Types of Affiliate Websites

Although there are currently no industry-wide accepted standards for the categorisation of affiliate websites, the following generic categories are commonly used by advertisers and affiliate networks:

• Content and niche market websites, including product review sites. Publishers may run websites that cater to a certain niche in the online marketplace, which is an excellent way for advertisers to target users specifically interested in certain products. Niche publishers may also run newsletter activity, allowing them to push relevant users towards merchants rather than simply running merchants' offers onsite. This significantly increases conversion rates.
• Search affiliates that use pay per click (PPC) search engines to promote the advertisers' offers (i.e. search arbitrage). These publishers bid on words and phrases in search engines to help drive traffic to a advertiser's website by using the sponsored links on portals such as Google, Yahoo, MSN and Miva. In addition to this, publishers can also use brand terms and improve merchant rankings within the natural portal listings (organic search engine optimisation).
• Cost per action (CPA) networks (i.e. top-tier affiliates) that expose offers from the advertiser with which they are affiliated to their own network of affiliates.
• Registration path or co-registration affiliates who include offers from other merchants during the registration process on their own website.
• Comparison shopping websites and directories.
• Shopping directories that list merchants by categories without providing price comparisons, coupons, or other features based on information that changes frequently, thus requiring continual updates.
• Loyalty websites, typically characterised by providing a reward system for purchases via cash back, points back, or charitable donations. These websites build a loyal user base by marketing merchants to their users and then sharing their profits with them. They can share these profits by awarding them with points that can be built up to contribute towards discounted online purchases through the website or by offering pure cash back. The idea is that by sharing profits with their users, these publishers can build a 'loyal' database of users who are happy to make purchases online through the websites because they feel they are getting something in return.
• Coupon and rebate websites that focus on sales promotions.
• Weblogs and website syndication feeds.
• E-mail list affiliates (i.e. owners of large opt-in -mail lists that use e-mail drip marketing) and newsletter list affiliates (these are typically more content-heavy).
• Personal websites (this type of website was behind the birth of affiliate marketing; however, such websites are now almost reduced to complete irrelevance compared to the other types of affiliate websites).