Twitter Facebook LinkedIn Flipboard 1 What is an affiliate program and why it is useful? Affiliate Marketing is a practice in which a business gets one or more affiliates for each visitor. In simple words, we can say, it is a revenue of sharing practice between the owner of the website and online merchants. The process is all about placing an advertisement on the site with a purpose to help merchant in sale of his products or to send potential customers to his website. It is carried through posting links, creating content or hosting advertisement. Basically, there are three ways to earn money through affiliate marketing; they are pay per click, pay per sale and pay per lead. Image Courtesy: Michaelsbrown Pay per click marketing allows the affiliate to earn money when a potential customer leaves by clicking on the link to the merchant’s website. In pay per sale, every time a sale is made by considering the result of advertising on the affiliate’s website. Based on the total sale from this, he might earn amount in certain percentage or as a commission. While in pay per lead advertising, a potential client needs to register at the merchant’s for placing advertisement on affiliate’s account. In recent years, affiliate marketing has been emerging as the most useful online money-making platform. Just by placing advertisements on websites, the merchant is able to attract customers without paying anything till the results are achieved. It helps to increase the exposure of products and services. Image Courtesy: Marketingland Are you still confused about how does this work? Let me give you a specific example… Suppose, I have a website with technology and I wish to make money from affiliate marketing of products. I will start searching for affiliate companies that offer technology products. Such companies help marketers increase awareness of their services and receive commission based on the sales generated from the advertisement. A famous quote said by David Ogilvy,” Unless your campaign has a big idea, it will pass like a ship in the night.” If you are associated with money-making online,affiliate programs are certainly the most reliable option. With the rising need for affiliate services, we have assembled a list of top affiliate programs that follows single affiliate opportunities and networks. Page Rank: 7 Alexa Rank: 9 Domain authority: 100 The affiliate networks of Amazon serve as a great source of income for many web-masters. It has lots of products available in its store to advertise and to get earnings up to 10% on qualifying purchases. No matter what content site you have,small or a large network, it always helps to monetize your website by offering simple linking tools. Amazon includes a large number of categories, which enables you to create multiple sites, focusing different products range. They provide you with their own unique code for including your site which link directly to the items that you want to sell them. You are supposed to pay commission every time you visit the Amazon site through any of your links. Page Rank: 6 Alexa Rank: 1 Domain authority: 100 With its already existing ad-sense program, Google offers very innovative Affiliate Network. Although this has been launched recently, many top notch affiliate products provided by this organization, helps to generate more money. Google is providing a great earning source for its users through its services using this marketing strategy along with its impeccable tool of ad-sense. Page Rank: 7 Alexa Rank: 491 Domain authority: 87 Commission Junction is one of the most popular affiliate programs directory which started in 1998 and acquired by Value Click in 2003. It has advertisers of big developed companies, who are sure of promoting products and services of the highest quality. It always promotes long lasting relationships between advertisers and publishers. Those who are associated with affiliate marketing; it can help a lot to build a reputation as a trustworthy website. Page Rank: 6 Alexa Rank: 441 Domain authority: 86 Clickbank is a leading affiliate program in the world, which offers a wide variety of digital products. It plays an essential role in the successful marketing affiliate products. One can find hundreds of products easily on Clickbank as all of them are niche specific. Advertisers are willing to offer high commission rates, since all the products are digital. It provides no-hassle to its buyers. Besides this, it also avoids wasting time and money. Page Rank: 6 Domain authority: 89 Alexa Rank: 932 ShareASale has been into this business since 2000. It is one of the highly recommended affiliate programs, when it comes to make money on web. It is an established network, which provides award winning technology and service with quality and integrity. With over 2500 products and 2000 merchants, it has great reports and pays promptly every month. It does not only enable you to connect with the affiliates, but also recruit new ones for your program. It can definitely prove to be a good place to start. Page Rank: 6 Alexa Rank: 1,055 Domain authority: 81 Link share is an essential affiliate marketing network and is one of the oldest affiliate programmers, having a huge global user base. It offers quality services and ultimate results. It has a great reporting system and interface which helps to track the sales. Here, payment is done on monthly basis. Page Rank: 5 Alexa Rank: 218 Domain authority: 76 Clicksor is a kind of affiliate program, which offers an opportunity to gain extra income by underlining a selection of clickable text of displayed targeted advertising banners on one’s website or blog. It only follows fast payments through check of Paypal. Apart from that, it also offers 10% referral program. Besides allowing web -masters to have a great deal of context to sign up, it also provides advertising banners to add on the website. Page Rank: 4 Alexa Rank: 4,332 Domain authority: 64 Peerfly is an interesting site offering variety of types right from cost per action to cost per click. Apart from training you as an expert, they assure the continuous improvement of business campaign. They pay by check, ACH and PayPal. Some of the successful brands that work with them are Proactive Solution, Stamps.com, Columbia House and Netflix. Page Rank: 4 Alexa Rank: 6,129 Domain authority: 54 At present, more than 14000 affiliates are using Max Bounty with an aim to generate revenue from CPA advertising. It is very popular among top affiliate marketers as it offers weekly payment solutions. So, one can receive his earned commissions faster. The best part of becoming part of this corporation is that, one can also follow other web-masters and build residual revenue. It also has a team of dedicated managers to find the most suitable ads for the demographics and to acquire desired results from the traffic. Twitter Tweet Facebook Share Email This article was written for Business 2 Community by Sanket Patel.Learn how to publish your content on B2C Author: Sanket Patel Follow @blurbpoint Sanket Patel – Director at Blurbpoint Media, a leading Internet Marketing Firm dealing in Organic and Paid Search campaigns, Inbound Marketing, High end Link earning services, Online Reputation Management, Social Media Marketing and Content Marketing. He has extensively researched on the ultimate recovery process of Panda/Penguin which is working successfully… View full profile ›More by this author:Let’s Forget Link Building For A While – Other Vital Verticals Of SEOTop 4 SEO Basics To Know As an Online MarketerHidden CTR Ingredients to Cook Your Online Recipe The Right Way