And that's about it. It's easy to see how it works because it works on the premise that you deliver new customers to them. Of course the downside is that no sale = no money, so you could refer 1,000 visitors and if no one buys anything you're still not better off. Affiliate schemes - nice and simple.
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