Pay Per Sale
Posted by admin | 
July 18th, 2007
When most people think of affiliate marketing, they think of the traditional method, ie., when a sale is made, you’re paid a commission percentage.
This is generally referred to as pay-per-sale affiliate marketing, but once in awhile you’ll hear it referred to as pay-per-action. I suspect that reference is usually a mistake though, or intentionally meant to mislead inexperienced affiliate marketers, because pay per action usually refers to the pay per lead method instead. For the purposes of this article though, we’ll refer to pay per sale affiliate marketing as “traditional” affiliate marketing.
Traditional affiliate marketing can be one of the most lucrative ways to make money from affiliate programs. This is because affiliate commissions range very drastically. Some sales can generate just 5% commissions for you while others will generate 60%-70%.
At first blush, beginner affiliate marketers automatically assume they should promote the affiliate products which offer the highest commissions. So in the examples above, they’d choose the 60%-70% commissions over the 5%. This isn’t always the best choice though.
If you’re promoting a product - let’s say an ebook - which sells for $100 and you’re paid 60% in commissions, you’ll make $60 each time you generate a sale.
That’s great money for just one ebook sale, right? But if you’re promoting a plasma tv that sells for $10,000 and you’re paid 5%… you earn $500 each time you make a sale. Much better!
And as strange as it might seem, it’s just as easy to generate a $10,000 sale as it is to generate a $100 sale. You just have to target the right audience, and get that targeted audience in front of your affiliate promotions.
A lot of beginner affiliates make wrong assumptions about what people will buy.
In fact, many don’t think an ebook can sell for $100. Most don’t think you can sell plasma TVs, or other expensive products online either. But that’s simply not the case.
People buy what they want, when they want it. And withmore and more people buying onnline, you can earn a decent income from affiliate marketing if you learn the ropes, play by the rules and engage in profitable promotional techniques.
The key to earning a lot of money with traditional affiliate programs is a combination of factors.
First, you must generate targeted traffic to whatever program, product or service you want to offer.
Second, you must offer great products that people are looking for.
It does little good to try and sell expensive exercise equipment to people who are trying to set a couch potato record. And you wouldn’t get anywhere trying to sell fancy high-heeled shoes to rifle enthusiasts.
So the first thing you need to do is figure out what might appeal to YOUR audience.
If you’re just starting a brand new website, you have the luxury of researching and picking a topic that you feel should be lucrative. If you have an existing website, you need to pick affiliate products which will work for that audience.
Don’t put work at home or web design products on a site that is all about hobby sewing. Yes, you might have a few visitors interested in starting a home sewing business, or a sewing website of their own, but the bulk of your visitors will have no interest in those topics. Instead they’ll probably want sewing fabric recommendations, sewing machine books or instructions, sewing patterns and so on.
Figuring out what your audience is willing to spend money on can take some time and patience. In some cases you may have to resort to a trial and error approach. Once you’ve figured that part out though, then you just have to select affiliate programs and programs which offer quality. It doesn’t do you much good to promote sewing patterns for instance, if it will take 10 weeks for an order to arrive. Trust me… your visitors would be extremely unhappy, and they may blame you because you’re the one that recommended the service.
And that’s another piece of the overall puzzle. You can make a heck of a lot more money with traditional affiliate programs, if you write reviews and recommendations. When you have personally bought a product, or had a good experience with an online merchant. You can then review and recommend that product or merchant to your own website visitors. Personal reviews and recommendations have a much bigger influence, and can make you a heck of a lot more money than just putting up a generic link on your website.
