Affiliate Program 101

The amount of information available on the internet is staggering. There seems to be a website for everything, and in most cases there are many websites all competing for the same audience. Creating a website requires a good bit of time and money. Working to gain the website popularity takes even more time and effort. What is the motivation for doing this? One important motivation is to make money online. Website owners want to be compensated for their time and effort. This is commonly done by allowing advertisements on the website through an affiliate program. One common affiliate program is Google’s Adsense.

Affiliate programs are actually pretty simple. The owner of a website allows advertisements to be displayed somewhere on the website. The advertisements displayed are often targeted to the website audience. If a person viewing the webpage is interested in one of the advertisements and clicks the link then the website owner just made some money! This is called a pay per click program and is just one example of an affiliate program.

There are many different types of payment plans when it comes to affiliate programs. One of the most common is the pay per click program mentioned above. In this payment plan the website owner is payed a predetermined amount of money each time a website viewer clicks a link. The amount paid is usually a matter of cents. While driving high traffic is always essential for affiliate programs, in the pay per click program the advertisement placement and content is more important.

 

An advertisement for Mercedes is not going to drive many clicks on a webpage about hunting. A better choice would be an advertisement for hunting supplies. Working an advertisement into the design of the webpage is also essential. Advertisements should be in places where it is natural for the viewer to click. An example of this would be an ad in the middle of the page next to a block of text that t

Another common affiliate programs that work on a pay per view basis. These pay a very low amount of money each time a webpage that contains advertisements is viewed. The person viewing the webpage does not need to actually click the advertisements, just load the page. The amount paid per view is most often a fraction of a cent. This is still a valid source of income though. If the website drives a couple thousand or more views per day this adds up quickly.

One common and effective strategy is to combine pay per view and pay per click programs. Since the pay per view programs do not rely upon user interaction they are generally more reliable for income. This base income from the pay per view program can then be combined with the less reliable pay per click program. With a pay per click program the amount of money made has the possibility of fluctuating greatly from day to day. If the webpage had only pay per click advertisements the website wonder would have less financial security.