Best Affiliate Program Alternative to Web Hosting Affiliate Programs

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is an important online customer acquisition channel that enables online retailers and merchants to do business with digital marketers and online marketing agencies over the internet. Affiliate marketing allows online merchants to successfully run affiliate marketing campaigns by tracking affiliates performance in terms of impressions, clicks, numbers of sales, and sales revenues. Because of its scalability, cost effectiveness is a channel that has grown in popularity with advertisers.

In order to engage in affiliate marketing, an online merchant must first set up an affiliate program and decide if they want to run it via a third-party affiliate network, for example, Commission Junction, Share A Sale or Rakuten. Alternatively, a company may instead set up and run their own affiliate program inhouse with the advantage of having total control of how the program is marketed as well as ensuring security and scalability to its affiliate base.

The merchant must also decide on the type of desired paid action that they want their affiliates to deliver, for example, to generate clicks, new leads, deliver sales or new paid subscriptions. In all of these cases, the online merchant must paid commissions for the successful completion of the chosen transaction, the merchant has the option of paying a percentage commission on the sale or a fixed currency amount per completed transaction.

For the entire process to work, the online retailer must use an affiliate tracking system that is reliable and trusted by its affiliates. The affiliate software needs to allow digital marketers, agencies, and affiliate websites access to all the required marketing material that they need to market the brand on the internet. Also, the affiliate program must offer its affiliates their own account with access to live performance stats and a wide selection of creatives, banners, text links, and promotional offers.

Affiliate Program Ecosystem for Uptime and Web Hosting Affiliate Programs

Affiliates and publishers running affiliate marketing campaigns make money by promoting a merchant’s product or service using a number of different traffic sources. They then get paid a commission every time that their referred customers make a purchase. The main advantage for the affiliate merchant is that they only pay for a desired transaction that has been completed making the affiliate channel a very cost-effective customer acquisition channel.

Online marketers and bloggers have for quite some time been promoting web hosting affiliate programs as they pay good commissions for a varied range of digital products. The popularity of these affiliate programs is also due to the growth of this market as in the past few years more and more websites have been built to cope with the demand from online shopping and internet entertainment. Today many web hosting companies offer affiliate marketing opportunities that are financially better than those offered by traditional online retailers and most advertising networks.

Uptime monitoring services are the perfect complimentary affiliate product for affiliate websites promoting domain, web hosting, and web design services as this is a service that helps webmasters, tech support and developers monitor web site uptime and also monitors websites performance. StatusCake partner’s affiliate program offers a very competitive and recurrent commission of 30% lifetime, affiliates also benefit from having their own affiliate account where they can check performance stats, affiliate commissions, and access to creatives.

The Affiliate Merchant

An affiliate merchant is an online retailer or brand that uses affiliate marketing tactics and techniques to increase online traffic, online sales and build brand awareness for its website in exchange for a commission payment. In order to run affiliate marketing campaigns, the merchant has to set up a tracking system with its website so that it can provide tracking links, banners, performance stats, manage affiliate communications, and payments.

The Affiliate Website

Affiliate websites also known in the space as publishers are a vital part of the affiliate ecosystem, without affiliates there isn’t an affiliate program that can deliver the desired results. An affiliate can be a single marketer or a marketing agency with experience of driving traffic from different media sources and converting it into sales. Affiliates fall into a number of categories depending on the type of media channel that they use including email marketing affiliates, social media experts, content, and blog affiliates for example price comparison or product review websites. Affiliates then get paid commissions for delivering a desired action to the merchant, it could be new sales, leads, or subscribers.

The Affiliate Program

This is the place where advertisers manage the affiliate channel by integrating an affiliate tracking system with their website and where the banner ads and tracking links are generated for the affiliates to promote the brand. The affiliate program is the central hub for managing campaigns, performance statistics, and handling commission payments. This is also the place where commissions and reporting are done and where all the information regarding the affiliate is stored.

The Affiliate Network

This is one of the most popular options for merchants and online retailers to run affiliate marketing as opposed to setting up their own in-house affiliate program. In this case, the affiliate network is the middle agent between the merchant/online store and the affiliate website or publisher allowing the affiliates to join any programs on offer that meet their website content to monetise their traffic and earn commissions. An affiliate program also helps online stores and merchants offering affiliate programs to reach a large number of publishers willing to promote their products and services.

Both merchants and affiliate websites benefit from joining an affiliate network by using the same tracking technology, reporting, payment processing. There are many advantages for affiliates too including the possibility of joining several merchants in one platform, reporting, access to links, marketing material, and commission payment in one place.

The Final Customer

The consumer that buys the product via the affiliate website makes the whole system work. Sales are the driver of affiliate marketing and they generate the revenues and commissions to be split between the affiliate website, the affiliate network, and the affiliate merchant. In many cases, the affiliate informs the users that they may get a small commission if they buy from their site, but this is not compulsory.

The affiliate tracking system then takes care of the whole process in the background and the consumer can fulfilled their purchase generating a sale and a commission for the affiliate. By buying from an affiliated site the price of the item purchased by the final consumer is not going to be more expensive.

Making Money with Web Hosting Affiliate Programs – Host Gator Affiliates

For many years now affiliates and digital marketers have been promoting web hosting services via affiliate programs. This is a niche that can be marketed by affiliates already promoting web services or by new affiliates looking to get started with affiliate marketing. The main reason is that web hosting affiliate programs pay good commissions and marketers can easily promote different hosting suppliers and, in this way, earn commissions from the different options offered to customers. This is an attractive option for affiliates promoting blogging, how to set up a website, or making money online type websites.

Web Hosting Affiliate Program Popularity

The popularity of web hosting program is mainly due to the high commissions paid to affiliate websites and as proven new customer acquisition channel for web hosting companies. Host Gator affiliates for example pays via a tier commission model that has a different commission per tier depending on the number of new sign-ups that you deliver in a month to Host Gator Affiliates with the minimum sign up commission of US$65 and the maximum of US$125. For example, they pay US$125 per sign up if you send at least 21 new accounts in a month, that accounts to US$2,625.

Another reason for the popularity with web hosting affiliates today is that more websites are being built that need a hosting provider. So, this is a market that is experiencing growth and will keep growing for years to come as the popularity of internet shopping keeps growing all over the world. Affiliate marketers can easily get involved in this niche and set up a web hosting review site or comparison site and start creating content to start ranking in the search engines as well as promoting these services via social media and email marketing.

Ways to Monetise Web Hosting Affiliate Programs

As with uptime monitoring services, web hosting affiliates can make more money from commissions by joining affiliates programs since they pay much higher commissions than CPM/CPC rates paid by advertising networks. Affiliates don’t have to run websites that just review hosting services but are good options for marketers promoting technology content via websites or tech blogs. Digital marketers can also promote web hosting offers and discount coupons via social media

Another option available is to create content around themes such as how to set up your own website or blog and include a section reviewing several web hosting services in order to attract SEO traffic. This website and also be a place where a database of subscribers can be started and build an email list to be used with future promotional newsletters.