okay so uh in this video i want to do something different i want to draw something for you to explain a very simple concept which is the basic technology of affiliate marketing okay so the basic thing or the basic technology of affiliate marketing is cookies and no these are not the type that you eat okay a cookie in the it world is basically a very small file oh it looks almost like a text file on your computer so it’s a very very small file that is placed in a person’s computer that contains very very important information about an application or login or username or password now if you’ve used your gmail account before or yahoo mail or whatever most other applications like facebook for example okay so you notice that once you log into facebook on your browser and then you close your browser or even shut down your computer and restart again facebook will not ask you for your username and password again and the same goes with gmail as well why because they use cookies so with cookies they actually once you log into facebook they store your username information your password information and your last login time etc in the cookie so it’s all encrypted so you don’t have to worry about someone being able to read that and only the application that created the cookie can actually retrieve information from the cookie so facebook for example will place a cookie in your computer when you log in and then when you restart the computer it will look for the cookie again if the cookie exists then facebook will skip the login part if the cookie has been deleted or flush or has been expired let’s say after 48 hours then it will ask you to log in again now cookies are very dependent on the browser so every browser has a different set of cookies for example if you log in to gmail using firefox and then you open your safari or your chrome that cookie does not get carried over because firefox has its own cookie chrome has your own cookie etc okay so how does cookies matter in affiliate marketing basically it works the same way as your gmail or facebook okay every time someone clicks on your affiliate link the affiliate platform or affiliate tracking system will place a cookie in the user’s computer so let me give you an example here here is your user and here is the product or service or website that you are promoting okay nice picture here and here you got add to cart all right so this is your vendor or your merchant and this is your user of course so the user needs to buy the products in affiliate marketing it’s as simple as that okay if there’s nothing to sell if there are no merchants selling anything then affiliate marketing just will not exist because you get paid to refer a sale sometimes a lead but we’ll get into that later but in most cases most affiliate programs are pay per sale so you get paid for referring a sale so there must be something on sale and there must be someone wanting to buy whatever that is being sold online now how does affiliate marketing work all right so of course the user can go directly to the merchant side okay if they know the website if they know exactly what they’re looking for then they can go to the affiliate site directly but in most cases they don’t so in most cases they go through someone else an influencer a blogger a website owner someone who has posted something on a twitter page etc so let me okay so the website owner the facebook account on our twitter owner can be you so what happens here okay if the user visits your website or visits your fb page or checks out some of your twitter posts and you mention a product and you send the user directly to the product let’s say an amazon product okay you send them directly to the product with a direct amazon link you get no commissions whatsoever so with affiliate marketing you need something else you need a third-party tracking system okay and that’s where the affiliate platform comes in so affiliate platforms are like clickbank jvzoo c j et cetera there’s so many affiliate platforms over there now what happens here is you start instead of sending traffic directly to the merchant side you will get an affiliate link for the exact same product from this affiliate networks the merchant or the seller would have listed their products in the affiliate platforms that you see here and affiliate platforms to give an affiliate link so now you use an affiliate link okay so how that works is when the user visits your site reads about a product something launching something new or you blog about it or you put in your facebook you put your affiliate link in your twitter account and they click on it it will actually go to the affiliate platform first and that’s where all the tracking happens and they would record everything like the time of click the uh country lots of different information will be recorded here once the information has been recorded the affiliate network would place a cookie in the user’s computer now this cookie will have very important information okay but the most important is the affiliate id so since you the user clicked on your affiliate link the menu cookie is placed your affiliate id will be in the cookie they’ve placed the cookie on the user’s computer they will then redirect the user to the merchant site and when they go ahead check out the products and buy the product that they want and they go to the checkout page for that merchant so there will be a code given by the affiliate platforms to the merchant that they need to place on the thank you page or the checkout page of the e-commerce system so when the user’s completed a payment and reaches the checkout page then the merchant site will actually communicate back with the affiliate platform and the affiliate platform will check for the cookie on the user’s computer and if no cookie exists then they will ignore that transaction because affiliate platforms only record transactions their affiliate transactions okay but if the cookie does exist then they will get back that information okay like this they will get back the information and of course your affiliate id is in here okay and then they will notify you hey you have made an affiliate commission so the cookie here is placed by the affiliate platform they are the ones tracking everything or an in-house affiliate program that has affiliate marketing features it is not placed by the merchant itself the merchant may place a cookie on the user but that is for their own use typically when you browse the internet you’ll have thousands of cookies in your computer you don’t always realize that it’s happening but there’s definitely thousands of cookies on your computer so the merchant since they have an account at this affiliate networks for example okay they will be able to log in and check that you have made an affiliate sale for this particular product and then they can then verify their product in some affiliate networks they can cancel your commission if they feel that that sale was not legitimate or if a refund has happened they can cancel it now let’s go back to cookies cookies have an expiration date it really depends on the affiliate network in most cases it is 30 days sometimes it’s 60 days sometimes it’s 90 days sometimes it is lifetime so when the affiliate platform checks for the user’s cookie if no cookie exists then they just don’t record the affiliate transaction okay and this can happen sometimes when a user initially starts with a different browser but then closes the browser and then goes directly to the merchant side in a different browser okay for example if the user initially clicked on in using chrome but then later completed the transaction using firefox or internet explorer or even completed the transaction in a different computer where the cookie does not exist then the affiliate platform will not be able to tell that you are the referring affiliate the merchant side would not be able to pass any information back to the affiliate platform and therefore you don’t get credited for the affiliate sale but that being said the chances of that happening is very very small but there is a chance of that happening okay in natural internet use as you would understand so cookie expiration dates sometimes you have 30 days which is the most common you have 60 days you even have 90 days and sometimes you have lifetime so when the affiliate networks checks for the cookie if the cookie does not exist or if it has expired if it has passed this expiration date then it will just not record the transaction or sometimes it can record a transaction but it will not credit you for the sale so basically in affiliate marketing cookies are very very important they are what control affiliate marketing they’re the backbone of affiliate marketing and it’s how almost all affiliate platforms will track your affiliate commissions now another way a user can simply remove cookies is by clearing the cache and cookies in their browser so in chrome in firefox all browsers all modern browsers have the ability for you to clear your browsing history clear your cookies so if they clear the cookies they are considered no longer cookied by this affiliate platform and if they actually make a transaction after they have clicked on the affiliate link then they clear the cookies and they make the transaction okay you don’t get commissions as well but the chances of that happening is very very small okay sometimes someone will clear the cookie but it’s very rarely that they will clear the cookie after clicking on your affiliate link and before completing the transaction okay because online transactions typically take a very short time unless there’s some issue or there’s some problems during the transaction process here okay but in most cases it happens in a very short time a matter of minutes sometimes at most maybe even an hour but not longer than that so if the user from the same computer from the same browser click on your affiliate link but did not buy immediately and he came back 15 days later and if the cookie has a 30 day expiration period so 15 days is still less than 30 days okay so that means the cookie is still valid and even if they go directly to the merchant side okay when they complete the transaction the merchant side will feedback the information to the affiliate platform the affiliate platform will check for the cookie and say yes this cookie was placed 30 days ago but it is still valid therefore we are going to credit you the affiliate for the sale and that’s how you make money with affiliate marketing okay so i hope my little diagram here was useful and
now let’s continue with the rest of the course