The End All Guide To Affiliate Marketing And Making Money Online For Future Clickbank Webmasters
Firstly, know that this article is not a comprehensive “welcome to affiliate marketing” guide. Almost everyone that makes money on the internet (even the millionaires) do so through affiliate marketing.
Affiliate marketing is a means of promoting web businesses in which an affiliate is rewarded for every visitor, subscriber, customer, and/or sale provided through his/her efforts.
An affiliate is essentially a salesperson whose job is to send people to a merchant’s website. When a predetermined “action” or sale is made, the affiliate is paid a commission. I will teach you more about the actual application of affiliate marketing later in this chapter.
Compensation Models
Another important attribute of an affiliate program is its’ compensation model. Here is a breakdown of the various compensation models that affiliate advertisers utilize.
Pay-per-impression (PPI) / Cost-per-thousand (CPM)
Publisher gets from Advertiser $x.xx amount of money for every 1000 impressions (page views/displays) of the ad. Pay-per-click (PPC) / Cost-per-click (CPC)
Cost-per-click. Advertiser pays publisher $X.XX amount of money, every time a visitor (potential prospect) clicks on the advertiser’s ad; it is irrelevant (for the compensation) how often an Ad is displayed. Commission is only due when the Ad is clicked. Pay-per-lead (PPL) / Cost-per-action/acquisition (CPA) / Cost-per-lead CPL)
Cost-per-action (CPA). Advertiser pays publisher $X.XX in commission for every visitor that was referred by the publisher to the advertiser (web site) and performs a desired action, such as filling out a form, creating an account or signing up for a newsletter.
This compensation model is very popular with online services from internet service providers, cell phone providers, banks (loans, mortgages, credit cards) and subscription services.
Pay-per-sale (PPS) / Cost-per-sale (CPS)
Cost-per-sale (CPS). Advertiser pays the publisher a percentage (%) of the order amount (sale) that was created by a customer who was referred by the publisher. This model is by far the most common compensation model used by online retailers that have an affiliate program. Pay-per-call (no abbreviation exists yet)
Recently developed call-tracking technology allows to create a bridge between online and offline advertising. For example, the paid surveys program Survey Adventure, pays out an extremely high $4.50 per double opt-in lead (CPA). The real money is in pay per sale programs (PPS). If you have a good product and a sound marketing plan, the money will come.
Affiliate Marketing & You
Web 2.0
Affiliates were among the earliest to adopt Pay-per-click advertising when the first PPC search engines. Since then, a large number of advertisers have adjusted their affiliate program terms to prohibit their affiliates from bidding on those types of keywords. Sign up for AdWords and Miva.
Why Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate Marketing is driven by entrepreneurs who are working at the forefront of internet marketing. Affiliates take risks and “trial and error” is probably the best way to describe how affiliate marketers are operating. You will not earn the right to call yourself an affiliate marketer overnight.
Affiliate Networks
Very few publishers handle their affiliate programs in house. Most affiliate programs are set up and managed by large affiliate networks. Most of my affiliate programs are set up and maintained by the affiliate network ClickBank, which is the largest affiliate network on the web. The majority of this online guide will focus on marketing strategies for ClickBank affiliates, but here is a short list of the top affiliate networks that all of the professionals belong to and you should apply to.
The “Big 4″ Affiliate Networks
ClickBank connects over a hundred thousand affiliates with thousands of information product vendors offering a huge array of downloadable products, mainly eBooks. Because it is cheap and easy for merchants to join, the quality of the products provided can vary. ClickBank is also a great place to search for unexploited niches.
Commission Junction (or “CJ”) is another very popular affiliate network. CJ brings together affiliates and product vendors, but also offers physical products for its affiliates to promote. Getting Paid By The Networks
You may set your affiliate accounts to deposit your earnings directly to the card. PayPal is also a great option, but not all affiliate networks offer payment via PayPal. Just check your account on payday to find the money there.
ClickBank & CJ
ClickBank connects over a hundred thousand affiliates with thousands of information product vendors offering a huge array of downloadable products, mainly informational eBooks. ClickBank is also a great place to search for unexploited niches.
Why ClickBank
To keep it simple; the first thing that you will do is sign up with ClickBank, get a free affiliate account and look for products you want to promote. Whenever you get a sale, your account is credited with your affiliate commission and checks are mailed out every two weeks (once you break the small minimum sale threshold).
The reason that ClickBank is so popular is the large commissions. Since ClickBank specializes in information products, the product vendor’s costs are minuscule and large commissions are passed on to affiliates – often as much as 50-75%.
ClickBank Marketplace
The ClickBank marketplace lists the products that are currently being sold by publishers. When looking for a product to promote, you are going to base your decision on results of your target market criteria. Search for something like “Affiliate Marketing Beginners”. Once you have a list of potential products you will be searching for products by the following important factors:
$/Sale: The amount of money (minus refunds) that network affiliates have earned per sale in the past.
%/Sale: The percentage of profit that is paid to affiliates per sale. Most product vendors at ClickBank pay 25% to 50%. Most vendors looking to sell a lot of their products pay 75%, regardless of quality or other factors.
% Referred: The percentage of product sales that were generated by affiliates rather than the vendors own promotions.
Gravity: Gravity in short represents the popularity of a product – (the amount of affiliate sales have been made recently). Just because a product may be more popular than the other does not necessarily mean that the product is making more money for its affiliates.
The products are arranged by their popularity. You may review the above factors as well, so you can click on the product title to have a look at the “pitch page”.
What To Sell
Don’t try to go onto ClickBank and find the highest selling products to promote. Find something that appeal to your target market. Believe me when I tell you, that you can find products on ClickBank related to anything and everything, all offering affiliates great commissions.
(Update: What was a “few” products are now a few pages of them. When you search Google for “Warcraft”, you get 10,610,000 results.
Commission Junction
Commission Junction (or “CJ”) is another very popular affiliate network. CJ brings together affiliates and product vendors, but also offers services and physical products for its affiliates to promote. CJ has many large brand names on its site, and is extremely well established. Below is a list of the paid survey advertisers that I work with. Network Earnings: which is like ClickBank’s $/sale feature and represents the amount of money (minus refunds) that network affiliates have earned per sale in the past.
$/Action: Like ClickBank, many products on CJ offer a percentage or dollar amount that you earn per sale of a product, but with CJ you may also sort by the amount earned per lead and click (CPC and CPA).
What To Sell
Just about all of the advertisers that I work with via Commission Junction employ the CPA compensation model. One of the most popular markets both on Commission Junction and among web-surfers right now is paid surveys. Commission Junction has some of the best converting free to join CPA programs on the net such as the paid surveys program Survey Adventure. It pays out an extremely high $4.50 per lead (CPA). Because paid surveys are so popular among college students, such programs convert very well.
For Newbies: The Easy Way To Get Into Affiliate Marketing
The presales page can often take on many other formats such as customer testimonial, anti-scam and programs database page just to name a few. In the end, all of these are simply teasers of a product or products that are so effective, a visitor cannot wait to purchase the product(s) that you are promoting. Give Visitors Hope: Every single day, people buy things. If what they buy is not meant to simply keep them alive, such as food, the product that they buy is meant to improve their life in some way. Because I want to make money and build a name for myself by helping others make money online, thus, improving my life.
I have found “how to make money” informational products to be the best selling on the web, but there are many products that this can apply to. If you decide to take the product review approach, tell visitors how “your” product is so much better than the others. To combat this problem, a great presales page must create a sense of urgency in the visitor. Many people try to do this by putting discount deadlines on their products. It is the manner in which you present your product and how you play on the many factors of an effective presales page. You will NEVER sell a product using the presales page format if the user feels that you do not know what you are talking about. Study up on your product, use this product yourself.
Optional Components
The first three components of an effective sales page/website are not optional. I recall a site that I went to when I first became interested in affiliate marketing (I was 16). It was a database of products to sell online. Review a product or products. Set up a product database.
by Jason S