Getting Started as a Publisher

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Now you’ve taken all this time to research, develop and build your website, you’re ready to get involved in publisher marketing. There is no strict definition of what a publisher is. A publisher is simply an individual or company with a method of distributing or publishing publisher links. Most publisher s are website owners with a great idea and a good understanding of HTML – but they can also be bloggers, PPC publisher s buying traffic from search engines, owners of email databases or forum moderators.

How you’re going to be disseminating these links to your prospective customers is your first concern, as whatever advertiser or network you approach, your first call of duty will be to let them know how you’ll be promoting them. Therefore, the more you can tell them from the get-go, the better! Be prepared to provide screenshots of your site, stats of your database, numbers of users on your forum, or numbers of unique visitors to your website. Consider your application your “pitch” – your first chance to impress the network and the advertisers you’re interested in.

Once -you sign up to the network(s), either the advertiser or network will give you access to trackable publisher links for each advertiser. Most networks will need for you to sign up for each advertiser individually in order to approve the terms and conditions of working on each programmes – so ensure your details and profile are kept up to date in case an advertiser wants to contact you directly, and so they have the opportunity to read about you and your site before they accept you onto their programme.

Give the advertisers time to respond to your application. Once you’re approved onto your chosen programmes, take time to become acquainted with the system.. There is plenty of detailed reporting to be found, as well as useful stats about your chosen advertisers, their conversion rates, and places to find their latest offers.

As soon as you post a publisher link it is ready to register clicks. The first few are likely to be your own! Most advertisers will offer a selection of linking methods – including text links, banner creative, email HTML creative and product feeds. Product feeds are lists of all the items available on the advertiser website, and can either be downloadedfor their links, descriptions and image URLs, or in the hands of a developer, used to power price or product comparison engines.

What you decide to do with these links is now in your hands, so I recommend experimenting and keeping a close eye on your reporting to see which advertisers are most popular, and which banners and links are getting the most attention.

If you decide to expand your activities to new sites and ventures, make sure to update your advertisers and networks. as they won’t want to miss out on a good opportunity to be promoted!

Affiliate marketing forums such as http://www.affiliates4U.com will also play host to hundreds of useful posts and feedback from other publisher s and advertisers, so sign up as soon as you can and watch out for relevant posts concerning your networks and advertisers.

The publisher world is now very much your oyster.

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