The biggest act of online theft is perpetrated by affiliate programs.
You might think I mean the theft of commission by those mean sponsors who only register a fraction of the leads you generate them but, no, that is not what I mean.
You might think I’m talking about the affiliate marketing programs that change their terms and conditions so that they only have to pay out “if” you send them enough business each month, but you’d be wrong again.
You would even be wrong to think that I mean sponsors who “go out of business” just as you start to earn commission or those who suspend your affiliate account just before you’ve earned enough commission to earn a payout. Nope, there is an even bigger scam!
Can you trust your sponsor?
When did you last confirm that your affiliate sponsor pays out when the sales you generate are made by people from a country outside of your affiliate program’s catchment area?
I mean, does the affiliate marketing program you use to monetize your web site with ads and links have multiple online presences – one for different regions of the globe – to market products for its vendors to people in different geographic locations?
Do you use Amazon?
You must know that Amazon has seven, yes, 7, versions of its web site – a version for customers in 7 different regions: Canada, China, France, Germany, Japan, United Kingdom and USA.
It benefits Amazon. It benefits Amazon’s retailers. It benefits Amazon’s customers. It doesn’t benefit you as an Internet marketer. It saps your commission like a black hole in your trouser pocket drinks your loose change.
Every time you send a sales lead to amazon.com and your lead transfers to amazon.co.uk to make a purchase, you lose your sales commission – it’s in the small print that most affiliates don’t read.
You lose commission whenever someone swaps between Amazon sites.
If 75% of your web traffic comes from the U.S then you must register with amazon.com and serve amazon.com ads to that 75% of your traffic. The remaining 25% of your traffic must be served ads from the version of Amazon that they are most likely to purchase from.
The situation is the same for Affiliate Future, Affiliate Window and Trade Doubler; even Google Associates Program sometimes does this.
Many other popular affiliate marketing programs all require multiple sign-ups and geotargeted ads to enable publishers like us to earn commissions on the sales we generate.
Ad servers like OpenX can be used to target specific affiliate links and banners to your site’s visitors according to their geographic location, if you want to mess around with them, that is.
Why should you take the risk of losing commission?
You shouldn’t.
Affiliate marketing programs do not need to operate in this scheming manner. It is a marketing scam. It benefits them at the detriment of marketers like us.
This malpractice will only stop when marketers stop working with companies that deliberately segregate their programs so as to deprive affiliate marketers of their rightful income.
Not all affiliate programs are the same!
All five of these global retail outlet affiliate marketing programs need their affiliates to sign-up once only and to use only one affiliate URL per product marketed to guarantee commission from product sales. Their vendors do not care where in the world their products are purchased. They only care that an affiliate link is clicked, a sale is made and their affiliate is paid.
Let’s review each of those five affiliate programs one-by-one
ClickBank
ClickBank is is one of the most raved about affiliate programs on the Net. Active since 1998, ClickBank is the retail outlet of choice for more than 12,000 digital product vendors and over 100,000 affiliate marketers. It pays up to 75% commission via check and, once you have received your first two checks, by direct deposit.
PayDotCom
This brain child of Mike Filsaime provides marketers access to vendors of both digital and physical products. Join them and get both an affiliate and free vendor account. Affiliates earn up to 80% commission, payed instantly into a PayPal account.
ShareASale
Has been with us for over ten years (established in 2000) and has over 2,500 merchants registered with it.
ShareASale offers up to 75% commission on pay-per-click, pay-per-lead and pay-per-sale programs. ShareASale monitors link activity by acting as a go-between link server e.g a prospect clicks a link, the link goes to ShareASale’s server where the click is registered before the prospect is quickly and seamlessly redirected to the vendor’s landing page.
Promotion tools include a marketing page creation panel, datafeeds with ftp access, a discount coupon creation panel, the ability to search for vendor deals and much, much more.
RegNow
Retails over 25,000 software packages for multitudinous vendors.
Affiliates can use banners and links to sell specific software titles, RSS feeds and can build a complete website package for upload to a server – a custom web site template is provided by RegNow for those who need it.
Software is sold on a 30 day trial basis with affiliate links built into the software’s “buy now” link so commission is not lost when a browser’s cookie cache is cleaned. Affiliates earn up to 75% commission plus 2.5% in “additional commissions” payed by wire, check, ACH or Visa Electron.
RegNow is a versatile and robust software affiliate program that even provides datafeeds and coupon management – yes, affiliates can set their own discount coupon codes which can be promoted on coupon sites.
PaySpree
Offers instant commission payments direct to your PayPal account and states it pays “The largest payout percentage of any affiliate network & the lowest fees.” All new affiliates and vendors get a free vendor product listing with additional product listings costing a one-off fee of $29 regardless of the number of products you list.
Sign up for any of these affiliate programs and discover a universe of products to market for up to 75% commission.
Here’s a quick recap of their features
- Free vendor account
- Instant payment
- Up to 80% Commission
- Pays by PayPal
- Link clicks, sales and conversion stats
- Instant commission
- Pays by PayPal
- Free vendor singe product listing
- Vendor multi-product listings at $19 (one-off, life time fee)
- More than 12,000 digital product vendors
- Over 100,000 affiliate marketers
- 75% commission via PayPal
- Recommended by experienced marketers
- Lists over 25,000 software products
- Provides datafeeds
- Build a complete software download web site
- Affiliate links built into the software’s “buy now” link
- 75% commission plus 2.5% in “additional commissions”
- Payed by wire, check, ACH or Visa Electron
- Affiliate coupon management console
- Established in 2000
- Over 2,500 merchants
- 75% commission
- Pay-Per-Click, Pay-Per-Lead and Pay-Per-Sale programs
- Monitors link activity by acting as a go-between server for link affiliate and vendor
- Marketing page creation panel
- Datafeeds with ftp access
- Coupon creation panel
- Vendor product deal search
I’m registered with all five of the above affiliate marketing programs. I still use the more ordinary ones like Affiliate Future and Google Associates when I cannot find alternatives to the products I wish to advertise but I always search for products to advertise from my top five global traffic friendly affiliate programs first.
Try them, it doesn’t cost to sign up. The money you make selling affiliate products will help pay your bills.
And what better way to use them than autoblogging.
Excellent post! I’m already a ClickBanker but had never heard of the other four programs so just signed up with them. Still waiting to be approved by shareasale – hope it’s as good as it looks!
Thanks for your advice
Veronika
Hey Veronika, ShareASale took about a day and a half to approve my application so you should be marketing their products by today. Hope you get plenty of sales (leave a few customers for the rest of us).
Have fun,
Dion
I absolutely loathe amazon. I’m surprised you didn’t mention that their commission are a complete joke — I can’t quite remember the percentages but think it was something like 4.5% when you’re new to 8% if you make alot of sales. One thing I focus on is sales of sex toy products, you can use an honest trustworthy affiliate like [site removed: adult] who conveniently pays to paypal reliably with 25% commissions, or you can sell the EXACT SAME products through Amazon for 4.5% commission, where you would have to sell 4 to 5 times as many products just to break even. Amazon really sucks.
Totally agree. I dislike Amazon for too many reasons to mention.
As for the adult website you mentioned, I have a successful online store through them. I’ve tried other companies in the past which failed my tests for customer service, product quality and affiliate communication. The company you mentioned is by far the best within their product range.
To my knowledge, ClickBank doesn’t pay commission via PayPal.
Well spotted. ClickBank pays by check and offers direct deposit once two pay checks have been sent to an affiliate. Thank you Duminda.
Try Omnistar Affiliate for your affiliate software, it helped me to increase sales by about 10%