Charity and Community Shopping for Local Fundraising using Affiliate Marketing.
This blog outlines simple ideas for communities and charitable organisations such as schools, charities, social groups, families, companies and others to raise at least modest amounts of cash by harnessing affiliate marketing, which is available on the Internet essentially without cost to any individual or any group that has a website of any kind.
An excellent example of an affiliate website in the UK is AffiliateWindow, which offers links to hundreds of merchants offering consumer goods, financial services, insurance, entertainment, business services, travel, telecommunications, dating, art, motor vehicles to name but a few. At such a site, you join without charge and place links again without charge, to place on your website. If a user of your website clicks on a link and buys an item, it generates commissions to be paid to you account, since you have generated a sale for that merchant. The Affiliate Marketing site has an arrangement with the merchants to provide this advertising mechanism in order to widen its advertising markets, so the actual advertiser (you for instance) is encouraged to place adverts using this (free) service. All clicks from your advertisements are traced via a unique i.d. number that is incorporated in to the code that you are given place into your webpage.
Therefore, any webpage owner can place one or more links to commercial websites that sell products that might be attractive or useful to readers of their webpage. The great advantage to local community or charitable groups is that they already have a captive set of 'customers' who are wanting to help that organisation and can use the community webpage to access commercial websites at no cost to themselves, in order to direct the advertising commissions to the community group, instead of to someone else.
Many advertisements that you see on websites all over the Internet will use this affiliate marketing system. So if you buy anything via an internet advertisement, it is likely that the website that placed the original advert will be getting a percentage of the sale. That's the way it often works. By placing adverts on your own website, you are increasing the potential sales of the merchant you advertising and will therfore receive a commission, which is usually a percentage of the sale value or a fixed cash amount, which can be quite generous.
AffiliateWindow offers advertising links to leading merchants such as Greenpeace, BUPA Travel Cover, PC World, Cornhill Direct, LondonTheatreDirect.com, CD WOW!, Latest Events, Comet (electricals), HouseWeb, Tiscali, Vodafone, Sky and Boots. There are currently 629 merchants on offer as of 25/05/2008. Advertisements can be simple text links as above, banners and other graphical links, or more sophisticated Flash or shop window type links, which you can choose freely in order to match the content and 'feel' of your own website.
Looking through the merchant list, commissions can vary from around 1.5% to 16% (5%-10% is common) or fixed sums from around £0.50 to £50.00, depending on the value of the items being advertised.
I hope to expand on these ideas in future posts to be written in late May, 2008.
Meanwhile, if you find this interesting, take a look at the AffiliateWindow website to view the merchants they have available.
