What are Affiliates? Do they actually help you get members?

[Orabelle]

I know Affiliates are basically like partner sites, right? Are these useful? If so how do you make an affiliate button and put others' buttons on your site? How does that all work?

Thank you!

[Kami]

They are absolutely useful.

Their primary function isn't actually membership, at least not directly. Affiliates are a good way to increase your SEO ranking naturally. Basically, search engine bots look for the number of times your URL appears online in a natural setting (as in, not spam). The more times they find it, the more times your site is indexed, and the more keywords are associated with it, leading to better ranking. Additionally, affiliating with bigger, already-established sites gives your forum credibility. If, for example, you affiliated with a reputable site with a lot of activity (like ProBoards Support), indexing bots will recognise that your link appears in conjunction with a site they already know not to be spam.

The reason that this helps you get members is pretty simple: the more times your site is crawled for keywords, the better your ranking will be for those words and therefore will appear in search results for people looking for a site like yours.

Then, to a lesser degree, is the direct effect: affiliating with other forums might appeal to someone that uses that forum. Affiliating with forums both similar and different to your genre increases the pool of potential members.

Traditionally, affiliate buttons are made to be 88 px wide and 31 px tall. You would need a graphics program -- even online ones like Photopea will work -- to create your image, or you can request one to be made here on Support in the Graphic Request Board (a subboard in Graphic Design).

Putting other peoples' buttons on your forum varies. Most people choose to use straight up HTML and create a table in the footer of their forum to place other sites' HTML codes. It looks something like this:

<a href="URL"><img src="URL" class="fr-fic fr-dii" style=""></a>

Others choose to use javascript or a plugin, if they want something a little different than a simple list -- for example, my affiliates are randomised, which means I use a javascript code that doesn't use HTML codes, all I need is a link to the site and to the image.

Hope that helps (:

[Orabelle]

That helps tremendously. Thank you so much!

[Kami]

You're welcome!

[Orabelle]

Kami I am making my button as we speak. I noticed you own a roleplay site like I do! Would you like to be Affiliates? Maybe this can teach me how to do it?

[Kami]

im not currently able to access my admin panel but send me a PM and we will discuss (:

[Orabelle]

Ok! Will do

[bai]

If Kami hadn't said something about SEO, I would have said "not really" to the second question in your thread title.

[tomdeep]

Affiliate is like one kind of process. It is like the one which website have more traffic, by paying we are displaying our ads on their website is the Affiliate marketing