What to look for before joining an Affiliate Program

Here are several of the top factors you should take into consideration:

Stability of the company and program

What I found to be the one of highest priorities for most webmasters is the stability of the affiliate program, and the company. This should be one of your top considerations when evaluating programs. Is the company stable and financially sound? Do they offer assistance with promoting the opportunity? And, do they pay in a timely fashion? Often, webmasters have been lured in by offers of high commissions, only to find out they will never see a paycheck, despite referring hundreds, or even thousands, of visitors.

Synergies with your site

Many sites sign up for every affiliate program they can, imagining if they make a few bucks on each, that they will be profitable. For a select few, this may very well work. However, for most sites it will not, and many cases you will turn off your audience because of the 'over-commercialization' of your site. As you are considering the various affiliate programs available, be sure to consider what exactly your audience, your visitors, might be interested in clicking on, and eventually buying.

Commission Tracking

An important aspect to consider is whether or not the affiliate program offers some way for you to track your sales, and even the number of visitors you refer. There are several ways this can be accomplished, such as real-time, online reports showing you sales and your commissions. Or perhaps sales can be tracked through a simple email each time you receive a new customer. This can be very important for allowing you to test and evaluate the effectiveness of the program, make comparisons with other programs or advertising opportunities, and give you piece of mind that you are receiving what is fairly do.

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Making the Most of Pay-per-Click Programs

This first article focuses on helping you decide which pay-per-click programs to join. There are a variety of factors to look at when evaluating pay-per-click programs to determine which are best for your site, and which are going to have the best site-generating-income for you.

There are several main factors to evaluate before signing up and adding banners to your site:

1) How do they count click-throughs?
2) What do they pay and what is their payment history?
3) What are their payment terms?
4) What other tools or features do they give you?


How do they count click-throughs?

This is an often overlooked factor of pay-per-click programs, since it is usually not highlighted and often is only mentioned in the fine print of the program's operating agreement. Most programs are set up to pay you one time for each unique IP address that generates a click in a 24 hour (or longer) period.

The reasoning behind this is simple: it prevents the program from being cheated by an unscrupulous affiliate that makes it their full time job to click over and over again on their own banners.

However, this method of preventive action also poses a threat to your ability to earn a fair income. Since many ISPs, especially larger ones, assign IP addresses dynamically, it is entirely possible that a large number of clicks would not be counted since they are coming from different people, but using the same ISP, and therefore the same IP address. Also, clicks from the same person, in a 24 hour period, even if they came during different visits to your site, would not be counted.

What do they pay and what is their payment history?

What a particular vendor or network pays is perhaps the most obvious factor for judging a pay-per-click program. This is simply what can you make per click you refer from the program. Pay-per-click programs range from paying $0.01 to $0.20 or more per click. However, many webmasters sign up for pay-per-click programs without researching whether or not the program has a solid history of paying their affiliates.

A general rule of thumb is to avoid programs that offer what seem to be too large of a payout to webmasters.

Just be aware that the programs that offer to pay the highest are not always the best. If they offer $0.30 per click but never pay you, you would have been much better off accepting $0.10 or $0.15 from a trusted network.

Also, avoid programs that pay under $0.01 per click, since they are generally not worth your time given the number of clicks you need to refer to make a decent income from your site.

What are their payment terms?

This is another factor that is often overlooked by webmasters. Many programs have strict criteria on when they make payment to their affiliates for click-throughs. Be aware of the minimum amount you must accumulate in commissions before they will mail a check to you.

Generally, a pay-per-click program should send checks when between $25 to $50 in commissions have been accumulated. Less than that is preferable of course, but be on the look-out for programs that require higher conditions to be met, or which combine high minimum with low per-click payouts.

What other tools or features do they give you?

An additional factor of evaluating pay-per-click programs is to determine what other tools or features they offer you to assist in generating the most income from your site. Some programs give you online tools to easily manage your account and to allow you to easily determine which ads you would like to host, and which you would like to block.

Other features include giving you the ability to earn additional income by referring new webmasters to the program. For certain types of sites, this can be an excellent additional source of income, however most sites will not see a high enough volume of referrals to make much of an impact.

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Improving Pay-per-Click Click-Through Rates (2)

In order to get higher click through rate (since this is the most things ever needed by affiliate), there are al least 4 specific ways any web site can use to improve their income through pay-per-click programs:

1. Improve Ad Visibility

2. Decrease Competition

3. Use a Call to Action

4. Highlight the Ad

5. Target Your Web Site



1. Improve Ad Visibility

One of the most basic means to improve click-through rates is to improve the visibility of a given banner ad on your web site. This means positioning the ad in a place where more of your visitors will either see the ad, or in some way be inclined to click on it. Although this seems obvious, there are several trade offs, depending on the focus and style of your web site.


some studies showed that standard-sized banner ads at the top of the page, or about 1/3 of the way down the page show the highest overall click-throughs.
other studies have a little bit differences. Ads placed next to the scroll-bar on the right, at the bottom of the page, but above the fold (the visible part of a page before a person needs to scroll down), showed the highest click-throughs. this study used smaller 125 x 125 ads, compared to the standard banners (468 x 60) that most banner networks and programs allow (or provide).

2. Decrease Competition

too many banner or graphics placer on a page could distort visitors’ focuses. The most reason is that the more choices they give, the better the chance the person will find something of interest, and then decide to click-through. However, this rarely true.

Think of this!! The more ads and graphics you have on a page the more you confuse your visitors. When a person visits your web site, different parts of the site are in competition for the visitor's eyes.

The more banners there are, the more their eyes are distracted. Different colors and flashing animations can simply cause information overload, forcing your visitor to leave (this is the worst think to happen) yout page, or tune out all banners on the site.

By reducing the amount of banners and graphics, your visitor will be much more likely to focus in on an ad, and therefore be more more likely to click on it. A page should have no more than two banner ads. One at or near the top as described above, and another at or near the bottom.

3. Use a Call to Action

Be carefull using this option since different pay-per-click programs and networks have different rules about using a call to action. you should (or must) invest your time to learn the term of services before implementing this strategy.

But, when allowed, adding a call to action to your site in general, or near a banner ad, can be effective in improving click-throughs.

there are some call to action that attract your visitor to click on it, as ‘To keep this site free, please support our sponsors'

4. Highlight the Ad

If the program you promote doesn't allow you to use a call to action (or even if they do), a generally perfectly legal method of improving click-throughs is to enhance your site to highlight the banner ads and make them more visible to your visitors. An example of this would be to incorporate the banners into a side border or menu on your web site, use a Drop Shadow effect in popular graphics programs such as Microsoft Image Composer or Adobe Photoshop to surround the ad with a shadow to lend visual appeal, or adding even more complicated graphics to bring attention to your ads.

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Affiliate Program Terms (1)

Discussing about affiliate program, we have to knows basic terms usually or frequently used. Here are terms used when describing affiliate programs and the most common definitions:
Affiliate, Merchant, Commission, Affiliate Program, Pay-per-sale, Pay-per-lead, Pay-per-click, Pay-per-impression, Pay-per-impression, Conversion ratio, Click-Through Ratio, CPM, Two-Tier Commission, Residual Commission.


Affiliate: An independent party that promotes the products or services of a merchant in exchange for a commission.

Merchant: A company that has set up an affiliate program and has agreed to share a commission with affiliates that promote their site, products or services.

Commission: An amount of income you receive for referring a sale, lead or click to a merchant's site.

Affiliate Program: an affiliate program is any type of revenue sharing program where an affiliate web site receives a portion of income for delivering sales, leads, or traffic to a merchant web site

Pay-per-sale: A program where you receive a commission for each sale of a product or service that you refer to a merchant's web site. Generally offers the highest commissions and the lowest conversion ratio.
Pay-per-lead: A program where you receive a commission for each sales lead for a product or service that you refer to a merchant's web site. Generally offers mid-range commissions and mid-range to high conversion rations.

Pay-per-click: A program where you receive a commission for each valid click (visitor) you refer to a merchant's web site. Generally offers low commissions (range of $0.01 to $0.25 per click), and a very high conversion.

Pay-per-impression: A program where you receive a commission each time a merchant's ad or link is displayed on your site. Generally offers the lowest commissions, but a nearly 100% conversion, often resulting in the highest earnings potential.

Conversion ratio: The ratio of visitors from your site that are 'converted' to a sale, lead or click, and go on to earn the you a commission.

Click-Through Ratio: The percentage of visitors who click-through on a link to visit the merchant's web site. Pay-per-click program earnings are highly dependent on click-through rations. You can improved this ratio by a variety of means: making links more visible to visitors, adding personal comments or testimonials about the benefits of a product, or even reducing the number of possible links that a visitor can follow.

CPM: The practice of calculating a cost per thousand ad displays. It is used with programs that pay on a impression basis, with the CPM rate being the amount you earn for every 1000 times an advertisement is displayed.

Two-Tier Commission: Two-tier, or multi-tier, refers to the practice of an affiliate merchant paying commissions to both the affiliate that referred a sale, lead or click, but also to the affiliate that referred that affiliate to the program.

Residual Commission: Residual commissions refer to programs that provide affiliates the ability to earn an income month after month for referring a sale to a merchant.

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