Affiliate Programs pay off in different ways. You become affiliated with a merchant that sells a product or products. Someone visits your site and you send them to that merchant. The visitor to your site makes a purchase from your merchant.
The merchant will compensate you for procuring the buyer of their product. Your agreement with that merchant may be a percentage of the sale or a fixed rate. This method of compensation is often described as pay for sale or merchants may refer to it as cost per sale.
Another form of compensation you may have heard about is called pay per click. Some merchants or affiliates call it cost per click. This is pretty simple actually. A person visits your site and merely clicks on a link that whisks them away to the site that belongs to your merchant.
The link your visitor clicked on might be a video, a text link, or a picture. Under this arrangement, an affiliate is owed a payment based on the visitor clicking on that link. It does not matter if that person makes a purchase or provides any information at the merchant site.
Lead generation is another popular program for affiliates. The people you direct to the merchant must visit and provide contact information. The visitor must complete an action required by your agreement with the merchant.
That action could be filling out a form, providing contact information, or even filling out a survey. The information provided willingly by the visitor your directed to the merchant may be used as a sales lead. This lead can be used by the merchant or sold to another party. This scenario is known as pay per lead or cost per lead.
Some affiliates work hard to drive visitors to merchants who participate in a program providing residual payments. You send someone to a merchant and that person signs up for a product that requires a monthly fee. You can continue to receive compensation as long as the person you directed to the merchant continues to purchase products or services.
Cake is good and a two or three layer cake is even better. A popular two tier program may create streams of income for a motivated affiliate marketer. Under this concept you can earn commission connected to affiliate sites you recommend to the merchant.
You may identify several affiliates that could generate income for the merchant. You make a referral to the merchant. The merchant then agrees to compensate you for the extra business and sales generated by those sites you brought to his attention. This income is in addition to the leads and sales you create on your site for that merchant.
They say you only get one chance to make a good impression. Some merchants still pay an affiliate a fee based just on the number of people who see their banner on your site. This structure is considered more of an advertising program than a genuine affiliate construct. You can imagine why this pay for impression or pay per view format may not be the most popular for merchants.
You probably would not want to pay a fee for everyone who sees a poster advertising your garage sale. It makes more sense to pay a fee to someone who refers a person to your garage sale that actually buys the lamp that looks like a leg.
Affiliate Programs and how they compensate you should be carefully examined before you commit your time and energy. A complete understanding and agreements in writing are essential. A little homework increases your comfort level and gives you a leg up on your contemporaries.
Author Resource:
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