What is affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketing is when a business pays a partner, the affiliate, a commission only for the sales, sign-ups or clicks they send through a tracked link. For example, a blogger who reviews desk lamps might link to your online shop at brightnooklamps.co.uk. When a reader clicks the link and buys a lamp, the blogger earns a share of that sale.

Affiliate marketing can work well for both you and the affiliate. You reach new customers through bloggers and creators they already trust. The affiliate earns money by recommending products that suit their audience, and their readers find products they might not have come across otherwise.

How affiliate marketing works

An affiliate programme usually involves four parties:

• The business: you, the brand that sells the products and pays commission to the websites and creators that promote them. The affiliate network Awin calls this party the advertiser, though some people say merchant.
• The affiliate: someone with an audience who earns commission by promoting products they believe in. You may also see the words publisher or partner.
• The affiliate network: the platform in the middle, where affiliates connect with brands in one place. It tracks the sales and pays out the commission.
• The customer: someone new to your shop, who clicks the affiliate's link and buys.

An affiliate link is a link to your website that's unique to one affiliate. When a customer orders through it, the sale is counted for that affiliate and the commission goes to the right person. For your lamp shop, that means you can see exactly which blogger sent each order.

Some programmes give affiliates a personal discount code that works the same way. A code is worth giving when price decides the sale, because it helps the affiliate win that first order. If your lamps are unique and in demand, you may not need one.

How affiliates get paid

You decide what you pay for and how high the affiliate commission is. On a network such as Awin, you choose between three commission models. Awin offers pay per click only to its Accelerate and Advanced customers.

To set a rate for pay per sale, start from your margin. If a lamp sells for about £500 and costs you about £250 to make, your margin on that sale is about £250, and every pound of commission comes out of it. Delivery and your other costs come out of it too, so pick a rate well below that margin that still pays the affiliate well.

Think about what the affiliate spends to make a sale, too. An affiliate who pays for ads to promote your lamps has costs of their own. It's worth checking that your commission still pays off for them once their ad costs are covered. A fair rate keeps good affiliates working with you for longer.

Where affiliates promote products

Affiliates use the channels their audience already follows. What you can give them depends on the channel.

Blogs and review sites

Ask bloggers for reviews, comparisons or "best of" lists, such as the best desk lamps for a home office. Blog posts like these can bring in readers from search, and good SEO helps them appear higher. Give your affiliates the technical details of each lamp and good product images to work with.

Videos

In a video, people see a product in action before they buy. Affiliates who make video content might post a review, a tutorial or an unboxing of your lamp. Ask for videos like these if you want to build brand trust. If you send affiliates a sample lamp, they have something real to show.

Social media

Affiliates also promote products through social media marketing on Instagram, TikTok and Facebook. They often mix recommendations into their usual posts, which can feel more natural to their followers. You can also give affiliates a discount to share with their followers.

Paid advertising

Some affiliates pay for ads to promote your products, for example on Facebook or through Google Ads, Google's online advertising programme. Paid ads reach niche and targeted audiences, but they cost the affiliate money.

Labelling affiliate links in the UK

In the UK, affiliate content has to be clearly recognisable as advertising. Advice on the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) website says the CAP Code, the UK's code for non-broadcast advertising, applies to affiliate marketing and is likely to apply on an affiliate's own website and social media too. If the lamp blogger's review holds affiliate links and the context doesn't already make that clear, it has to be obviously recognisable as an ad. For a review that's all about your lamp, a clear label such as "Ad" in its title, so readers see it before they click through, is likely to be the simplest way. The label belongs where the reader meets the links, not hidden at the bottom of the page.

The rule applies to you as well. Under the Code, you and the affiliate are both responsible, even when the affiliate wrote the post without any input from you. Put the labelling rule in your programme terms and check now and then how your affiliates show your products.

Should you use an affiliate network or run your own programme?

Our advice: if you're starting your first affiliate programme, join an affiliate network rather than finding and managing affiliates yourself. The network does most of that work for you: you get tracking and payments that already work, and affiliates can find your lamp shop there. Awin and CJ are two networks you can join.

You may still see ShareASale mentioned, but it's no longer an option. Awin moved its users onto the Awin platform and said the ShareASale platform would close by the end of 2025.

To start, you sign up with a network as an advertiser and set your commission and programme terms. Affiliates then apply to your programme, and you approve the ones that suit your shop. A network charges businesses for its service too, so check its pricing before you choose one. Once you know which partners bring sales, you can work more closely with them or build your own programme later.

Next, decide how much you guide your affiliates. If you leave the promotion entirely to them, you get their own creative ideas, but the result may not match your brand. If you give them brand guidelines, images and example copy, their posts fit your brand and still sound like them. That second route works better, because an affiliate's audience trusts the way they talk about products.

Advantages and drawbacks for your business

Affiliate marketing suits many small businesses, but it has costs and risks too.

• You only pay commission when a partner brings a sale, lead or click. Your budget goes on what already works.
• Affiliates promote you to their own readers and followers, who may never have found your shop. Content creators can have a big impact on what those people buy.
• Commission eats into your margin. On pay per sale, part of the price of each lamp an affiliate sells goes to that affiliate, and the rate has to work for your prices.
• You have less say in how your lamps are shown, because each affiliate decides how to present them.

How to start affiliate marketing

You can also start affiliate marketing as the affiliate, earning commission by promoting another company's products to your own audience. Our affiliate programme works like this:

1. Have a website, blog, channel or newsletter with an audience that reads or watches what you recommend.
2. Sign up with one of the affiliate platforms we work with, CJ or Everflow.
3. Get your unique tracking link from the affiliate platform.
4. Show our products to your audience with that link, and label each post or page as an ad.
5. Earn commission on every qualifying sale, except domain sales. CJ or Everflow tracks your sales and pays you.

Make sure your website turns visits into sales

Affiliates can send you visitors, but your website has to turn them into customers. If an affiliate keeps sending people your way and few of them buy, the problem may be your site, not their promotion.

Your site also has to stay up when an affiliate's post sends a wave of visitors to your lamps. Reliable web hosting keeps it available when they arrive.

Then work on the pages those visitors see:

• Improve your landing pages, so visitors land on the lamp the affiliate talked about.
• Make your checkout process as short and simple as possible.
• Test and refine your site to improve the user experience.

Make sure your shop turns visits into sales before you invite your first affiliates. If your shop isn't online yet, start with web hosting for the site they'll send visitors to.