| CPA (cost per action) or pay per lead affiliate programs are those that offer you commissions for getting potential customers' contact information. The information may be as simple as a zip code or email or may be more detailed and include personal information like a social security number. Over the last 6 months, there has been an increasing number of pay per lead programs competing for the attention of webmasters. The obvious advantage that PPL programs offer is that visitors to your web site do not need to make any type of purchase for you to be able to earn a commission. Although shopping on the web is becoming more and more commonplace, it is still, and will probably always be, easier to give something away then to sell something. Here are some averages of what you can get paid when people fill in the information on the offers you are promoting: * Art/Entertainment ? $4.20 * Banking/Trading ? $41.66 * Careers ? $4.05 * Credit Reporting & Repair ? $31.33 * Credit Cards ? $7.18 * Construction ? $8.14 * Education/Training ? $11.83 * Hospitality/Travel ? $3.68 * Insurance ? $8.40 * Loans/Mortgage ? $9.85 * Matchmaking ? $2.48 * Real Estate ? $19.63 * Technology/Telecommunications ? $15 Keep in mind that these are the averages of what you can get paid per lead but do not include what you may spend per lead or the conversion rates of whatever it is you are promoting. There are many pay per lead affiliate programs available to you but one of the most popular is Commission Junction. This company has grown to become one of the largest affiliate program networks, with over 1700 merchants and growing every day. There are two reasons that Commission Junction has been able to grow so quickly. First, it offers very competitive pricing for their merchants. Second, it continuously improves its own affiliate program to provide more benefits to affiliates. Commission Junction also offers a variety of other benefits to affiliates. Unlike most other affiliate networks, commissions earned from all merchants are pooled together in one check, and you are paid monthly by CJ directly (not by the merchant). This way, if you sign up for many different offers wthin the program and each of them earn you a little bit of money, you will get paid the sum of all of these. With many other affiliate networks, you would get paid nothing until you reach the normal minimum check sizes they set (generally $25-100 per merchant). Commission Junction also offers a wide selection of affiliate programs that you can promote on your site. This is because they have attracted smaller merchants than some of the other pay per lead affiliate programs. Some of these smaller merchants offer highly targeted products which focus on a very narrow niche. This. of course, is very useful if your site is also very targeted, because it makes it more probable that you will find a merchant that is appropriate for your audience. Programs in CJ also range across all types of affiliate commission models besides pay per lead, including pay per click and pay per sale. |
