The New Affiliate Marketing

For those of you not familiar with affiliate marketing let me first give you a little background info. Affiliate marketing allows anyone with an email account, website, blog, message board, facebook page, myspace page, etc. to earn money by referring people from their site/page/email to a commercial site offering products or services. If your visitor purchases anything from that site after using the link or banner you provided them with you will then receive a commission on that purchase just as if you were the sales person for that sale. This is known as pay-per-sale affiliate marketing.

There is another very popular form of affiliate marketing that most of you have probably heard of called pay-per-click. This is similar to the above scenario except you will generally be paid a much smaller commission just for someone clicking on the link you provided.

In the first example of affiliate marketing (pay-per-sale) your visitors must actually make a purchase in order for you to be paid. The commissions are generally based on a percentage of the total purchase amount. Depending on the items purchased you can receive some pretty large commission checks with this form of marketing. The downside to this form of marketing is that you have to do a magnificent job of pre-selling these items so that once the visitor leaves your website or email the visitor doesn't think twice about spending their hard earned money on some other website.

The second example (pay-per-click) the visitor simply has to click on your link or banner in order for you to receive a commission. Although the commissions are far easier to receive because your visitor doesn't actually have to do anything other than click a link, the commissions are typically only a few cents per click. This form of affiliate marketing can be very lucrative if you have a website that receives a ton of traffic and you can accumulate these clicks in high volumes per day.

A lesser known form of affiliate marketing is quickly taking over within affiliate marketing systems like shareasale.com called pay-per-lead affiliate marketing. The reason this is rapidly becoming "The New Affiliate Marketing" favorite is because it is a good cross between pay-per-sale and pay-per-click marketing. Often with pay-per-lead programs your visitor must first click on the link you have provided for them and then fill out a form of information or take a survey typically receiving a free item, sample, or demo of the affiliates products or services for doing so. For providing the affiliate with a quality lead they will pay you a certain dollar amount. This requires far less pre-selling than pay-per-sale marketing because the visitor is not purchasing anything and typically receiving something absolutely free just for filling out a bit of information and it can generate far higher commissions than a simple pay-per-click program. Pay-per-lead commissions are typically a flat dollar amount ranging from a couple dollars to several hundred dollars per lead.

Pay-per-lead affiliate marketing has bridged the gap between hard to earn pay-per-sale programs and the low commissions of pay-per-click programs with an easy to earn program with very generous commission structures that allow you to get paid for giving away other people's free stuff.

Click Here and then click on the "Preview Merchants" button under the affiliates section to view hundreds of merchants offering pay-per-lead programs.