Alberon Systems Oxford - Web Design: Toolbox

One way to bring more visitors / customers to your web site is an affiliate scheme.

Affiliate schemes are used by a large of web-based businesses, including big names such as Amazon, but they can be amazingly effective for businesses of all sizes. Here’s how they work.

Let’s say you sell ski boots. You decide how much commission you’re going to pay your affiliates (this can be a percentage of a sale, or a fixed amount per sale, enquiry or other event). You invite various affiliates to join your scheme. X runs a general interest site on skiing and decides to join. Affiliate X puts a special link to your ski boots site on his web site. If visitors to his site are interested they click on this link and are brought to your site. At the same time a cookie is set on their computer which remembers that they came to the site via affiliate X’s web site. If they subsequently go on to make a purchase or an enquiry, the cookie is checked and the appropriate commission allocated to affiliate X’s account.