How To Grow Your Business With ServInt’s Affiliate Program (and others too!)

At HostingCon earlier this month, we received some excellent feedback regarding our affiliate program that I thought I’d share with you and expand upon.

It seems, from what I can gather, that ServInt’s affiliate program is great from a feature perspective (our payout is currently at 100% which is, and I’m not just saying this because I work here, absurdly awesome) but could use a bit more hand holding for new users.  I thought I’d do a little hand holding for those who have been curious about how to take part in ServInt’s affiliate program and earn free hosting!

First let’s investigate some of the jargon involved in affiliate programs and affiliate marketing.

Campaign: A campaign is simply a collection of ads that you want to run at any given time.  For example, let’s say you wanted to dedicate a week on your site to celebrating Earth Day and green causes, products, and services.  ServInt has several ads with an eco-friendly theme.  You could create a campaign that would allow you to aggregate all of your eco related ads together for easier perusal.

Clickthrough: A clickthrough is exactly what it sounds like, the act of clicking an ad link through for more information.  These are measured in ServInt’s customer portal, similar to other measuring tools such as Google Analytics.  A clickthrough does not necessarily mean anyone purchased a product (i.e. a conversion, more on that later), and thus it does not necessarily mean you will receive a commission.  It is an important tool regardless as it let’s you know what ads are more popular than others and in what locations might they be more effective.

Conversion: A conversion happens when a clickthrough results in a sale.  The ad and click has just been “converted” into revenue.

Most affiliate programs, including ServInt’s, have some form of “Earning’s Pending” metric or measurement as well as an “Earning’s Paid” metric.  This allows you to see how many credits you have earned, and how many credits have actually been deposited to your account.

Once a campaign is created, you can create ads for that campaign.  Here is a picture of ServInt’s implementation.

Clicking on Manage Campaigns allows you to create a campaign.

After a campaign is created, clicking on Manage Ads let’s you create ads within a campaign.

With the creation of each ad, you have the opportunity to choose from dozens and dozens of banner or text ads.  Once you select a banner ad, a code is generated that includes a link to the flash or photo banner and you’re set!

I, however, wanted to try something a little bit different. I chose to make a text ad and rather than paste the entire code as-is, I removed the html tags leaving only the following url, minus quotes.

“http://www.servint.net/index.php?refid=CDE152400365″

That URL is all that’s needed to generate clickthroughs and conversions. You could paste that into a URL shortener like bit.ly or tr.im for easy Twitter and Facebook integration, or you could embed it into a link on a blog or forum.

Every link, and every conversion, counts.

Now, there are certainly some ethical concerns to iron out. Neither ServInt, nor yourself, want to be seen as simple shills. Being transparent about an affiliate link is a must, but when these links are used in ways that genuinely benefit people, there is no problem with receiving credit for an Affiliate referral and thus subsidizing your web hosting.

The key to our affiliate program is simple, you can effectively have your entire site(s) hosted for free by earning affiliate commissions if you so choose. Having the backbone of your business, i.e. your web hosting, financially covered allows you to grow faster AND it helps you invest in the areas of your bread and butter that may have been in neglect before.

Work ON your business, not IN it.

Any other successful tips on Affiliate Programs, ServInt’s or others even?

Let me know in the comments, on Twitter @Servint, or on Facebook!