In order for you, the affiliate, to earn your commission for a sale, the customer has to follow a ClickBank hoplink. The hoplink takes the customer to the vendor's sales page, and then ClickBank automatically gives you credit (in the form of money in your account) for that referral. Hoplinks look like this: http://AFFILIATE·VENDOR·hop·clickbank·net and they should be targeted to the top level of the current window.
You'll also want to check these people out. They're at: http://www·cj·com/. Their full name is Commission Junction, and they are a ValueClick company. If you don't want to have to cobble your own affiliate marketing program together piece by piece, CJ offers turnkey affiliate marketing products.
If you're really lazy, or just super-busy, you can turn over the management of your program to them, or use one of their customized search marketing solutions. You can also combine these. They're a bit like Google AdSense, too, in that you can get paid for putting other people's ads in the categories of your choice on your site.
Advantages of CJ:
. They're the current market leader in affiliate marketing solutions.
. They have more merchants than any other affiliate marketing company I have seen.
. Their system is very robust and has lots of good features.
. One feature puts a big SCORE at the top of your screen so you can see at a glance
how much money you've made.
. You can set things up so that people who work for you setting up affiliate stuff can
have different security privileges.
Disadvantages of CJ:
. A whole bunch of cookies are involved. It's to the point that text links have a
built-in 1x1 transparent GIF with a cookie. If you hate cookies you will have to
double-isolate all the links!
. In 2002 CJ jacked up their prices so a whole lot of merchants dropped out.
However, as of May, 2005, this seems to have turned around and new merchants
are streaming in.
. Commission percentages are extremely low in comparison to other major
affiliate sites.
. Affiliate links are provided by cj.com. Meaning that as an affiliate you do not
have total control over the appearance of links.
Google Adsense
Google Adsense is a wonderful programme I'm sure you've already seen, even if you didn't know it. It allows you to earn money off you website, without you having to do a thing! It's free to setup and takes very little time.All you do is place some code into your page and Google will put some relevant ads on your page. Whenever someone clicks on those ads, you are paid a percentage of what the advertiser paid for the click. If this sounds complicated, don't worry, Google has setup a great step by step guide exactly how Adsense works. Click Here to view the Google guide. If you are getting traffic to your site, then I highly recommend that you use adwords. The only time I wouldn't use adsense is when I want the visitor to buy something, or perform some other call to action. You aren't going to make a sale if the visitor ends up on someone elses page.