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Basic Terms
What is an Affiliate Program?
An affiliate program is a program which allows websites to pay to have their site or products advertised on another site. The best way to explain this is by using an example. Take Amazon for example. You have probably seen their ads and products on other sites. How did these websites do this?
Well it's actually very easy. If you own a website you have an opportunity to add adverts to your site to increase revenue. So getting back to our example, you would sign up with Amazon's affiliate program. You will be enter to Amazon's affiliate area at this point. Here you will find
lots of adverts and it's code is already generated so all you have to do is add the code to your site.
At this point you should have uploaded your file with the advert code in it and will see a nice amazon graphic on your site which will link to Amazon. For every visitor that now visits your site and then visits Amazon through your link, you will receive a percentage of the sale, say 5%. It's that easy!
To sum up :
Visitor clicks on affiliate link or advert on your site ->
Visitor buys something from that site ->
You earn commission
Once you have accumulated an agreed minimum amount of commissions you will be paid by their method of payment (eg. cheque).
What ways can i earn commissions?
There are many methods to get paid - pay per lead, per sale etc.
I signed up with a program but they rejected me?
You will not be accepted to every network or every program that you register for. They have the final word if you are eligible or not. Rejection could be because of a number of reasons including :-
- Low Traffic
- Unrelated content (eg. sports site applying for a dating affiliate program)
- Poor web design
They may or may not let you know why you were not accepted but 99% of the time you will just receive a default email which doesn't let you know the reason why you were not accepted,
Terminology
Sale % (Pay Per Sale) - You are paid a percentage of the sale which you generate. So if you link to say a CD site and you get 10% commission, you'd get $1.50 for every $15.00 CD sold.
Lead (Pay Per Lead) - A lead is when you link to a site and a visitor goes through your site to theirs and generates some sort of action. This usually requires the visitor to sign up for something,
be it a newsletter or forum or whatever. It could even be for a sale.
Leads where the person has to sign up for a newsletter are usually around 50 cents where leads to credit card sites can be as much as $30.00 per lead.
Click Throughs (Pay Per Click) - This is self explanatory. You get paid per click for every visitor you generate for your affiliated site. Click throughs are not as common as they were a few years ago with most bigger affiliate networks using sale % and lead payment methods.
CPM (Pay Per thousand Impressions) - An impression is one display of a banner. So 10,000 page views of a banner would be equal to 10,000 impressions. CPM is a term used to determine the rate you get paid for every 1000 impressions of a banner. So a CPM of $3.00 means that you would get paid $3.00 for every 1000 impressions displayed. This method of payment is usually implemented on Ad Based Affiliate Networks.
CTR (Click Through Rate) - This is shown as a percentage. If a link is clicked 5 times on average of every 100 impressions the link would have a CTR of 5%.
Advertiser - An advertiser is some one who is paying to have their site advertised. In Merchant based affiliate networks they are the merchants.
Publisher - The publisher is the webmaster who is advertising other companies sites and products in return for revenue. In relation to Advertisers, publishers are their affiliates.
Reccomended Affiliate Sites
- FastClick - Always pay on time, pay good rates. All in all, a grea company to affiliate with.
- Commission Junction - The largest affiliate company on the web.
- ShareASale - Great company for the small to medium website owner.
For more affiliate listings please visit AffiliatePrograms.
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