Affiliate commission – What plan to choose.

For webmasters new to affiliate marketing, some of the terms might not always be so easy to understand. While some terms are less important, you at least need to understand the different commission types available.

Affiliate commission – Choosing a revenue option

When choosing an affiliate program, the commission offered is - obviously - very important. So is the commission type. Should you choose a program that pays you for every visitor you send their way, so called PPC? Or should you go with the option of sharing the revenue for that particular visitor? Fixed commission or a percentage? The options are many, there is no general answer to what is best. It’s up to you to decide where to send your visitors, to experiment, evaluate and finally choose one or a few affiliate programs best suited for your needs.

PPC - Paid per click

Many affiliate programs offer you a - fixed or varied -commission for every visitor you send their way. Often these programs are similar to Google’s Adsense program, namely contextual advertising. The advantages of this are many, but so are the limitations. The main advantage is just the contextual bit, the task of placing relevant ads on every page is gone, and all you need to do is choose what program to join. Another great advantage is – because of the flexible nature of these programs, you will only need to join one program, making it easier to reach the payout threshold. The downside of it all is the revenue. If you can target your visitors, and subsequently what they are looking for, you can make a much larger profit with other types of affiliate programs. But, it WILL require far more work.

PPM – Paid per mille

This is roughly the same as PPC, the difference being you get paid for every visitor viewing the ad, they do not have to click it. Many companies, offering contextual advertising, have this option included in their program. The good part about it is the possibility to get paid while visitors stay on your site, instead of referring them to someone else. This option is most suitable for high traffic web sites - with small quantities of visitors, this rarely adds up to a good profit. It can, however, be a good way of targeting often viewed pages on your site.

PPS – Paid per sale

This type of commission is based on the activities of the visitors you refer to the affiliate website. If you send active visitors, who shop a lot, this can be a goldmine compared to PPC and PPM. The type of commission varies as well. It can be a percentage of the sale, a fixed amount per sale/signup or a combination of both. What to choose is very dependant on your audience, and what category of program you are looking for.

In some cases, often with a recurring commission, the option of sharing the revenue, thus getting a percentage of the total order, rake or what have you, will be far better than choosing a fixed amount per sale. The dynamics of percentage vs. revenue sharing will be looked at more deeply later on.

PPL – Paid per lead

This is roughly the same as PPS, but you get paid for leads instead of sales. This is a fairly uncommon commission method, but it often applies to specific categories of affiliate programs; Insurance companies, financial institutes and other companies with high priced products in competitive markets. If you have a site targeting visitors looking for these kinds of products, this can be a highly interesting revenue model for you.

There are other, less common, alternatives. Many of them are individual, and are mainly for very specific niches, or for experienced affiliates.

Earn affiliate commission from your off-line experiences

What many struggling webmasters forget is that pretty much any experience could be a solid ground for a profitable site. Writing about personal interest also adds other advantages; it’s much easier to write interesting content in an area you feel comfortable with and you - as you already know your topic - get much for free, no need to research for ever before you can make your site.

A very good example of a topic familiar to most is vacations. Almost everyone go on vacation, and everyone has opinions in regards to that very vacation. No matter if you had a good time or a bad time, sunny weather or two weeks of rain – people will find it interesting.

Due to the high competition for travel sites, booking you airline tickets, hotel or car rental is often cheaper using the web. This is why the market for travel related keywords are so broad, thus making it more than possible to find a few good keywords to target.

Writing about vacations is obviously a good topic for a blog, but you can easily make a full site about it. Even if its only one vacation, one destination – you can add information about sightseeing, shopping, night clubs or attractions.

How would this generate an online income?

Any site with visitors is possible to monetize, it’s just a matter of how. If you are running many sites of different niches, finding a good versatile affiliate program might be a good alternative to the obvious; contextual advertising. If you – on the other hand – are running one, or a few sites similar in nature, you should really try to find the best paying affiliate program you can. If you can send many potential customers to only one affiliate program, the importance of high commission is naturally higher.

In this case – with a blog or website about travel and vacations – the potential revenue is good. You have the opportunity to advertise expensive products, often with high commissions making the niche more lucrative than most.

Just as most people have opinions and experience from traveling, many travelers try to find as much information of a destination before going. This is an excellent opportunity to present them with products related to that destination, or to vacations in general.

If you are lucky enough to attract people looking for the information to choose destination, you will have the possibility to present them with even more – on target – offers. The potential commission on a flight and two weeks of hotel for a family of fours is very high. If you choose your affiliate program well – and offer low airfares, cheap bookings and interesting information – you will no doubted earn quite a bit of money.

Promoting travel related affiliate programs give you an excellent opportunity to pre-sell the products you are advertising. Many affiliate programs have a wide range of products, ranging from expensive all-inclusive packages to small guided tours on a particular destination. Take advantage of your knowledge and experiences. If you have been on a spectacular trip, a major football tournament or just have an odd vacation memory, be sure to write it down, join a travel related affiliate program and you will be sure to make at least a little bit of money.

Use Your Website To Pre-Sell Your Affiliate Programs

Most experienced affiliate marketers will tell you that one of the most important factors of online marketing is pre-selling the products promoted. Pre-selling can be difficult at first, but if you choose your affiliate programs wisely, you can have your site pre-sell the products for you.

If you have a site of your own, you are probably using quite a few services to maintain it. This includes hosting, domain registration and other day-to-day services needed to operate a website. Due to the high competition in these areas, most of the sites offering these services will also run an affiliate program to find new customers.

This is an excellent opportunity to use these affiliate programs, promoting them on selected pages on your site. More visitors than you might think will look around your site, perhaps looking for something not expected.

When I build a new site in a niche I haven’t tried before, I always try to do a little research as to the competition. Many times I get ideas from the sites I find; if they are successful I would be foolish not to use what apparently works.

Different people are looking for different things. I for one am writing for Affiliate Ranker, so I tend to find new affiliate programs this way and I suspect others like me do as well. If you are promoting a 2-tier program, this can be a nice addition to your income. Others might be in the market for a new web host. If you are pleased with your hosting solution, why not share it and make some commission in the process? Are you using a template as your website? Even if you are using a free template, many of them offer affiliate commission on their paid templates. People are always looking for cheaper – and better – alternatives. If you are confident you are using the cheapest domain registrar, try linking to it with the (low) price listed. If it indeed is very cheap, people WILL use them, they have little reason not to.

Never underestimate the amount of visitors at your site, thinking they are NOT there for the reasons you intended. The reasons for them seeing your website are many, but if they are actually viewing your pages you have a good opportunity to serve them with some pre-sold affiliate links to click.

There are many services offering some sort of untargeted traffic, some better than others. But if you are using any of these methods – such as social bookmarking – odds are people will view your page without any interest in your actual content. If visitors arriving this way like your site, they will often look around a bit too see what it’s about. These are the people you are hoping to send to the newly signed affiliate programs.

If you have an about-page, why not make a short list of the services you are using, all with affiliate program links, and see what happens over time. Who knows, the results may surprise you.

Link Exchanges To Gain Affiliate Commission

Usually link exchanging is done to raise your link popularity or pagerank – But if done correctly, you may find your self with literally thousands of visitors – with one thing in common. Figure out how to USE this web traffic; don’t let it go to easily.

Exchanging links – weather you do it manually or use a service for it – is mainly to gain more link popularity – thus gaining positions in the search engines. This is perhaps the most common way of improving your page rank, and it’s very effective. But, a side effect most webmasters don’t think of is the traffic they attract while doing so.

If you are using a link exchange service to exchange links, you can – and should – try to take advantage of all the webmasters coming to your site and/or link pages. Most webmasters won’t take the time to check out your offers, but if you can present them with an on-target banner or text-link – promoting a product directly related to webmastering, link exchanging or anything similar – you will find yourself with a new way of making affiliate commission.

The link exchange I used for this experiment - link2me – has the option of upgrading for roughly $30, making it possible to send out unlimited link exchange request. I’m not sure how many sites they have in their directory, but – trust me – it’s plenty. They also have an option at every request, enabling you to present a specific link page to the recipients of your link exchange request. This is where you will have the opportunity to add well chosen affiliate links. This page should actually BE a link page, and I encourage you to actually utilize the service and exchange some links. If you ask for a link exchange with every site listed, you should find yourself with thousands of webmasters looking at your link page to evaluate if they want to accept your exchange request. A good addition might be SimplyLinking, allowing 20 free requests daily.

If you want to take this one step further, it is possible to further target the visitors by making several link pages – each with a more narrow advertisement, and choosing what page to show for each link request. Because you know what their site is about, you can find and add affiliate links on a detailed level.

Choosing the correct affiliate programs for this is easy, but it can take some time to get it perfected though. The best way of evaluating it is by using different affiliate programs on different link pages. Look in your web statistics and compare the traffic on each link page with the amount of sales or clicks to the affiliate programs, then choose the ones with the best conversion rate.

There are many affiliate programs with products or services for webmasters. A webmaster engaged in link exchanging is bound to be interested in others ways of improving their page rank, or other ways of marketing their site. This include services such as; Link exchanges, article submissions, directory submissions, SEO services or simple, everyday products such as web design and hosting. If you are a bit imaginative, you can probably think of many, many other subjects which might be of interest.

Using this method on every new built site will give you both page rank and possible affiliate commission, this while still building your link popularity.