Category: The Ultimate Affiliate Marketer’s Guide

The Ultimate Affiliate Marketer’s Guide will both equip you and enable you to quickly become a successful Performance Based Affiliate Marketer and you’ll understand exactly how to avoid all of the mistakes that so many others struggle with because they have never had the benefit of Ginette‘s insights, instruction or her years of experience.

Get ready to experience the fast track to success!

Types of Affiliate Programs:

So let us talk about the different types of performance marketing programs available:

Pay per Lead/Pay per Action: This is where the merchant/advertiser pays you based on the number of valid signups or leads you generate through a form. It can be as little as a zip code and name or as much as full information – name, address, phone and other contact information. These usually pay as little as $2.00 up to $50.00 a lead. However you must be careful with this type of program and read the fine print in the affiliate agreement as the merchant/advertiser determines what it considers a valid lead and how. There may also be caps on how many leads the merchant will accept per week, month or campaign. This means after they fill their quota, they won’t pay for any other leads. 

Cost per Sale: You will earn a commission on every sale that comes through your links to the merchant/advertiser’s site. The great thing about this type of deal is you don’t ship anything, there is no support you have to provide to customers and no inventory. This is also the most common type of affiliate program.

Cost per Million: This is a little misleading as it is actually cost per 1,000 impressions you deliver on your website. Unless you have a ton of traffic it is difficult to make good money on these types of arrangements.

Cost per Click: Typically this would be Google AdSense or Bing/Yahoo publisher ads. This is where you are paid based on the clicks generated through ads placed on your site. The payment is based on the value of the Ad and their keyword value. Some higher priced keywords can generate a lot of income for you and the lower priced keywords will give you modest returns.

Pay per Call: Instead of paying for an email lead the merchant gives you a unique 800 number or extension and sets a minimum time the call must be connected to be considered a valid call or a completed sale. You are paid a flat fee per call you generate for them. You can find programs like this in most major affiliate networks.

Commission Structures



When deciding on what to promote look at the commission structure to figure out how many sales you need to make to reach the minimum payout. If you can’t do it in 3 sales then don’t join the program – this applies to in-house programs specifically. In a network you may be promoting several merchants and their products, so getting to the minimum is easier.

Reporting is critical to developing your campaigns and deciding which offer to promote and which ones to get rid of. You need to know what kind of traffic you are sending to the merchant and how it is converting as well as which banner or creative is working well for you. One of the nice features of the ShareASale network in particular is they show you the last 60 days of the affiliate average EPC (or Earnings per Click) of a merchant as well as the return/refund rate and average commissions. So you will know if a program is actively producing revenue and what their return rate is.

Networks, like ShareASale will even alert you if a merchant is running low on funds or not funded at all so you can quickly decide to switch merchants or contact the affiliate manager to see what is going on and when they will fund their accounts properly. This is especially important because some seasonal merchants, like Halloween merchants in particular, don’t fund their account year round. You would be sending traffic to dead links since the network shuts them down as they are no longer funded.

Return days, gap life, or cookie life:  is the amount of time the customer referred is still considered yours.

So let us say the return days is 30. This means if the customer comes back on the 30th day and makes a purchase they are still your referral and you get credit for the sale. If they make the purchase on the 31st day you get nothing as the cookie has expired.

In my experience over 95% of the sales are made the same day, so don’t be afraid of a one-day cookie. Keep in mind that your visitor may have different buying behaviors depending on the content you are using to promote a product. A longer tracking gap is always better.

One of the questions most frequently asked is what if the visitor clicks on my affiliate link then later click on another affiliate’s link – who gets credit for the referral? This will vary from program to program.  Modern programs have attribution options beyond just the last click. Always check with your affiliate manager on this. 

Each merchant will have their own Affiliate Agreement:

Please read these carefully. It will tell you what terms/keywords you cannot go after, usually their trademarks. So don’t try to buy domains that are misspellings or similar to the trademarks as you will get declined and even worse forfeit any commissions earned and be black listed in the network. The agreement will also tell you about payment cycles, and how refunds are handled, guidelines for email marketing as well as return days (cookie life).