Affiliate Marketing Learning

There are three payment mechanisms used in affiliate programs:
Pay-Per-Action (also called cost-per-sale): Credit card affiliate programs are an example of a pay-per-sale arrangement. With these arrangements, the merchant site pays an affiliate when the affiliate sends them a visitor who then successfully applies for a credit card. Some merchants are paying a huge $88 for every person who gets a business credit card as a result of filling in a quick form after clicking through from your web site.

Pay-Per-Click (Cost-Per-Click): In these programs, the merchant site pays you based on the number of visitors who simply click on the affiliate link on your web site to come to the merchant’s site. They don’t have to actually buy anything for you to get paid as an affiliate, and it is not important to the affiliate what a visitor does once they are on the merchant’s site.

Pay-Per-Lead (Cost-Per-Lead): A company offering this type of program will pay out to their affiliates based on the number of visitors who the affiliate refers that in turn sign up as leads (people indicating their interest in the product who have not yet made a purchase). All this means is that the visitor fills out some basic information about themselves at the merchant site, which the merchant can then use as a sales lead or sell to another company as a sales lead.

There are a number of other arrangements as well. Basically, a company could set up an affiliate program based on any kind of action that would be of benefit to them, and then payout based on the number of customers who performed that action once they arrived at the merchant site via the affiliate link on your web site.

Tags: How do Affiliates (you) get paid

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 8th, 2008 at 10:46 pm and is filed under Affiliate Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.