There are many companies that offer affiliate marketing in all kinds of variations, allot are scams though and even more are not worth bothering with. We have been working with affiliate programs for many years and know exactly which programs are worth using, unfortunately we have made many costly mistakes over the years which you can avoid if you follow this advice.
The majority of affiliate programs will pay you a percentage of the sale that comes from one of your links, there are some however that pay per click and some even offer incentives of higher commissions for driving lots of sales. All you have to do is select a link for the company you choose and insert it into your web page, then any sales that come from that link will earn you money, there are many links available including banners and text links (text links generally work better as people do not tend to click on banners very much although they can work in certain circumstances). Most affiliate programs also give you the commission if the person that clicked on your link buys the product anything up to a year later, the time scale obviously varies with the average probably being 1 month, this is done by the affiliate program automatically placing a cookie on the users machine. See below for a guide to the best companies that offer affiliate programs:
By far the best affiliate marketing company in our opinion has to be Commission Junction, it has a great selection of big brand UK stores, many of them from the High Street. Commission Junction offer affiliate programs for names such as Argos, Comet, Laura Ashley, B&Q, Argos Additions, First Direct, eBay, Marks and Spencers, Littlewoods Extra, Littlewoods Index, Barclycard, Capital One, Kays, the BBC, MFI, Mothercare, O2, More th>n and many others, they also have lots of smaller stores. Although Commission Junction is an American company they do offer lots of UK affiliate programs (and thousands of American ones), the account balance is displayed in American dollars but this is the only disadvantage, the money is paid in UK pounds every month. Click here
to visit Commission Junction.
The next best in our opinion is Tradedoubler, Tradedoubler offer a huge selection of UK companies and are UK based (they do have other european branches). They offer more UK programs than Commission Junction although many of the affiliate programs are not as high profile, they do offer lots of big names though including Dixons, Currys, Homebase, Littlewoods Extra, Littlewoods Index, Argos, Carphonewarehouse, As Seen On Screen, Dell, WHSmith and many others. Tradedoubler also offer useful content units, snippets of HTML that you can add to your web site that will display current offers or other content from the chosen merchant, these can be very useful for getting good sales. Click here to visit Tradedoubler.
With those 2 companies you will have access to a huge selection of UK affiliate programs, there are a few other affiliate program providers that we do use and would recommend if you cannot find the program you want from the above companies. These affiliate program providers are generally not as big and do not provide the same level of branded merchants as the above 2 but do offer some good affiliate programs, below is a list of the companies that we use:
