The Rakuten Affiliate Network began as Linkshare. It was founded in 1996 by Stephen Messer and Heidi Messer, making it one of the oldest affiliate market places operating today. In 2005 the company became a wholly owned subsidiary of Rakuten, a Japanese ecommerce company. The value of $US 425 million was paid outright, and the marketplace changed hands. In 2014 Linkshare was rebranded and the Rakuten Affiliate Network was born. Today, the affiliate network is the self-proclaimed largest pay-per performance affiliate network in operation. It is rated as the best affiliate network unofficially by its users and official by mThink.com and their panel of experts. That is all information that you can find anywhere online. Seriously! What I want to teach you is harder to learn: how you can use this affiliate marketing network to monetise your blog, website, or audience and followers.
Affiliate marketing, at its core, is an agreement. A merchant agrees to pay a publisher some predetermined amount when they get a member of their audience to complete a conversion. Publishers have authority in their niche, and they use this to build trust in the merchant’s product as a solution to the customer’s problem. The merchant gets some attention, the publisher gets paid, and hopefully, the customer pays for a product that will help them. Bookings.com pays travel bloggers to feature adds on their sites. However, the travel bloggers aren’t paid just for displaying the adds. Affiliate marketing is performance based, and Booking.com will only pay when someone clicks on one of these adds/links, goes to the site, and books a night in a hotelor flight.
