Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is an interesting and exciting process to make money.
Before you jump in the affiliate marketing, it is important to understand:
1. How affiliate marketing works?
2. How to find products and services to promote them?
3. How to choose the best products that covert the best and how to select the best affiliate program to your target audience?
4. How to get some profitable niche market?
5. How to build web site and how to use pay per click advertising to promote your affiliate program?
6. How to use ezine marketing to increase your affiliate's commissions?
7. How to build your email list and how to promote affiliate programs using email marketing?
8. How to get TRAFFIC to your web site?
9. How to CONVERT your visitors into your merchant's web sites buyers?

Affiliate marketing programs represent one of the best methods to achieve an online success for both affiliate and merchant.
There are several of affiliate marketing programs depending to:
- Merchants goals: make more sales, more subscribers, more visitors,
- Merchants strategies: merchants choose affiliate marketing programs to promote their online business because they are less expensive than others online advertising, but they can run this program for just a pre-determine period.
- Products and services can have a huge impact to select a specific type of affiliate marketing programs

Pay Per Click affiliate marketing programs:

Pay Per Click affiliate marketing programs is the easiest type of affiliate marketing programs for affiliates to earn money. With these techniques, merchants pay affiliate marketing whenever a visitor is referred to the merchant's website via the affiliate links. The affiliate gets paid even if the visitor he refereed does not purchase or downloads or subscribes to anything from the merchants website. Usually, clicks are just some cents for one clicks and not exceeding a dollar.
To determine this amount you can compare it to the important
Pay Per Performance affiliate marketing programs:
Pay Per Performance affiliate marketing programs is the most common
Affiliate marketing type where the merchant pays the affiliate for referral that take an action by buying or download or subscribe. Affiliate is responsible to portion action and supports all fees.

There are two type of Pay Per Performance affiliate marketing programs:
- Pay per sales, and
- Pay per lead.
Pay Per Sale:
With Pay Per Sale affiliate marketing programs, merchant pays affiliate just a commission whenever the visitor referred by affiliate buys something from the merchant's site. Depending to products and services and merchants strategies these commissions are varied from 5% to 90%.

Pay Per Lead:

With Pay Per Lead affiliate marketing programs: the affiliate earns when the potential client that he has referred to the merchants signs up with the merchant. The client becomes a subscriber.

There are more types of affiliate marketing programs such as single-tier, two-tier, multi-tier affiliate marketing, and lifetime commissions:

Single-Tier, Two-Tier, and Multi-Tier Affiliate Marketing

these types of affiliate marketing are based on the different levels or tiers in the affiliate network by which payments are made. In a single-tier affiliate marketing program, the affiliates are only paid based on the direct sales or traffic he has referred to the merchant. All the previously mentioned affiliate marketing types fall under the single-tier classification.

In two-tier affiliate marketing programs, the affiliate is not only paid for the direct traffic or sales that he refers to the merchant's site, but also on every traffic or sales referred by various other affiliates who joined the affiliate program through his recommendation. Example: for the first referred the merchants will pay you 20% and when the visitor that you referred become an affiliate and sends a third person to merchant website and he buys from it you will pay 10%.

Multi-tier affiliate marketing works the same way, although the affiliate gets additional commission for a wider number of affiliates in different tiers in the affiliate network.

Affiliates promote products and at the same time can earn commissions by recruiting affiliates to an affiliate networks or to merchants.

In a two-tier affiliate programs, you have you commissions you can earn them:
1- First tier commissions: where you drive a customer and they buy from your merchants.
2- Second tier commissions: where you refer an affiliate and they make a sale, you will earn a commission on sales generated by new.

First tier commissions are paid when you make sale or lead. The second tier commissions are paid when the new affiliate make a sale or lead.
When you join this type of affiliate program it is critical to ask about the two-tier affiliate programs income is determined as:
1- Straight percentage, % of revenue generated by affiliates that you are refereed.
2- Percentage of a percentage, % of earnings generated by affiliates that you are referred.

Case study
Suppose an affiliate programs that you pay a 20% for first-tier and 10% for two-tier affiliate programs commissions for a product with a price equal to $ 100.

1- % of revenue generated by affiliates that you are refereed
Tier-one affiliate programs commissions:
Your own personal customer referrals are considered Tier-one sales. You are paid 20% of $100 ($20) as a commission on your own personal tier-one sale.
Two-Tier affiliate programs commissions:
When this customer will be an affiliate and refers a third person to the merchants.
The merchant paid this affiliate 20% of $100 ($20) and you paid 10% of $100 ($10).

2- % of earnings generated by affiliates that you are referred:
Tier-one affiliate programs commissions:
Your own personal customer referrals are considered Tier-one sales. You are paid 20% of $100 ($20) as a commission on your own personal tier-one sale.
Two-Tier affiliate programs commissions:
When this customer will be an affiliate and refers a third person to the merchants.
The merchant paid this affiliate 20% of $100 ($20) and you paid 10% of $ 20 ($2).

lifetime commissions: one more important thing you should consider when looking for your affiliate program, it is to get some affiliate program using life time commissions such as hosting services, you will promote some products or services once and you will get paid month after month for something you did once.
Select products or services that people use it every time, keywords research tools (data base), websites sell services memberships.
You have sponsor products or services once and you will get paid from the merchant for months or years as long as your readers is a customer to your merchant.

Lifetime commissions when the merchant pays the affiliate every time the same customer buys products or services from the merchant, not just for the first purchase.

Affiliate programs paying residual commissions for life pays commissions on all recurring fees, such as monthly web hosting fees or auto responder fees.

Lifetime commissions are where you do the work once and then get paid over and over again.

Depending to product you promote, you can take decision:
- The customer need the product generally for a long period of time at this moment residual affiliate program is more interested.
- The customer need the product once and perhaps can buy in the future at this moment high-paying commissions or one time commissions are more interested than residual affiliate program commissions.