In a typical affiliate marketing set up, the merchant provides his affiliates with banners and text ads that link to his site. The affiliates will then post these ads on their website or blog and they get paid whenever traffic or sales are directed to the merchant’s website.
Affiliates are often paid on commission basis, although other online merchants would opt to pay a fixed fee for the affiliate’s compensation. Starting to make money online with affiliate marketing is relatively quick and easy. All that one has to do is to sign up as an affiliate for an online company that offers affiliate programs.
When you sign up with an affiliate marketing program, you are usually required to fill out a form containing information about yourself. Some affiliate programs may also require you to present the URL of your website and describe its contents. This will allow the retailers to verify that you actually have a website with contents that are relevant to their products. Some affiliate programs, however, won’t require you to have a website.
After signing up with an affiliate program and being an actual affiliate, you are now ready to start making a lot of money by selling other people’s product online. How do you make money? There are actually a number of ways for you to earn money as an affiliate, and most of these ways depends on the type of affiliate marketing program you’ve gotten into.
Many affiliate marketing programs compensate their affiliates in either of three ways: pay-per-click (PPC), pay-per-sale (PPS), or pay-per-lead (PPL).
- PPC - the affiliate is paid whenever he directs traffic to the merchant’s site.
- PPS - the affiliate only gets paid when his referral converts into an actual sale. In most PPS affiliate programs, the affiliate would usually get 15% to 20% commission for each conversion.
- PPL - although affiliates are paid a fixed fee whenever his referral converts into a lead for the company.
- Two-tier programs - the affiliate is also allowed to recommend other affiliates to the merchant. In these affiliate programs, the affiliate would be paid for the traffic or sales that he would direct to the merchant’s site and for the traffic or sales directed by the affiliates who signed up with the program through his recommendation.
- Residual affiliate programs - affiliate programs where the affiliate gets paid for as long as the merchant keeps the customer the affiliate has referred to his site. One form of residual program gets the affiliate paid a commission every time the referred customer purchases something on the merchant’s site. Another form of residual affiliate program gets the affiliate paid a percentage every month for as long as the company keeps the referred customer.
With a lot of options available and a lot of ways to earn money, affiliate marketing is undoubtedly the most popular and one of the easiest ways to make money by selling other people’s products online. As to how much money someone can make from affiliate marketing actually depends on the affiliate. A dedicated and hardworking affiliate would certainly get more from the program compared to those affiliates who would simply sign up and forget about the program.
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