Executive Summary - OnlineNatureMall.com Affiliate Program

We should sign up as an Affiliate of the Online Nature Mall. This web site offers 10,000 nature related items that our members would enjoy. Online Nature Mall will pay us 10% of all sales made at their site. There is no cost to us. Everything is free and we can quit at any time for any reason.

Online Nature Mall is a secure site run by Yahoo and Thayer Birding Software (Naples, Florida). The Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Wisconsin Ornithological Society and many Audubon Chapters are already Affiliates.

A company in Chicago called ShareaSale keeps track of the sales made through our web site. They are the ones that send us a check each month. We can also see how many times folks clicked on a link to our store.

ShareaSale will provide us with a small piece of code to put on our web site. This lets them keep track of who makes a purchase and the amount of the purchase.

If you approve of this proposal, this is what we will do:

1. We will sign up as an Affiliate at ShareaSale. Then we will respond to an email they will send to us.

2. Next we will select the Online Nature Mall as a "Merchant" we want to link to.

3. Then we will get the code from ShareaSale to add to our web site.

4. Our webmaster will paste this HTML code into our web site at the appropriate places.

Visitors to our site will then see text or even a colorful banner inviting them to support our organization by shopping on our site. When they click the text or banner on our web site, they are routed through the ShareaSale server to the Online Nature Mall, thus allowing bullet-proof tracking of our sales.

This is what the code looks like that we will get from Shareasale:
<a href="http://www.shareasale.com/r.cfm?b=34696&u=123456&m=7670&urllink=&afftrack=">Help Support our Organization... 10,000 Nature Items for Sale</a>

This code shown above identifies our organization (the u = our own unique number that ShareaSale will assign to us). The code also identifies the Online Nature Mall as Merchant #7670 (m=7670). The specific banner or text we select has its own number as well (b= a unique banner image or text). For text links, we can have the text say anything we want it to say.

We can even have links from our web site that will take our members to specific sections of the Online Nature Mall, such as Bird Books, Bird Feeders or Nature Books. It is even possible to link to a specific book, CD or other product that our members would be especially interested in.

This will come in handy when we want to promote an item via e-newsletter or on our website.

We can place links on as many of our web pages as we like. The easier we make it for our members to shop, the more money we will earn.

We will be paid on the 20th of each month. The check will be prepared and sent to us from ShareaSale.com. We must have earned $50 by the end of the previous month to receive a check. If not, the amount we earned carries forward until we have earned $50. [Online Nature Mall has an open account with ShareaSale so that funds are always available to pay Affiliates. Online Nature Mall also pays ShareaSale 2% of sales as a fee.] We are never charged a fee. This is all free to us.

We recommend that you approve this proposal. It should take less than 15 minutes to complete steps 1-3 above. Adding the code to our web site will take an additional 5-10 minutes.