Drive Storefront Traffic Through Your Affiliate Marketing Program

Paul Byrne of AIDE Data distributes Smart Circle Cards, which are discount and savings cards for food and entertainment establishments, like spas, cinemas, golf clubs and restaurants. One way he drives traffic to his web store smartcirclecards.net is through the affiliate program he set up through ProStores. “Through our existing business contacts, we created partnerships with non-profits, newspapers, TV stations and savings and discount clubs," he says. They market Smart Circle Cards on their websites and earn commission on any resulting sales.  

Paul offers them of variety of ways to access Smart Circle products. Some affiliate partners iframe or embed his entire web store directly into their website. “This allows an affiliate's members or customers to feel like they’re staying on the affiliate's site,” says Paul. 

Other partners advertise Smart Circle Cards on their site and then link those ads to Smart Circle’s web store. All the affiliate has to do is sign up, and the ProStores program generates HTML links for them to use. 

Paul has also created a window into the Smart Circle product catalog that affiliates can feature on their website. “It's simply a customized template I create through SSML Editor.  I can size the template for any affiliate’s site layout and then send them a piece of code that puts the window on their website.”  Paul then assigns each window a specific affiliate code so he can track each partner’s sales and commission. 

Paul just started the Smart Circle affiliate program in May and he’s already seeing results. “In June I had a couple hundred dollars in sales from affiliates. In July, it’s looking like a couple thousand dollars. It’s new for us, but we view it as a promising growth opportunity." 

Comments

[Bob Klingenberg]

Prostores 10... another ripoff. I started with a store on Ebay. Then a couple years an Ebay manager erased several hundred of my listings. I realized that I needed a place to back up my store. Prostores was sold to me with the promise that as I listed and changed things on my Ebay Store it would automatically do the same in Prostores. Since then the success rate seems to be about 80-90%. Never higher. I cant use a store with that percentage of errors. Numerous contacts with Prostores customer support result in the same thing. The tech generates a ticket that has nothing to do with the issue. No matter how I answer their responses all their actions follow off the ticket. So to date all I am receiving for my monthly fee is the backup of about 80% of my ebay store. Expensive and frustrating. The moment I can find a procedure that lets me back up my Ebay store 100% I'm gone from Prostores. Of course, like the vast majority of sellars on Ebay, we are watching Apple. They are building the worlds largest server farm. Far more capacity than any of their other activities could use. The current Ebay software, sourced from a third world country is a tottering failure. Ebay execs have been lying to the stock holders. The current SEC investigation will hopefully result in jailtime. Meanwhile, if as rumored, Apple puts it's talents to writing real ecommerce software we will all move there. Leaving Ebay with the companies that are fronts for the Chinese government. Prostores will quickly die off.

[earl the affiliate marketing newbie]

hi there,

i thank you for having a very informative article. this helps a lot for those who are like me who is new in affiliate marketing online. thanks!