This is perhaps the most popular method amongst the affiliate marketers. Very simply if you make a direct sale of a product through affiliate link, you will receive an affiliate commission. The amount is typically decided by the merchant beforehand. You should already know this information well and truly before marketing a program as there are some rules as to which ones work effectively. They can range from once off to reoccurring income. Once a affiliate product is sold, you will receive a percentage of the sale. Anything from 4%, such as Amazon through to 80% on ClickBank etc
The most obvious way to set up pay per sale programs is to use marketing tools such as Google Adwords or Yahoos overture system. This is simply where you set-up a small marketing proposal to drive traffic to an affiliates sales page, with your affiliate id on the end of the link. You would surely have seen them, if you have ever done a search in Google they are the adverts that are at the immediate top and on the extreme right of the page under sponsored links. This is often the short cut novice people use to drive traffic directly to a merchant site. I say novice as they are missing out on making the potential lead their own and establish a relationship.
2 - Pay Per Lead
Initially making money from pay per lead does not require a customer to purchasing anything from an affiliate link. Typically they sign up for a free report, trial membership etc on a squeeze page or a pre-sales page. The beauty of this is that you are getting paid for providing a lead. The downside is that they are not your lead! This is an important aspect to think about. While you are getting paid to provide a lead to the merchant, once you do so, they are no longer your customer and you cannot generate any repeat business.
The golden key to affiliate marketing, and any marketing and sales relationship is to generate repeatable business. While you can get paid using pay per lead programs, it is not the most effective way to generate a long term profitable income online. You should be capturing these leads yourself and building repour with them to generate long term sales.
3 - Multi-tier Affiliate Marketing
Multi-tier affiliate marketing is a little more complicated as it involves tiered marketing. However, it can be wildly profitable. If a customer you refer to an affiliate product joins the affiliate program, you can earn commissions from every sale they make. This is not to be confused with network marketing or multi-level marketing since multi-tier affiliate marketing usually only involves only one tier.
