Affiliate programs. How do they work?

[eduardo]

As the subject header says I am interested to know how affiliate programs work?

I ask as I'm developing a site (iam fairly new to all this) and I want to add some affiliates to it.

How do the links work to enable me to get paid?

Is it something like www.mysite.com/redirect............ and that gets me paid.

Also does it matter if I just construct the pages in a web editor with .htm or html or do I have to have asp or php?

I ask as I have asked several big companies who run affiliate programs and they are all telling me different things so I'm asking for impartial advice so I don't get stung as obviously if I send traffic there way (and people buy) then I want my share of the pie.

##To the mods. Not sure if I put this in the right forum. By all means move it if it's in the wrong one##

[Joe A]

Who's your processor... If you use CCBill then it's all there in your admin area, and you all you have to do is fill in a few online forms and you're ready to go.

Email me if you are with CCBill and I'll be able to help you..

[Gilly]

Quite interested in this also as I help run a adult DVD trading site:



Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Gilly

[NeilUK]

You just go to the website in question and click the link for "webmasters" and sign up. They take you through each step and give you the link codes and you get the banners.
As Joe says some are with CCBILL and they are good because you can merge several in one account.
Another good one is www.dannicash.com for Danni Ashe's website. But as a I say they all take you through each step and its very easy to do. Must be if I can do it


Cheers

Neil

[Matt - A-W-D]

Our program UK-AdultCash uses CCBill. If you sign up you will get a 5 digit number and you include this number in your referring links back to our sites. Your referring link is tracked by CCBill and if a surfer joins any of our sites from your link, you get 50% of that membership fee + recurring if the member stays for more than a month.
We have loads of promo content you can use to promote our sites and you are paid directly by CCBill each week. You can also login to CCBills admin area and keep a check on your stats. All in all, its very straightforward and obviously the more traffic you send the better chance you have of making more money

[R18 DVD Shop]

There are a few ways but its usually just a piece of code added onto a url - for example the normal url might be "www.abcde.com" but any traffic you send to it might be something like "www.abcde.com/index.php?affil_id=eduardo"

When a user enters the site the site creates a cookie with your affiliate id info included so when that user signs up (or buys a product in the case of my site, for example) the site then credits you with that signup. Some sites run their own affiliate programs while others choose use companies like ccbill to administer it for them and most (adult) payment processors have affiliate tracking as standard - different sites have different rules on cookie durations, payouts %, payment frequency etc but the underlying method is the same.

How u code the page makes no difference whatsoever as long as every link to an affiliate site you include has the unique identifier for your affiliate account

Jay

[eduardo]

Okay thanks to you all for taking the time to help which is as always very much appreciated so thanks again.

For anybody else interested then I managed to find this site as well which helps a lot.