How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?

The beginning of your affiliate marketing journey – the more you know the better!

How the affiliate program works: (using Shareasale as an network example)

• You signup and are approved by the network- ShareASale if you’re not already a member, and then you can apply specifically for ( *** ) program using the join links you are provided.
• Once approved, you start adding this merchant’s promotions to your site with banners, original content (including affiliate links), adding coupon offers, etc…
• When you create content or a review and include affiliate links, be sure you disclose according to FTC requirements.
  • For Example: “I get commissions for purchases made through links in this post.”
  • For more information on FTC or disclosures.
• You can grab your unique tracking links from the network. You’ll have access to either just the click URL if you’re savvy with adding links to your blog or you can copy the entire HTML code so you can paste it into an HTML or source code editor on your blog.
  • Tutorial on getting links:  https://snow-consulting.com/how-to-get-a-link-shareasale.html
    • A little more info:)  Affiliate Links 
  • Information on Social Media Links
  • Information on Instagram
  • Information on Facebook 
• When a site visitor clicks on this link, a cookie is placed on their computer. The cookie will remain active in their browser for a certain length of time (example: 120 days), depending on the merchant agreement. If your reader places any orders within that time, that sale will be tracked by the network cookie and attributed to your account.
• The ShareASale Network keeps track of your earned commission and pays out on a monthly basis if your balance reaches their minimum threshold. Usually this threshold is either $50 or $100, depending on the network and which form of payment you request (check or direct deposit to a bank account). If your commissions don’t meet the minimum to get paid, they will roll over month to month until they accumulate and meet the minimum for payment.

I hope this very basic overview is what you were looking for, and I hope it’s answered your questions!  We have more detailed information, along with links to join the affiliate networks.

http://www.snow-consulting.com/clients.html

Resources:

Mother’s Day is May 13th!  Let’s make sure mom feels pampered and loved this year.  Your readers will find a great selection of Mother’s Day gift items at our merchants.

Check out the selection we have chosen below.  These are just a few of the items we found to make moms happy.

Celebrate your Beauty with Luscious Cosmetics!

Snow Consulting is happy to be managing Luscious Cosmetics – an independent line of Glamourous and Affordable beauty products ranging from the make-up essentials everyone needs, the tools of the trade, to specific beauty solutions.

As one of the fastest growing beauty brands in the world, Luscious Cosmetics is proud to bring their fans (and soon to be fans!) a line of products that are exciting, cruelty free, Vegan and Vegetarian friendly – and so innovative that they have caught the attention of makeup artists, beauty addicts and celebrities alike.

“At Luscious Cosmetics, we take the business of beauty very seriously. The company was founded with the purpose of creating high quality cosmetics with an affordable price tag, but without ever compromising on ingredients or ethics.”

Luscious Cosmetics believes there are no rules and no limits to create your own signature look to express yourself!

Join this ShareASale Affiliate program today – and find out just how far you can go with Luscious Cosmetics.

2017 Holiday Gift Guide

Each Holiday Season I look forward to flipping through that years’ Wish Book.  Everything had a special sparkle to it between those paper-thin pages packed with toys, treasures, and treats!    And with that same childlike anticipation, we are happy to bring you the Snow Consulting Holiday Gift Guide!

The kids on your list will love the latest Character Costumes from Find Costume.  While Lightake has ALL the latest trendy gadgets!  If you have a budding musician on your list – Loog is a great place to get them started on their stardom.

For the BIG kids, watch his eyes light up with something from Car and Truck Remotes.  Maybe its that special piece of hardware from Cobra Electronics.  Escort offers industry leading radar detectors and car accessories he will love.  For the professional on your list – Discount Watch Store and Ties.com will have him looking his best.

The ladies are not to be left out with all that sparkles from Soufeel and Frost NYC.  Find those special items she will wear with joy from K-DEER, FewModa, ROMWE, SheIn, and Whurk Boutique.  And no lady would object to something from The Perfume Spot!

We have all the bases covered for the Sports Lovers too, at Do It Tennis, Fairway Golf, Hickies, Hockey World, and Hyperwear.

Everyone has those hard to buy for on their list.  You are sure to find exciting gift ideas at Future Memories, Glasses Shop, and the Wine of the Month Club.   No matter what their interests, you are sure to find something for everyone….and don’t forget to make your own Wish List!

Gifts for Her

Gifts for Him

Gifts for Kids

Lifestyle Gifts

Learning to use datafeeds will improve your niche sites, give you access to more product information and generally help boost your web business. Increased traffic and more sales happen when you keep content unique and fresh, so don’t plan to just plug and play – learn to pick and choose what products and what information will match up with your topics. It works!

There’s more to handling datafeeds than just finding and downloading them:

• Find available feeds, sort categories and download what you need. Then manipulate the information inside.
• Loading those products to the server for your site or creating a post with the images and links.
• Pulling the information into a post template so displaying the feed is “automated”.
• Updating feeds when information changes

What is a datafeed exactly?

The easiest way for me to visualize a datafeed is to see it as a spreadsheet. Even though it is usually presented as a CSV file, that just means commas or tabs are separating the data you would normally see in a spreadsheet cell. You can upload a CSV file into a spreadsheet and, conversely, you can save a spreadsheet as a CSV file.

A datafeed is an inventory sheet of the merchant’s products. Each row (think spreadsheet) represents one product. If the product comes in different sizes, different colors, different anything – each choice will have its own row.

The cells going across the row are for the various bits of information you need to display that product on your site: Name, Landing Page, Large Image, Thumbnail Image, category, Retail Price, Sale Price, etc. There are many ways a network can choose to accept datafeeds; each network usually sets up the template criteria so they are uniformly structured.

How do I get a datafeed from ShareASale?

I marked the Links tab and the Datafeed choice with red dots in the image above. You find these tabs in your ShareASale dashboard as an affiliate. You can also find the same Datafeed choice under the Merchants tab, labeled: Find merchants with Datafeeds.

Make selections to suit your site and see what datafeeds are available

Make some selections to narrow the results:

And then choose a merchant with the number and type of products you’re looking for:

Now let’s take a look at that information graph – Using a different merchant for the following details – don’t get confused, I just wanted to show you more than one!

Full bar gives you lots of info, but it’s too small to really see, so I’ll break it up into 3 pieces for an up-close look right below this image:

Let’s take the first part – from the far left. We see the merchant name, a link to the profile page and some basic details in case you’re deciding whether or not to join:

The second part, moving from the left to the center, gives us more program details (CPC, cookie duration and AutoDeposit) and some important information about the feed. The green circles tell you how many of the SAS datafeed enhancement features this merchant uses. You can also see how many products are in the feed and when it was last updated.

This last piece – the far right of the graphic – is what you’re looking for so you can download or find a specific product. I duplicated the green circles and the number of products so you could find your place, and then on the far right you see 3 choices: Download as a csv (comma separated values) file, or Search Products, and Apply for FTP access, which is a box you check if you want to transfer the file via FTP now or in the future:

Let’s look at Download as csv first. Very straighforward. Click that option and you’ll get this instruction:

The image above tells you that: 1) Once you save this file and open it, you will have to replace USERID with your own affiliate number. Just in case you don’t know your affiliate number, it’s right there (I’ve hidden mine under the gray bar). 2) When your computer asks open or save?, choose Save. Then you can open it with the program of your choice. I use a spreadsheet to open, but remember it’s a csv file, so you have to look for it with *all files instead of just xls or xlsx files. 3) One last thing. When you’re opening the file, your computer will ask you about the format of the data. Data is separated by TABS and not by commas, as you would expect in a csv file. Good to know when you see the options!

Choose Save and rename the file something you’ll remember when you look for it.

Before we stop and let you rearrange your spreadsheet data to suit your site, I want to show you another way to use the datafeed. This way is great for beginners and small sites where 1 or 2 products in a category is plenty. These instructions also show you what it looks like when you get to the datafeed info via the Links tab.

The image above is from the LINKS tab for the merchant OnlineSports. You can see banner choices, text links, coupon deals and datafeed all in one place for the same merchant. In this example, OnlineSports’ datafeed has 102,000+ products. I think we’re going to have to do some search narrowing:

If you look near the Search box, you’ll also see an opportunity to download csv file. This is a great feature for narrowing your results until you get exactly what you want and THEN downloading the file!

We searched for baseball and got way too many, so we narrowed it to youth baseball and as you can see, there are now 50 products showing up that pulled from the entire OnlineSports datafeed. For each product, you see an image and an opportunity to get the individual link if you want, or add it to your “basket”, which is a feature SAS uses to make gathering things easier for affiliates.

If you’re only going to incorporate a few products, the “get link” feature is what you want. When you click it, you’re going to see the various ways the link can be written for you. Text only, large image, thumbnail image, with and without price, merchant name, etc. I hope you can see now that you don’t have to be a technical wizard to find the right products to feature on your site. Learn a few more tricks with datafeeds and you’ll be able to manipulate whole categories of inventory for your niche.