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What is an affiliate program?:Affiliate programs are designed to help the smaller tiered websites make $$$ while helping the larger websites (Amazon.com, Ebay.com, Google.com, etc) make even more money. Many affiliate programs give you advertising code to put up on your website and whenever someone clicks through to their site from your site, you get paid money. Some affiliate programs pay on a cost per click basis (when someone clicks on the affiliate ad on your site, you get paid a set amount of money regardless of what that users goes on to buy). Most affiliate programs pay on a cost per acquisition or cost per sale. This means you only get paid when someone from your site goes to the affiliates website and actually purchases or buys something. These type of affiliates have always beens watched carefully by smaller websites since it's harder to track a sale that a click and many small websites who sign up as affiliates to larger sites feel cheated sometimes on actual sales. Tracking is the big issue. Is it really possible to track a user over 30 days with a cookie (a small file placed on the end users computer that tells the affiliate program the user came from your site). Many affiliate programs claim to have "cookies" that track 30 days which gives you a good chance to score a sale from your referral. However you look at it, Googles Adsense program is slowly forcing the cost per click ad model to come back into play and eventually no one will work on a cost per sale unless it's to their advantage. We have always preferred a cost per click model, since once the user is on the advertisers site, we have no control anymore. It they get the sale great, if not, it's not our fault and we shouldn't suffer becuase of it. Many ad networks (Doubleclick, FastClick, ValueClick, etc) run successful ads on a network of sites with targeted ad campaigns from their advertisers. They are essentially the middlemen who place ads on sites across the internet for their clients.
Which affiliate programs are the best?:Ebay and Google have some of the top affiliate programs online today. Ebay has been around since the start of the internet with their auction business and the Ebay Affiliates program is notorious for generating many members $1000's every month. Affiliate programs sometimes are hard to trust and lack sufficient tracking, but Ebay works directly with Commission Junction (CJ.com) and provides great online reports and timely payments. You get paid per bid, buy now, or new registrant (as much as $20 per new Ebay member). Googles Adsense takes it a bit further in that you only need to place their code on your site once and they will forever serve targeted ads to your pages content. You get paid on a cost per click basis (usually $.20 to $.40 a click). Google offers a variety of ad types (banners, skyscrapers, text links, etc) so you can easily integrate their ad code into your site without effecting the layout too much. Googles Adsense has really taken off since 2004 and it currently pays out almost $500 million to their affiliates each quarter. Netflix had a really great affiliate program with their online movie rental model, but it has lost some of it's steam lately with lots of competition and the payouts just aren't that great anymore.Google Adsense, What is it? How does it work?:Google Adsense is slowly dominating all ad networks and cost per click ad networks on the internet. Their proprietory ad serving software targets users to advertisers better than anything before it. It's really simple to implement on any or all of your sites. Just sign up at Google for an Adsense account and once accepted you can started placing text links, banners, skyscrapers, tables, etc on your site. The ad code will automatically pull up text links (or image links if you want) that are the most relevant ads for the content that you offer on your page. As users move around your various pages and content, the ads that come up will also change accordingly (i.e. if you have a page on horses, then ads related to horse products come up). Google provides lots of customization tools on their site to help integrate the ads right into your content for the best results. They pay once a month by check and you can check your stats 24/7 through their website. We feel this is the best affiliate program on the internet and will continue to deliver huge profits to all its affiliates.Pay Per Click Programs, are they worth it?:After years of research, pay per click programs are worth it. Both advertiser and affiliate site get what they want and the payouts are fair. Google has helped push this industry along (just when CPM ads seemed to be the only ads) and now cpc networks are thriving because advertisers are only paying when someone clicks on their ads and websites are getting better targeted ads on their sites and increasing their revenue (often making more $$$ than they did in the high CPM days). Nothing like targeted ads to show people that the internet is here to stay and that everyone can make money. CPM ads are still critical for brand advertisers (Mcdonalds, Coke, Intel, etc) since they are not looking for clicks but maintaining or establishing brand identity.
Do you have a quality site or product that belongs in this guide? We are always happy to evaluate or review new products and websites. Feel free to contact us at the email address below and let us know about you. If you have a demo product you'd like us to look at, please contact us before sending anything. Thank you.
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