Affiliate Marketing is a business model that allows you to receive a commission for generating a transaction, such as a sale or lead, for a merchant that you are promoting. The merchant site provides its ads or affiliate links to you and assigns a commission for each task it wants to accomplish. As an affiliate you place these links or ads on your website, or blog, or in such places like email contents, search listings, articles, e-books, internet forum postings and so on. Whenever a visitor uses any of these links to generate an action on the merchant’s site, the transaction is tracked online and you get paid a commission for that transaction if the visitor carries out the desired action.
To get yourself started in Affiliate Marketing on almost zero start-up cost you will need to sign up with one or a couple of Affiliate Networks. Affiliate Networks are loaded with a list of affiliate products/programs that you can promote to earn commissions. The main convenience an Affiliate Network has over independent affiliate programs is that you only need to log into one place to see the statistics for the numerous programs you are promoting within that network.
More also, Affiliate Networks usually have more integrity when it comes to paying you your commissions. They usually pay you on time and don’t usually default in their payment of commissions. The independent sites on the other hand have had reported cases of not paying their affiliates after generating the required outcomes.
Furthermore, most Affiliate Networks combine all your commissions of the numerous programs or products you are promoting onto one check (cheque) whenever your commissions accumulated reach the minimum payout threshold. You don’t have to be striving to get checks (cheques) from different sources, which may be difficult and time consuming.
There are tons of Affiliate Networks but I highly recommended the following places, particularly www.clickbank.com and www.cj.com. Clickbank is by far the easiest for Beginner Affiliates, however the rest are equally good.
1. Clickbank – http://www.clickbank.com : is a leader in the Affiliate network industry with over 11,000 merchants. You get paid commissions ranging from 5% to 75%. The products on Clickbank are basically digital or downloadable products, so the merchants can afford to offer very high commission for each sale you generate. Downloadable or digital products like e-books, e-newsletters, e-zine, e-courses, music, games, softwares, videos and so on can be created with little or almost no money. They can be reproduced in any quantity – it is as simple as copying a file. Even if the merchant sells a million copies, production costs stays at zero; hence, Clickbank merchants can afford to pay very high commissions.
Clickbank programs are mainly CPS (cost per sale), meaning you only earn a commission if the visitor completes a sale on the merchant site you direct him/her to. They have Real-Time statistics and conversion tracking that is patent pending. People don’t usually buy products the first time they visit a merchant’s website. It often takes some days for the purchases to start. However, Clickbank places a cookie in the visitor’s computer for 90 days so that you will get credit for the sales.
With Clickbank you get paid every two weeks once your commissions reach your selected minimum payout threshold. No website is required to join Clickbank (meaning you can register with Clickbank even without having a website of your own.).
2. Commission Junction – http://www.cj.com : is a ‘top dog’ in the Affiliate Network industry. In a nutshell, they are massive. There are thousands upon thousands of merchants or affiliate programs to choose from within this network. They offer CPM (which means getting paid for impression for putting a pop-up or banner ad on your site); CPC (Cost Per Click, where you earn commission when a visitor goes to your website and clicks on any of your affiliate links); CPL (Cost Per Lead, where you earn commission for every visitor you lead to the merchant’s site even if they don’t buy anything!); and CPA (Cost Per Action, which means the same thing as Cost Per Sale, where you get paid if the visitor completes a purchase on the merchant’s site). To find CPL programs on this network, simply conduct a search for ‘Advertisers’ using a single word ‘lead’ on their website.
Commission Junction have real-time statistics and a 2-tier commission program in place. You get paid monthly as long as your commissions accumulated reach their $25 minimum payout threshold. A website is required to join but you can join using a free blog, which you can set up at places like http://www.blogger.com or http://www.squidoo.com.
3. Linkshare – http://www.linkshare.com : this is also a huge Affiliate Network- somewhat similar to Commission Junction. You get paid commissions by CPL and CPA. They also have a 2-tier commission structure.
You can log onto the following link to locate CPL (Cost Per Lead or Pay Per Lead) programs on Linkshare:
http://alogin.linksynergy.com/php-bin/affiliate/join/scate.shtml?cate_id=-1
Press CTRL-F on your keyboard to get a search box. Type ‘flat fee’ into the search box to conduct your search for the lucrative pay-per-lead affiliate programs on this network.
4. Befree – http://www.reporting.net : This is an Affiliate network that has some of the largest clients on the internet. BeFree offers a commission for referrals from webmasters – you receive a commission for every signup. They offer CPS and CPL type of programs with multi-tier commission. BeFree also has a large number of merchants in their network. They are into a partnership with Commission Junction. A website is also required to join.
If you wish to promote CPL programs on BeFree, go to the search page of their website and use the drop down menu under ‘Commission Method’ to select ‘cost per lead’. Leave all other options to their default positions, and then click on the search button to get a list of BeFree merchants offering CPL programs.
5. Paydotcom – http://www.paydotcom.com : This network is somewhat similar to Clickbank. On the Paydotcom network you will find merchants even paying higher commissions than those obtainable on Clickbank! Paydotcom has lots of e-books and physical products. You get paid by PayPal or check (cheque). Like Clickbank, no website is required to join.
Affiliate Networks like Clickbank and Commission Junction make the payment of commissions to affiliates without authorization from the merchants. So you don’t have to worry whether the merchant will pay or not. However, with Paydotcom the merchant makes the decision to pay the affiliates and has to authorize Paydotcom to do so. This is the downside of working with Paydotcom.
In conclusion, there are many other decent Affiliate Networks out there; particularly ClickXchange.com, ClixGalore.com, ShareASale.com and WebSponsors.com but I found the 5 aforementioned ones to be the best places for you to get started as an Affiliate marketer.
NOTE:
Cost Per Action (CPA) – Advertiser/Merchant pays each time a visitor clicks on an ad, and takes some sort of action, whether it is a lead or sale.
Cost Per Click (CPC) – Advertiser/Merchant pays each time a visitor clicks on an ad. Clicks can be generated through PPC (Pay-Per-Click) Search Engine banners, text links, popups, other graphics, etc.
Cost Per Lead (CPL) – Advertiser/Merchant pays each time a visitor clicks on an ad, and fills out a signup form for something “free”. The purpose of this (for the Advertiser/Merchant) is to build a list of potential customers whom the Advertiser/Merchant can market to, over and over again.
Cost Per Impressions (CPM) – Advertiser/Merchant pays for ads viewed, every time the ads are viewed a certain number of times. For example in the case of Cost Per 1,000 Impressions, the Advertiser/Merchant pays for every 1,000 ads viewed. This includes banners and other size graphics. Additionally, this is how many emails and newsletters are sold (per 1,000 people the email is sent to).
Cost Per Sale (CPS) – Advertiser/Merchant pays an affiliate a percentage or fixed fee for a sale of a product or service, if the customer who made the purchase was referred to the Merchant’s site by the Affiliate.
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