Making money by selling affiliate products is easy. Any website can be monetized with affiliate programs. There are lots of programs to choose from but not all are equal.
I’ve been making money from the Internet for around 10 years. I don’t use Amazon. I don’t use Commission Junction. I don’t use Affiliate Future. I don’t use Click Bank.
I did use those affiliate programs.. in my naive days. Nowadays, I keep clear of them as much as I can. I would use them for selling my own products. I no longer use them to advertise other people’s products.
Here is why
Answer these questions:
- Do you advertise Amazon products?
- Are signed up to amazon.com?
- Do your referral links send shoppers to amazon.com?
- What happens when you send a shopper to amazon.com and the shopper makes a purchase through amazon.co.uk?
When did you last check that your affiliate program pays out when the sales you generate are processed on a different domain to the one you refer a shopper to?
Amazon, eBay, Commission Junction and Affiliate Future all have separate affiliate programs in different regions of the world.
When we sign up to amazon.com we are not automatically enrolled into the affiliate program managed by amazon.co.uk. This means, for example, that we lose our sales commission when we send a shopper to buy a book from amazon.com but the shopper transfers to amazon.co.uk to buy the same book.
The same applies to eBay, Commission Junction and Affiliate Future. Sales commissions are lost when affiliate referrals transfer to a different domain to make a purchase.
Do the affiliate marketing programs you use to monetize your web site have multiple online presences i.e a domain for different regions of the globe? Are you losing out on sales commissions?
Alternative affiliate programs
These 2 affiliate programs work differently. Share-a-Sale and PaySpree pay out on all valid sales no matter where those sales are processed.
ShareASale
Has been with us for nearly 15 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.
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
- Instant commission
- Pays by PayPal
- Free vendor singe product listing
- Vendor multi-product listings at $19 (one-off, life time fee)
- 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
Join PaySpree and Share-a-Sale affiliate programs. They are free to join. I use Share-a-Sale most of the two.
Wondering why I don’t use ClickBank? Too many hoops to jump through before payments are released and Click Bank deducts a ‘holding fee’ from unreleased affiliate earnings. I got a sinking feeling when I saw my earnings drop to zero dollars because of ever bigger holding fee deductions.
Article first published June 14, 2010. Updated and republished Oct. 9th 2014.
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