There are many forms of affiliate marketing and if you are new to making money online or new to affiliate marketing, there are actually many different types of affiliate marketing that you should be aware of. As you know, affiliate marketing is a form of revenue sharing model that compensate the affiliate for any sales or actions made by referring customers to the respective online merchants.

Affiliate marketing started back in late 1994 when many e-commerce sites started to use the affiliate marketing model to bring in more business. The end results are fantastic and this why affiliate marketing is one of the most used advertising strategies used nowadays.  

Now let’s go through the various affiliate marketing methods that online merchants used for their affiliate programs.

Pay per click

Basically, whenever a visitor to your site clicks on the adverts of a particular merchant, you will get paid for it. The more visitors that click s on these ads, the more money you made. Please note that this is different from the pay per click model using Google Adsense.

Pay Per Lead

Whenever a visitor is directed from your site to the merchant’s site and sign up for more information, you will be paid. Depending on the type of information given, you can get paid from a dollar to even tens of dollars per lead. It can be very lucrative especially in financial niches.

I have yet to explore pay per lead but from my past experiences within the financial niche in which I experiment using Google Adsense, I received up to a few dollars for every click. Please note that this is not the same as the pay per click above, this is a form of creating sites filled with Google Adsense ads to lure visitors to click on these ads. To read more on this, check out this post.

Pay Per Sale

Very simply, you make money whenever a visitor whom you refer to the merchant’s site buys something. As you know most, most people do not buy immediately, rather they will take their own sweet time to go through the products or services offered and make a decision later on.  Now you may think if that is the case, won’t my efforts be wasted?

Don’t worry, this is normally what happens. The merchants will store a cookie in the visitor’s computer which will be valid from a day to up to a year, and some even claim lifetime although I find it hard to believe. Now, some time later when the visitor finally make the buying decision and if your cookie is still stored in his or her computer, you will be given a commission for the sale made. Now isn’t it wonderful! 

The methods above are some of the ways in which merchants employ in their affiliate program. In some cases, some merchants will offer a mixture of the methods above or should I say a hybrid of various methods. There are probably some other methods that merchants used for their affiliate programs and these methods are normally spin offs or hybrids of the three methods above but basically these three are still the most basic and commonly used methods.

For good resources on affiliate marketing, please check out my “Recommended Resources” section.