As discussed in the last article, the sales website requires a Landing Page, Order Page or Shopping Cart and a Payments Page at the minimum. For a small website selling a single (or very few) products, all the three components can be accommodated on the same page.

Additionally, a sales website will need search-engine-optimized pages to get the free traffic from search engines. These are pages that are optimized for the search terms that potential customers actually use to search for your product.

The Landing Page

In the context of selling a product, the landing page serves the function of either creating a sales lead or persuading the visitor to make an immediate purchase. Sales leads involve capturing contact information so that you can follow up with the prospect in the hope of ultimately getting a sale. Lead generation pages are best for high value products and for services.

For lower value and consumer products, an immediate sale is typically preferred.

In both cases, the landing page involves persuading the visitor to take the action desired by the seller. It contains “sales copy” that typically uses the AIDA approach to get the reader take the desired action.

AIDA : AIDA stands for certain characteristics that the sales copy must possess.

• Astands for Attention Value, i.e. the sales copy must immediately catch the attention of the visitor.

• Istands for Interest Value, i.e. the copy must arouse the reader’s interest (say, by talking about a problem that the reader faces).

• Dstands for Desire Value, i.e. the copy must create a desire for the product (say, by convincingly showing how the offer is a value-for-money solution to the reader’s problem) and

• Astands for Action Value, i.e. the copy must very clearly indicate what the reader must do (such as filling up the lead-generation form or clicking the Buy Now button).

To create effective AIDA copy you must have a very clear idea about your customer – the specific problem faced by the person, the solutions available to the person at present and what kind of appeal will get the person interested in your offer.

The Order Page

In the case a single product, the order page can consist of a Buy Now button. Clicking the button will take the reader to the payment page, which might be at your site if you have made arrangements to accept payments (say, by letting the customer pay by credit card).

If you sell multiple products, you will need an on-line Shopping Cart. On-line shopping carts are pieces of software that displays different products along with relevant descriptions and other details to the shopper, and allows the person to select particular products to buy. After the selection is complete, the buyer is led to a payment page where that total order value is shown.

The Payments Page

If you want to accept credit cards directly from customers at your site, you need to complete a lot of formalities.

• You will have to open a merchant account with a bank allowing you to accept specific credit cards

• Arrange a payment gateway to link your website to the credit card processing agency and merchant bank account (if your merchant account does not come with a payment gateway)

• Create a secure page for the customers to enter their credit card details (so that the details will be encrypted before being transmitted over the Net, preventing hacking).

• Code the payments page coordinating all the above

For small sellers, it is much more practical to avail services like Google Checkout or PayPal who will attend to the formalities and provide you a simple mechanism to accept customer payments, such as the Buy Now button mentioned earlier. You can incorporate the code snippet that they provide into the code of your order page at the desired location. In case of multiple items, the button can be displayed against each item.

In an earlier article we looked at the option of charging website readers for allowing them access to premium content on your website. We observed that premium content typically consist of information or know-how that is not easily available free. We also saw that the typical solution was to allow free access to a sample of the high-value content and restrict access to most of the premium content.

It follows that we should be able to keep the premium content behind a firewall with restricted access to authorized persons, i.e. subscribers who have paid for the access. Ideally, we should also be able to prevent unauthorized use of the content by even the authorized users, such as posting it free elsewhere. These capabilities are available under two broad options:

• Website subscription software that we buy, or

• Subscription website administration services that we hire.

Subscription Website Software

There is free software plug-ins such as MemberWing that can be downloaded and activated at your WordPress blog. Such software has comparatively simple capabilities.

At the other end are packages like MemberGate that offer a large number of capabilities including Subscription Manager, Shopping Cart, Affiliate Program and your own Discussion Forums.

• Subscription Manager can automate such tasks as new member signup, sending subscription renewal notices and managing different membership plans.

• Shopping Cart enables you to offer physical, digital and downloadable products for sale at your site.

• Affiliate Program capability will make it possible to recruit affiliates, track their performance, compute compensation using applicable rules and provide reports to affiliates.

• Discussion groups allow creation of loyal communities who will visit your site again and again to participate in the discussions. These groups will typically need rules, setting up, moderation and maintenance, all complex tasks.

Options like those mentioned just above come at a price and the software tends to be expensive.

Subscription Website Administration Services

Vendors such as SubHub provide full administration services for subscription websites. You just sign in as a user of the service, paying a periodical charge and are then able to use the numerous facilities offered on-line. No software download and installation is involved and hence non-technical persons will find this a better option.

With Web-based solutions like those offered by such services, you can

• Build professional looking websites using templates

• Publish different types of content without the need for any technical expertise

• Charge for premium content such as expert articles, forum membership, digital downloads and other products offered at your site

• Include other monetization options such as advertisements

• Run affiliate programs to increase your sales

• Forget about administrative routines like installation, maintenance, security, backup and even things like hosting and renewal

Comparison of the Solutions

If you buy subscription website software, you have full control over everything. The only requirement is that you should possess the know-how required to attend to all these things, including installation, creating content, managing members, maintenance, backups, security, upgrades and all the other incidentals involved.

If you opt for a Web-based platform that offers the capabilities against a periodical charge, you are freed of most of the routine things. The time saved can then be spent on creating really valuable content and developing/implementing key strategies for promoting your business.

Generally speaking, the software option is for technical-minded persons while the service option is for business-oriented users.

Subscription websites where people pay to read premium content is one way to make money with your website. You offer a sample of your content free so that readers can see its value. The premium content is hidden behind a firewall accessible only to paid subscribers.

Let us make one thing clear at the beginning. Readers are not going to pay for information that they can easily get elsewhere. To charge for content, you must provide expert information that are not easily available, and that people want.

Website Subscriptions for On-line Media

While print news has been traditionally offered under the subscription model, on-line news have been typically offered free. On-line content was monetized through advertisements displayed in the content. However, this model is becoming unviable because ad click rates and payments for clicks are both declining steeply.

Newspapers are now trying to adopt website subscription model to become profitable. However, people have become accustomed to free content on the Web and are reluctant to pay. Subscription numbers fall steeply when readers are asked to pay.

Free Access Communities and Privacy

On the other hand, there are some factors that make readers wary of free access sites. Readers typically form communities with shared interests, and like to comment on news and other members’ views. When access is free, there will be many lurkers in these communities harvesting information about members.

People are becoming increasingly conscious about the need to protect their privacy and many might be willing to pay to protect it. This is an opportunity for subscription-based Web communities. If you can provide such a forum, and content of value to members, you can consider creating a subscription website.

A Subscription Site to Impart Your Hard-Earned Knowledge

If you have training in a particular field, and have gained specific experience of producing desired outcomes by following specific procedures, you can think of creating a subscription website. Many people will be interested in learning such practical things as how to write computer programs, or publish a book that they plan to write.

Draw on your know-how and write in authentic and complete detail about different practical (or reference) issues. Add pages regularly so that users will find fresh content and the site becomes a substantial reference source. In the free section, show samples of what they will find on the paid pages.

Generate traffic to your website using traffic generating campaigns. If you have done things right, including selecting the right topic to write about, you should be able to generate income through subscriptions. The links below will help you get more information about publishing a subscription site.

Subscription Website Resources

The following links will take you to sites that offer different kinds of information you need to create successful subscription websites

How publishers can make money on-line: Mequoda provides all kinds of information about subscription websites.

Creating a membership website: Subhub will take over the routines of maintaining your subscription website, leaving you free to focus on developing valuable content.

Generating traffic to your website: Website Traffic Building discusses specific methods to promote your website and attract interested visitors.

In the next article we discuss the options for creating a subscription website.

These days you can sell almost all products on the Internet. Even bulky and perishable products can be promoted using a Website. People search the net even for local purchases and bulky/perishable products can be promoted locally.

Compact products can be promoted worldwide, and if the product is downloadable, like software or an eBook, it can even be delivered instantly against payment.

Selling Your Product Involves Promoting Your Website

Creating a website describing your product, and providing facilities to order and pay for it, is only the starting point. Far more critical is the task of promoting the website so that people interested in your product becomes aware of your offer. Your website will not come to their attention automatically.

Promoting a website is a time-consuming exercise involving work on several fronts, as outlined below:

• SEO:

Make your website search engine friendly so that search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN will bring visitors interested in your product. This involves Keword Research to find search terms that your potential customers use, and search engine optimization as discussed in this SEO Article.

• Links:

Links pointing to your site from relevant sources not only bring traffic but also increases your search engine visibility. The articles at traffic building resources discuss various ways for building links.

• Ad Campaigns:

Ad campaigns can be PayPerClick ads using tools such as Google AdWords or banner and text ads on other sites against straight payments. Website Ad Brokers will help you find publishers to publish your ads.

• Affiliate Progrms:

Recruit affiliates to promote your products and send visitors to your website. Agencies such as Linkshare can help you find affiliates willing to promote your products, as well as track the clicks/leads/sales that each affiliate brings in and take care of computing commissions due to each affiliate and pay them.

Let us now look at the essential contents of a sales website.

The Sales Website

Product sales websites need certain specific kinds of pages:

• Landing Pages:

A landing page is so called because it is where visitors land from the links, i.e. search engines, other websites, ads and affiliate pages. The landing page should describe the product and also create a desire to buy it. This is done through good sales copy, which we discuss in the next article.

• Shopping Cart or Order Page:

These are pages that help customers place the order for what they want to buy. If there is only a single or few products, an order page will be enough. Where you sell numerous products, you will need an on-line shopping cart to which buyers can add the products they select.

• Payment Processing Page:

This is the checkout page where the buyer can make the payment for the order. There are several options for getting paid that we discuss in the next article.

For a small sales site that sells a single product, all the three pages above can be combined into a single page.

Shipping Arrangements

Don’t forget to look carefully at how you will deliver your product to your customers. Proper arrangements to attend to this key task must be in place before you start promoting your website. Otherwise, you can find yourself in a mess with a lot of angry customers.

Downloadable products can be delivered over the Net by providing the customer an authorized download link. Just make sure that the link is not used for multiple downloads. Physical products can be delivered through couriers such as Fedex.

In the next article, we discuss the pages of a sales website in more detail.

The case with your website is also similar. If the site is visited by a large number of Web surfers, advertisers will be interested to put up ads on the site. Niche sites catering to particular groups can also attract merchants trying to sell to those groups. The advertisers will pay you to display their ads.

If your website has too few visitors, you should build up the traffic first. Refer to Traffic Building Methods for ways to increase traffic to your website.

How Do You Find Advertisers?
You can of course visit different websites, and use the Contact Us link at each to seek advertisements. You can highlight the specific advantages that the site owners will get by advertising on your site. However, that kind of approach is tedious work, and might also discourage you if you do not get satisfactory responses.

There are much better ways to get advertisements. There are third parties who work with website publishers on the one hand and merchant advertisers on the other. You open an account with these third party advertisement networks and they will get advertisements for your site.

In the discussion below, we mention contextual ads, banner ads, text link ads etc. These terms are explained in a separate article.

Advertising Networks
Google AdSense and Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) serve contextual ads on your website. You register the website with these agencies, and insert code snippets that they provide in the code of the pages where you want the advertisements to appear. Full instructions for inserting the code, and of optimizing the click rates, are provided by AdSense/YPN.

Once the code snippets are inserted at appropriate places on the page, as decided by you, ads will begin to appear. When a visitor to your site clicks on the ad, you get a share of the ad revenue that the agencies earn. The agencies will check for fraudulent clicks, i.e. clicks by persons not really interested in the ad, and penalize publishers responsible.

Banner networks such as ValueClick, Advertising and Burstmedia will supply banner and other kinds of advertisements that you can display on your WebPages. Here also, you just insert code snippets in the codes of your page and the ads will appear. However, these are not typically context sensitive ads and you will have to select those ads that are likely to get greatest response on your pages.

To produce desired results, you will have to select ads that are relevant to your page content. Irrelevant ads can irritate your readers, leading to loss of goodwill for you. Another issue is to read the Terms & Conditions carefully.

For getting text link ads that occupy little space on your web page you can check out Text Link Ads, LinkWorth and TNX. Text link advertisers have link popularity objective in mind in addition to advertising objective, and there is a great demand for link popularity.

For PopUp and PopUnder ads that appear on pages separate from your own web page, you can check the same ad networks mentioned above. In this case, you typically insert the relevant ad code snippet in the … section of your page code instead of in the main body. The ads will then load every time your page loads.

The ad networks might also set up the code so that the ad will appear only once a session and not every time the page loads. This is less irritating to the readers of your page, but reduces the number of impressions of the ad itself.

In the next article, we look at several terms that you should be familiar with if you plan to sell ads on your website.

In an earlier article, we outlined how you can make money by displaying ads on your website. That article also had links to major advertising networks that will get advertisers for you.

To really make money from ads on your website, you should know the different options available. A familiarity with these options will help you select just the right kind of ads and payment modes that suit your situation and skills.

Contextual Ads, Banner Ads, Text Link Ads and More

Advertising networks offer different kinds of ads, and the CPM, CPC and CPA models of getting paid. If you approach advertisers directly (instead of going through the ad networks), you will have to negotiate everything, and might even have to install software to count impressions and clicks.

Contextual Ads: Contextual ads are tailored to your web page content. For example, if your page discusses pet dogs, the ads might offer dog food, dog collars and all other dog-related products and services. The ad networks will analyze the context and serve relevant ads.

Banner Ads: Though “banner” refers to a format, by banner ads we typically refer to ads that allow you greater control over what ads appear on your page. Contextual ads can mean that competitors get to display their ads on your page. When you select a banner ad yourself, you can select a merchant who is not a competitor, for example.

Text Links: Text links are short text that you display on your web page. These texts constitute live links to the advertisers’ websites. Text link advertisers typically seek “link popularity” in addition to displaying a sales message.

Popups and Popunders: These are advertisements that appear not on your own page, but as separate pages when your page is viewed. Popups appear in the foreground, often distracting the reader, while popunders remain in the background that you see when you close the main page.

CPM, CPC and CPA

You get paid in different ways for displaying the advertisements. CPM, CPC and CPA refer to these different methods of payment.

CPM: Under CPM, you get paid a certain amount per thousand impressions. Impressions are determined by page-views (not ‘hits’) that your website gets. If your site has many visitors, and they visit many pages of the site during each visit, you will have many page-views. Each time a page with an ad is viewed, the ad gets an “impression”.

CPC: CPC refers to the arrangement where you get paid when your site readers not only view but also click on the advertisements. You get paid a few cents or even dollars for each click, depending on the value of the click to the advertiser. Remember that if you try to get the ads clicked (or click them yourself) without any genuine interest in what the ads offer, the amounts paid to you can become too low to be worth it.

CPA: Under CPA, even clicking is not enough. Instead a sale or sales lead must be generated if you are to get paid. CPA ads can produce the highest level of income for you, even a hundred or more dollars per sale.

Your situation and skill level should determine which of these options you select. If you know how to promote products, and pre-sell them, CPA will be the best option. On the other hand, if you can only display the ads at your site without any active promotion of the offers in the ads, you are better with CPM or CPC.

In the last article, we looked at the monetization opportunities offered by an ezine. These included selling your own product or service, promoting affiliate products, selling ads on the ezine real estate and charging for subscriptions.

In this article, we look at the specifics of publishing an ezine, and also how to enhance its money-making potential. We also include some links that will help you attend to the issues involved.

Build a Mailing List

You have to build a mailing list to send your ezine to. Typically, you do this by creating sign up form at your website. You also provide an incentive for people to sign up. Here is an article with sign up form tips.

The incentive can be some freebie of value to your site visitors. For example, if your site is about sailing, you can offer an e-book on sail boats free to subscribers.

The more durable kind of incentive is the prospect of getting valuable information and tips on a continuing basis. If your website has great content on sailing, for example, and you offer a newsletter that will provide sailing news and tips, many readers might subscribe to it.

There should be a database to which the subscribers are added. This database is your “list”. Typically, this will be targeted list, say a list of sailing enthusiasts. It is this targeting that makes it an attractive option for advertisers who have products that will interest the targeted group.

Manage the Mailings

Once you have a list, you can start sending out ezines to the members of the list. This is not as simple as it sounds. If the list is large, you will need to use bulk mailing facilities. You will also have to handle:

• New subscriber signups
• Unsubscribe requests from subscribers
• Emails that bounce, i.e. mails that cannot be delivered owing to one reason or other

If the unsubscribed members are not immediately removed, you could face spam complaints. If the bounces are not removed, your list will contain invalid email addresses, and become a lower quality list.

You will need list management software, or list management services from dedicated list managers, to handle the above tasks. Aweber is a reputed list management service that handles all the tasks, and also provides high-value statistics about each mailing.

Producing the Ezines

All of your subscribers might not use HTML-enabled email programs. So you have to publish a text version that can be sent to all. An option to select the version, text or HTML, can be provided to subscribers.

The text versions are best with a 65 character limit for each line. At the end of 65 characters, press Enter key to insert a hard carriage break. Such limited length lines will display correctly in practically all email clients. Otherwise, the newsletters can be incorrectly formatted in some email clients, creating an unpleasant impression.

Deliverability is another issue that you have to attend while creating the ezine. Certain words and phrases in the subject line or body of the newsletter can trigger spam filters and send your ezine to the junk box. Use a spam checker such as the one available at Programmers Heaven. Your list manager might also provide spam checkers.

Enhance the Success Potential of Your Ezine

• Provide content of real value to your readers in each issue of your ezine. Use your topic expertise, or tap expert contributors, to do this.
• Limit the number of advertisements and check their placement to ensure that the ads will not drown out the content, or prove too distracting to the readers
• Select a name for the ezine that clearly indicates what type of content it will contain
• Select a subject line for each mailing that will intrigue or interest the readers so that they will read the mail. Even high value content can be destroyed by a poor subject line
• Review the statistics that your list manager (or list management software) provides and understand what is happening.
• Stick to your publishing schedule

Ezines are newsletters that you send out periodically to subscribers. Subscriptions are typically obtained through sign-up forms at your (or third party) websites, and are re-confirmed to eliminate spam complaints. The reconfirmation is done because people can send email addresses of other people to you and the latter might then raise spam complaints when you send mail to them.

In this article we focus on the monetization opportunities provided by ezines. In the next article we look at the practical issues involved in publishing an ezine, including the all important issue of how to build a mailing list.

Mailing Lists are the Key to Monetization Opportunities

A targeted mailing list is the core requirement to tap the monetization potential of ezines. A list of email addresses is said to be targeted when the addressees are interested in a common topic, such as sailing. You can sell sailing supplies more easily to a list of sailing enthusiasts.

Whereas you might get a response of less than 1 percent if you send mails to a general list, you might be able to get a 10% response if the mailing is done to a targeted list. The mailing list also allows you to send follow up mails, and this increases response rates because many interested recipients might buy only after a number of contacts.

Promote Products through Ezines

A mailing list created using sign-up forms at your website will consist of people who have already indicated their interest in your topic. If that topic is related to your product, you thus have a list of people apparently interested in your product, and mailings to this group can generate better response rates.

If you don’t have a product of your own, you can select other products that are relevant to your theme. You can promote these products as an affiliate and earn commissions. For finding affiliates, you can join affiliate networks like LinkShare and ClickBank.

People do not always buy on the first contact. That does not mean they are not interested. They might be pre-occupied, or might not be immediately in need of the product. In such cases, follow up mailings can remind them about it (or reach them when they are ready to buy).

Earn Income from Advertisements

When you have achieved a subscriber base in thousands, you can start earning income by displaying advertisements on your newsletter. There are ezine ad brokers such as Ezine Ad Auctions and general ad networks such as Platform A that can help you find advertisers.

The amount you can earn from ads depends on both the number of subscribers for your ezine as well as the target group it reaches. Generally speaking, you can expect $20 for 1000 subscribers. If your publication reaches business decision makers, you can charge more.

Charging for Ezine Subscription

In theory, you can earn money by charging a subscription for your ezine. In practice, it is not only difficult, but might not even be worthwhile. Charging for subscription reduces number of subscribers drastically (by tens of times).

On the other hand, if you spend time and money on promoting a free ezine, you can probably get more by selling ads to be published on your high-circulation ezine.

To get paying subscribers, you must publish content that is not easily available free on the net. For example, secret tips on making money from the Internet can get many people interested. However, you will have to bridge the credibility gap as there are too many unworkable “secrets” offered by many.

The best option is to start with a free ezine, provide great content on that ezine to build subscriber trust, and then offer them a paid version that offers more than the free version.

In the next article, we will look at the practical issues of publishing an ezine, and also the requirements for its successful monetization.

If you do not have a product of your own, you can sell the products of other merchants. This arrangement is known as affiliate marketing and comes in different flavors. In this article we take a broad look at affiliate marketing and how to succeed with it while the next article gets into the smaller details.

A Quick Look at Affiliate Programs

You create an affiliate account with a merchant who runs an affiliate program, and get an affiliate ID. The typical next step is to get some publicity material from the merchant website, such as banners or text links with your ID incorporated, and display it at your website. Alternatively, you can plan your own ad campaign and send visitors through your affiliate ID to the merchant’s sales page.

The affiliate arrangement can be CPM, CPC, CPL or CPS, which we discuss in the next article. The merchant pays the affiliate for ad impressions (CPM), clicks on the ad (CPC), lead generation (CPL) or a sale (CPS). Affiliate management systems of the merchant keep track of impressions, clicks, leads and sales that are generated by each affiliate.

We look at affiliate programs in more detail in the next article, where you will also find links to locate an affiliate program.

Affiliate Marketing Success

Picking up any merchant who has an affiliate program and displaying the ads provided by that merchant on your website is not the way to succeed with affiliate programs. The key steps for affiliate success are:

Build Traffic to Your Website: This is the prime requirement for affiliate success. Even if you attend to all the other requirements, if your website has little traffic few people are likely to see the ads. Only a small percentage of those who see the ads are likely to take the action that brings you commission (such as clicking, filling up forms or buying).

Select Relevant Ads: Select products and services in which your particular site visitors will be interested. Successful affiliates develop websites that have a specific theme and valuable content. People interested in that theme come to the website to read the high value content. These people are more likely to respond to ads for products and services that are in line with the theme, e.g. readers of your pet dogs website are more likely to respond to dog-training ads than to web hosting ads.

Select Good Programs: Affiliate programs differ in the rates of commission and other terms that they offer, the effectiveness of their sales page and the statistics they provide to affiliates. An ideal program is one that:

• Offers 25% or more as commission for a sale,
• Has a sales page that is likely to create a strong desire to buy and
• Provides statistics about ad impressions, clicks and leads/sales that were generated by you

Use the Product or Service: The most effective promotion is that promotion where you describe the specific benefits you yourself obtained by using the recommended product or service. Such descriptions get convincing authenticity when you have actually used the product or service and received the benefits. Otherwise you run the risk of recommending a dud product or service and damaging your reputation seriously.

Promote Effectively: The benefit experience description mentioned above is an example of effective promotion. So are product reviews as when you review a book or the features of a digital camera or even the contents of a website. Confining yourself to merely displaying the ad is not effective promotion. You have to plan a specific campaign to market each affiliate product.

Monitoring and Testing: Putting up an ad then forgetting about it is a sure way to achieve disappointing results. You have to keep track of what is happening on the ground, and try to identify the reasons for any underperformance. Only that way can you do something to improve performance (including dropping some programs and replacing them with others). Use the statistics that merchants, and your own webhost, provide to understand what is going on.

We provide links to locating good affiliate programs in the next article.

As we mentioned in the last article, you can sell the products of other merchants if you do not have a product or service of your ownl. You join the affiliate program of a merchant, get an affiliate ID and also some publicity material that the merchant has designed for use by affiliates.

You display the ads at your website, or send them out through emails to your mailing list. And the merchant pays you for the ad impressions, or clicks on the ad, or a lead generated or a sale.

Affiliate ID

Merchants give each affiliate a unique ID. All your advertisements and campaigns must incorporate this ID in the link that sends visitors to the merchant site. Otherwise, the merchant has no way of knowing who sent the visitor.
You can advertisements incorporating this ID if you log into your affiliate account and get the code for displaying a particular banner or other ad.

If you are running the campaign with your own ads and materials, don’t forget to incorporate this ID into the link that sends visitors to the merchant site.

Affiliate Marketing Compensation

CPM:- You display the merchant’s ad at your website and get paid a few dollars for every thousand ad impressions. Each time a web page at your site is viewed there is one impression for each of the ads displayed on that page. However, not all impressions might be paid for. Merchants might stipulate that only “unique” visits in a day will be counted as a payable impression, i.e. if the same visitor views the page a number of times in a day, it will be counted only as one impression.

CPC:- Under the CPC arrangement, an impression alone is not enough. The site visitor must click on the ad and go to the merchant’s page. Merchants watch out for fraudulent clicks, i.e. clicking the ad yourself and other such means of inflating the number of clicks. A click is considered genuine only if it is made by a person really interested in the advertisement.

CPL:- Even a click is not enough in this case. Your reader must go further and take some action that generates a “lead” for the merchant to follow up. Often, this might involve nothing more than completing a form at the merchant’s site providing contact details.

CPS:- A sale must take place under this arrangement, and that too a sale on that visit. Some merchants, however, might make arrangements to keep track of affiliates who introduce a prospective customer first, and pay that affiliate if that prospect makes a purchase on a subsequent visit.

In general, CPM arrangements pay lowest and CPS the highest. You can even get hundreds of dollars for each sale.

Passive Income: In some cases a merchant gets continuing business from each customer, as when web hosting companies get renewal fees every month or year. In such cases, some merchants pay the concerned affiliate a commission each time the merchant gets paid. This is called passive income because the affiliate does not need to make any further efforts.

Down Lines: Another dimension involves an affiliate building a down line of sub affiliates. If an affiliate brings in another affiliate, the latter is considered a sub affiliate of that affiliate. For each sale made by the sub affiliate, the original affiliate also gets a small affiliate commission.

Finding Affiliate Programs

As mentioned in the last article, you should select only those products and services that are aligned to your website’s topic. A dog lover might not be interested in golf clubs (unless that person also happens to be a golf player). Even if you select the best golf club affiliate program, your pet dog site might not generate many clicks for the golf club ad.

Typically, you don’t approach merchants directly. Instead, you go to networks that connect advertisers and publishers. Some networks have facilities to serve “contextual” ads at your web pages, i.e. they analyze the page content and serve those ads that are likely to be of interest to readers of that particular content. Google AdSense is the most well-known example of such a network.

Other networks will allow you to select merchants and particular programs. They display a list of merchants with affiliate programs and you select those that you are interested in. LinkShare and ClickBank are examples of networks where you can select your own merchants and products.

There are affiliate program rating sites that recommend top affiliate programs. However, it is suitability with your site topic that helps you succeed in your particular affiliate business. Select only those programs that pass this criterion. You can also do a Google search for ‘top affiliate programs’.