Affiliate Program

The affiliate program is a way for you to earn money with your website by linking to Insound. You get commission for all sales generated through your links.

No. Becoming an affiliate is free.

Your commission is a percentage of the sales generated by your affiliate links - whenever someone clicks from the link on your site to Insound, and makes a purchase, you earn a percentage of the sale.

Starting commission is 7%, but commissions escalate as your monthly sales revenue increases:

Sales in a Month	Percentage
Under $500.00	7%
Over $500.00	8%
Over $1,500.00	9%
Over $3,000.00	10%
Over $5,000.00	11%
Over $8,000.00	12%
Over $11,000.00	13%
Over $14,000.00	14%
Over $17,000.00	15%

For example, if your monthly sales total is $100, you earn $7 (7% of $100 = $7). If it's $499, you earn $34.93 (7% of $499 = $34.93). If your monthly sales are $800, you earn $64 (8% of $800 = $64); if your monthly sales are $12,000 (wow!), your commission is $1560 (13% of $12,000 = $1560).

You'll be paid every time your commission total is $20 or more. Please email marketing@insound.com if you have any questions about this policy.

When you link to Insound from your site, you will use a special affiliate link generated by adding a fromtag to the Insound URL. Fromtags are numerical codes used to track affiliate links. They look like this: &from=444444. When you become an affiliate, you're given a unique six-digit fromtag code to use when you generate affiliate links. They're added to the end of Insound URLs, and they indicate what affiliate site a visitor clicked through from. The fromtag is registered when a visitor first links to Insound from the affiliate site. Any purchases the visitor makes during that session are counted as sales revenue for the affiliate. For example: let's say you do a feature on one of the greatest indie albums of all time, Neutral Milk Hotel's In The Aeroplane Over The Sea, and you want to insert a buy link to it on Insound.

First step - Go to www.insound.com and search for the artist/title.

Second step - Click on the title link for In The Aeroplane Over The Sea

Third step - Copy the URL for the item. Aeroplane's is
http://www.insound.com/In-The-Aeroplane-Over-The-Sea-Reissue-LP-Neutral-Milk-Hotel/P/INS66394/

Fourth step - Add your fromtag. Let's say yours is 44444. Your link should now look like this:
http://www.insound.com/In-The-Aeroplane-Over-The-Sea-Reissue-LP-Neutral-Milk-Hotel/P/INS66394&from=44444/
Be sure to put your fromtag in front of the last / of the URL.

You've just created an affiliate link!

Create a "buy it at Insound" link to this URL from your site (we've made this easy by providing HTML tags, which you can find in the members section). You can link using the Insound logo links or linking like this:

Buy In the Aeroplane Over the Sea Vinyl LP Here.

Here's another possibility: you've just done a live review of a Wilco show, and rather than link to a specific release, you want to link to a page with all the Wilco releases Insound carries. Here's the search link for Wilco (you can get these by clicking on any artists name on the site:

http://www.insound.com/Wilco/A/22742/

Now add your fromtag, and you've got your URL:

http://www.insound.com/Wilco/A/22742&from=44444/

You can also create affiliate links to specific release pages, the Insound home page, any of our main pages (like upcoming releases new releases, vinyl, etc.) Different types of pages require different fromtag formats. If you're linking to the homepage, Upcoming Releases, Top Sellers or other landing page you'll need to use a question mark in place of the ampersand in the fromtag. In this case the link should like like this:

http://www.insound.com/top-sellers/?from=44444

In this format you do not need to add a forward slash at the end of the URL as you will with products and artists.

If you're already linking to Insound wherever it's editorially relevant (reviews, features, etc.), another way you can help draw folks' attention to Insound.com on your site is by setting up a "listening to" section. As shown in the image below, these are image links of your current favorite albums with their respective links to Insound. The box below can be set up using a simple html table and inserting it into your site or blog's sidebar. If you are unfamiliar with html tables you can grab a sample "listening to" table HERE.

Listening To:

Another idea is to highlight our monthly promotions: we are always running something new, whether it's a sale on certain titles, a monthly discount code only for affiliates, or something free with your Insound purchase. When you join, you're asked if you want to opt in to the Affiliate newsletter. If you choose to receive the newsletter, you'll get the scoop on these promotions ahead of time, so whenever we're running something you want your visitors to know about, you can mention it and include a link to the promotion.

Insound now has a web service that makes it easy for affiliates to programmatically retrieve information about products and artists from our database. Just make a request to the web service, and we will return information about the most relevant products and artists, in our database. The result can include anything we sell, from a vinyl album, to an MP3 download, to a t-shirt, to a book. Regardless of the product type, we'll send you a formatted affiliate link for each. If you're interested, contact us for details and a special web service account.