Affiliate programs are where you advertise another site's product or service and receive a commission for sending them visitors and/or sales.

Types Of Affiliate Programs

Pay Per Click
These programs are getting fewer and fewer due to less honest webmasters defrauding the programs. A pay per click program will literally pay you for every click on the banner or link placed on your site. Just in case you ever consider clicking the links yourself you will find modern pay per click programs also track the IP address of the clicker, try to defraud them and you could end up losing your commissions, not a good idea.

Pay Per Lead
Pay per lead programs will pay you when a referred user performs some kind of action, for example joining the site's mailing list, or opening a free membership account.

Pay Per Sale
By far the most popular choice for sites offering you a commission. With this type of programme, you get paid a percentage of any sale referred from your site.

Important Points When Choosing An Affiliate Program

Compatibility
While it may sound strange programs closely related to the genre of your site will pay best. If for example, you run a dating site, other dating site affiliate programs may pay you well. Why? because daters quite often join more than one site.

Alternatively, you should try and offer dating related services, a flower site would be an excellent program for the daters to send flowers to the people they meet.

This is just an example, but the more the affiliate program you choose complements your site the more you will make. If you sell bowling balls, find an affiliate program that sells bowling ball cases. Silly examples but you get the idea.

Method Of Payment

Often overlooked, if the site that is operating the affiliate program deals in a different currency than your own, make sure they pay by PayPal or you could pay hefty bank charges by paying a foreign cheque/check into your bank account.

Which type of program should I choose?
Pay per click programs are a little hard to find and often only pay a very small amount per click. Pay per sale programs pay better but rely on the visitor actually making a purchase. Often the best conversions are gained from pay per lead programs.

Extra Site Revenue

Google Ad Sense

Affiliate Programs What Are They?