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Make money from your website

This page contains information on affiliate schemes in the UK.
If you have your own website, then why not make a little money from it? Known as affiliate marketing, this does actually work! Here's how to make money from your website:

1Sign up to an Affiliate Management company, such as the ones listed below. This is free.
2 Select suitable advertisers from the large list available. Look for advertisers relevant to what your site offers
3 When you sign up to a specific merchant, you can access a list of all the banner ads and text links that they have provided. Select one that's most suited, and you'll get the HTML ready to paste into your site. An example fragment looks like:

Use cut-and-paste to get the code into your page, then upload the page to your site. As an example, the above link will look like this: Shop with Amazon.
With a similar link, you'll make 5% of sales made as a result of one of your site visitors clicking and ordering from Amazon.
4Check back with the Affiliate Management company regularly to view your statistics. This displays how many times a banner or link has been displayed, how many times it's been clicked on, and how much you've made. Business can be slow, which is why regular checking and site tweaks is important

Commission Junction stats Tradedoubler stats
Examples of online statistics


The major UK Affiliate Management companies

Details
amazon.co.ukAmazon - Probably one of the more common ways to get started making money out of your website - You get a cut from purchases made on Amazon.co.uk. If your site wants to sell DVDs, books, videos, etc., it could be well worth trying.
Google Adsense - Add Google's adverts to your site, and get paid for clickthroughs that you generate. You paste some Javascript code into your pages, and the clever Google Adsense looks at your page content and add appropriate, relevant ads. A nice little earner.

Tradedoubler TradeDoubler - Nicely laid-out sites and stat reports. They handle a whole load of other UK big names and top-performers. Payments are made every two months, after a two month gap (i.e. Apr payment covers Jan and Feb). Payment threshold is £30.

Affiliate WindowAffiliateWindow - A few good retailers, and an OK reporting layout. Payments are made every month, two month in arrears. Payment threshold is £25

DGM2 (UK Affiliates) - Until August 2005, we rated DGM as top performers, and were our most recommended network - they migrated their systems to a new service, DGMPRO in August, and since then, many of their affiliates (including us) have experienced broken links, poor reporting, lost revenue, problems with the new interface, the inability to create new links, and a number of other problems. When we complained to our contact at DGM, their comment on DGMPro was that "On the whole most publishers are very happy with it" - a fact not bourne out by the high volume of complaints and unhappiness outlined in the A4U Forum. Their share price is worth a look too.
Sadly, until they're prepared to restore some confidence, we're not able to recommend them, and we're now directing our traffic to other networks.

Commission Junction - Schemes include O2 online, Argos and Ebay. Based in the US, CJ now has a presence in the UK, and pay in Sterling. Very prompt payers, with good online reporting. Payments made monthly, with a £35 threshold for payment to UK customers. Sadly, we've had a number of problems with CJ's support, so we don't tend to recommend them. Problems have included:

  • Reversal of a large number of Barclaycard transactions for many customers at the end of 2003
  • Issues with link blocking - Norton Security / Norton Firewall blocks affiliate links from CJ's qksrv.net server, causing text links as well as banners to vanish from legitimate sites. For more details, see the thread on the US ABW forum, and the UK Affiliate Marketing forum.
    Norton Firewall log output
  • o2 Online - At the end of 2002, this merchant had problems tracking commission and acknowledged the problem promptly - CJ in London didn't. Instead, they continued to divert traffic and revenue to a program that was broken for over a month, without telling its affiliates. No apology, and no compensation.
  • The First Direct termination - An email from CJ claimed that this scheme was suspended, however it seems that the scheme is actually still running, and CJ had recommended which of a small number of affiliates should stay active. An example of poor cummunication, resulting in distrust.

Affiliate Future - An up-and-coming affiliate with advertisers including Kelkoo, Ink factory, UK Domains and a fair number of others. Reporting seems good, and feedback from other users is positive.
ZanoxZanox - We've only just signed up to this affiliate network, so can't offer much in the way of comment at this time. First impressions look good. Xanox appears to be a German operation (reflected in the English on their site), but has a good range of merchants for one of the lesser-known networks. To see the full list of merchants, you need to create a free account with them first.

Affcheck used to provide a service that consolidated all your statistics and income information from the various affiliate networks. Affcheck's web-based service supported automated data collection from all the major affiliate networks, provides online data analysis, sending you a daily email and SMS text message with your daily and monthly statistics.

* Update * - As of September 2005, the team at Affcheck stopped responding to emails and as of July 2006, they seem to have gone altogether, even though they're still taking money from our account. If you have any details about the whereabouts of site owner, Tom Strand from Sweden, or you're owed money as a result of using Affcheck, please get in touch.

 Affcheck monthly stats

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