If you are new to affiliate marketing you may be wondering how they actually work? How does the merchant know that you referred the customer in the first place. Here we look at the mechanics of affiliate programs.

There are basically three parties involved in an affiliate transaction.

• The Customer – the person who buys the product
• The Affiliate site- the person/site who promotes the product (sales rep)
• The Merchant site – the company selling the product.

Affiliate programs are very popular on the Internet and are an excellent mechanism to get into Internet selling as they don’t require any anything more complicated on your site as an hyperlink.

The actual process is illustrated below:

1.  A visitor of your site (customer) activates a link to purchase a product.
2. The customer is sent a redirection to the merchant site. This redirection contains two parts.
       a. The link to the product.
       b. An Identifier (affiliate ID) that identifies your site as the affiliate.
3.  The customer connects to the Merchants site and purchases the product.
4. The merchant logs the sale to the affiliate.

An Overview of Affiliate Links

All the tracking information that is required by the merchant to track the sale to an affiliate is contained within the link that is used to link to the merchants site.

Here is a simple affiliate link. I have highlighted the merchant url in yellow. This url used on its own will take you to the merchants site. In green is the affiliate tracking code. You can see that it start with a question mark (?). This is a standard way of passing parameters to a web server.

When combined as below the url will take you to the merchants site and the merchant will know the id of the affiliate.

http://www.1and1.co.uk/?k_id=5761551

Here is the url encoded as a link

Visit 1and1 UK

and hereis the code