Cloud Affiliate Program: How to Make Money with CloudSigma Part 1

A couple of weeks ago CloudSigma launched its Cloud Affiliate Program. Now you are able to join the success of CloudSigma and create for yourself a significant source of revenue by promoting CloudSigma through the Affiliate Channel. You can earn up to 20% lifetime provision out of every sale which is referred through your affiliate link. Alternatively you earn up to 27.5% per Sale and up to 2€ per lead as one time payments if you choose to promote the Standard Provision Offer.

This is part 1 of a How To Promote the CloudSigma Affiliate Program blog series. In this first part we mainly cover the basics and some easy methods to get started. If you want to read more general information on Affiliate Marketing I recommend this Wikipedia article.

Signup for the Cloud Affiliate Program

It’s free to signup so head over to partner.cloudsigma.com and click on Sign Up. After we approve your application you can choose between the Standard Provision Model and the Lifetime Provision Model. More details about both offers can be found at: https://blog.cloudsigma.com/cloud-hosting-partner-program/.

As soon as you have chosen one which fits best fits your needs, you can start generating tracking links.

  1. Click on Offers
  2. Then click on the offer you prefer e.g. CloudSigma Lifetime Pay per Sale Offer
  3. Scroll down to the Generate Tracking section
  4. Choose an Offer URL (optional) – you can choose between blog.cloudsigma.com or a special landing page optimized for conversions
  5. Add a Sub ID and Source (optional, more on that later)
  6. Copy your Tracking Link and start deploying it

Every visitor who signs up through your affiliate link will be tracked and you can view your clicks and conversions within the affiliate interface.

If you scroll down to the bottom you also find a couple of CloudSigma creatives like Skyscraper or Superbanner Ads. Feel free to use them on your blog or advertising channels.

How to promote CloudSigma?

There are several ways on how to promote an Affiliate Program.

1) Personal Referrals

This is probably the easiest way to promote CloudSigma. You know a friend or company who would like to move into the cloud. After you recommended CloudSigma to them you send over your affiliate tracking link for example by e-mail and wait for them to signup. As soon as they are set up you get paid. This could also be a personal tweet, a link in a blog post of yours or a Facebook message. It really is that easy.

2) Free Affiliate Promotion Methods

Here we talk about SEO, email lists, social network promotions, viral marketing, etc. These unpaid methods of promotion, while basically free, generally require a good amount of time than for example paid alternatives. However, the big advantage is that you do not have to risk any kind of money for now, except small fees for hosting.

A possible first step would be to setup a blog about cloud hosting and start writing article. Find a good domain, install Wordpress, pick a nice theme and you are ready to go. Whenever it makes sense in relation to the content, you can insert a CloudSigma Affiliate link. As soon as someone clicks the link and signs up with CloudSigma, you’ve got your first referral. You could also add one of the creatives to your blog, for example you could insert a CloudSigma Skyscraper Creative into your sidebar. Please be aware that textlinks usually get a much higher clickrate, but the creatives help support your text link click rates.

After you published about 10 articles it is about time to get some links. SEO (Search-Engine-Optimizing) is a big topic and you will find plenty of information on it in the web. Basically it’s all about getting juicy links. You can start by commenting articles on other blogs where you can put your URL along the comment. Furthermore you can start contacting other bloggers within your space and ask them for link exchanges, you probably stumbled upon so called Blogrolls already. Forums are also nice to distribute links, put your blog into your signature or link to relevant blog posts wherever it makes sense. Please note that there are many possible ways to get links, as noted we just cover the very basics here.

Be sure never to spam or post low quality, purely commercial content and remember it is important to identify your relationship with CloudSigma on your blog or other websites where you might be posting.

If Google likes your website, you will start generating organic traffic. You will rank for cloud specific topics. For example if you write an article about “How to run Linux in the Cloud” , at the bottom or within that article you could include CloudSigma Affiliate Links. Don’t make it look spammy, add an affiliate link wherever it is appropriate. It also makes sense to tweet interesting articles or put them on Facebook. That’s free traffic you don’t want to miss.

CloudSigma releases interesting press releases regularly as well as in-depth views and opinions on the cloud via its blog. You can incorporate your affiliate ID into links to these pages too as a great way to generate further interest and conversions for your affiliate account.

Here’s an example on how such a blog could look like (German): http://cloudlist.de . Several cloud specific articles are featured on the homepage and you can see a comparison table about cloud hosts under „Cloud Hosting Anbieter Vergleich“. It’s all wordpress and very simple to setup.

3) Paid Affiliate Promotion Methods

This mainly describes Pay-Per-Click (PPC) tactics. These types of promotion can generally, but not always, generate a ton of traffic if you have the money. They are, however much more risky, since you’re obviously investing your own money with no real guarantee that you’ll see any return on that investment.

In Europe the three most important PPC Networks are Google Adwords, Facebook Ads and Yahoo Search Marketing (soon to be replaced my Microsoft AdCenter). Everyone is able to sign up to these networks and start promoting their campaigns.

The CloudSigma Affiliate Program enables you to add custom tracking information in your tracking links. Here is an example:

This could be your standard Tracking Link: tracking.cloudsigma.com/aff_c?offer_id=2&aff_id=xxxx

Now when using for example Adwords, you could add the keyword you booked to your tracking link like this: tracking.cloudsigma.com/aff_c?offer_id=2&aff_id=xxxx&aff_sub=mycustomtxt-{keyword}&source=adwords

Adwords will automatically replace {keyword} with the specific keyword which triggered the click. If your click leads to a conversion, you will then be able to see the aff_sub Parameter in your Conversion Report. This enables you to judge keywords, if they actually make you money or if they just cost you money.

Of course you could also use this for tracking links on your blog. For example you could use this tracking.cloudsigma.com/aff_c?offer_id=2&aff_id=xxxx&aff_sub=cloud-performance-article&source=myblog for tracking clicks from your blog. I added &aff_sub=cloud-performance-article – so whenever this subId shows up in the conversion report, I know which article was responsible fort he conversion and eventually optimize it even more.

Make sure you always use SubIds when you use Paid Methods to promote an Affiliate Program, otherwise you won’t be able to rate your traffic.

Conclusion

I hope I gave you a more insight about how to start promoting the CloudSigma Affiliate Program. As you can see, it is easy to create an additional stream of income at a low cost. In the next post I will cover more advanced strategies for developing a significant long-term income with through your CloudSigma affiliate account.

If you have any questions I am here to help. Feel free to contact me through the main affiliate interface or directly by email at affiliate@cloudsigma.com.

If i you haven’t done so already you can sign up now: affiliates.cloudsigma.com

This is a guest article from Andreas Kraus, CEO of www.sunlab.de.

Share this Post

707379291da5aacee894a66824e8b43d?s=80&r=g

About Patrick Baillie

Patrick is co-founder of CloudSigma, and comes from a career working in Investment Banking Technology, as well as having previously ran his own business.