Affiliate Network Know-how

Participating in affiliate marketing networks can be fun and exciting. If you learn affiliate marketing and do things the correct way, you can experience the thrill of victory, and if not, the agony of defeat. Before you embark on an affiliate marketing program, affiliate network know-how is strongly encouraged to ensure you are successful with your home business.

There are a few important things that you need to know before signing up with an affiliate network or any internet marketing business for that matter. Two of the most important words for the internet marketer are “tracking” and “testing.”

If you don’t want to take the time to track and test the market before you dive in, you can throw in the towel now because you are wasting your time. You need to track your traffic, your keywords, conversions, and entry and exit pages. There is no getting around this and those that have tried normally ended up at the end of the affiliate network line.

These things are not done just to take up your time. There is a method to the madness.

• Tracking – You should know where your traffic is coming from. This could be geographic, gender, age, income level, marital status, etc., depending on your affiliate business.


• Keywords – This is an important part that most people skip, but you need to know what words are popular. By knowing what people are typing in their browser to find your website, you will know what words you should use to drive traffic to increase affiliate sales. If your affiliate marketing strategy just isn’t working for you and you are not getting the traffic you think you should be, keywords may be playing a huge part in that.


• Conversions – You can have all the traffic in the world coming to your site but if it’s not converting, it’s pointless. You need to know where people are entering your site and where they are leaving your site from. This is also a great place to put in an opt-in page so you can start building a list for your affiliate business.

How to Track Visitors

You may be thinking, this all sounds good, but how do I track the visitors when they come to my page? Fear of the unknown is why so many people skip this step, and most will eventually end up backtracking to complete this, which puts their affiliate income on hold.

Tracking programs don’t have to cost a fortune. In fact, many are free. One favorite is Google Analytics. You only have to place a small HTML code on your web pages and it collects the necessary data using this code. Google makes it very easy to interpret the results and they have proven to provide valuable information for internet marketers.

Another great affiliate marketing tool, especially if you are using a blog, is Free Stats. Although this marketing tool can be used for websites, it is recommended for blogs. As with Google Analytics, all you have to do is put a piece of code on your web page and you get an hour by hour coverage of your traffic.