No Comments Written by Robert on August 12, 2008 – 9:21 am

A newcomer to the affiliate marketing arena, AuctionAds allows publishers easy access to the popular eBay affiliate program.

AuctionAds acts as one superaffiliate, ensuring top payouts for AuctionAds members. eBay pays publishers on a sliding commission scale, which allows top publishers like AuctionAds to generate top commissions.

The more revenue you generate, the higher the percentage you receive. By joining AuctionAds, you lump all your sales in with the rest of the network, thus boosting everyone into the higher pay brackets.

AuctionAds works through a partnership with the eBay affiliate program

AuctionAds, provides an advertising widget that allows you to promote items available on eBay.com directly through your Web site.

AuctionAds works through a partnership with the eBay affiliate program, which is located at Commission Junction. The eBay affiliate program has a mixture of both cost per action (CPA) and pay-per-sale commission-based opportunities. eBay pays a fixed CPA when you refer a new user who creates an eBay.com account, and it pays a percentage-of-sale commission when you refer an existing eBay member who places a winning bid on an eBay auction. As an eBay affiliate, you earn a percentage of the commission eBay charges the seller of the auctioned item.

However, the amount you are paid is related to the volume of new accounts or revenue you refer. In short, the more new eBay members you refer, the more you are paid for each member. Likewise, the more revenue earned through the buyers you refer, the higher the percentage you receive as the affiliate. To reach the top payout tier, an affiliate would need to refer over 3,000 new eBay accounts per month, or refer over $1 million in total revenue.

Regardless of the size of your Web site, sending in 3,000 new eBay members or referring over $1 million in total revenue in one pay period is only achieved by a relatively small number of very large affiliates. An example of a very large eBay affiliate is AuctionAds, which receives eBay’s top affiliate payouts by allowing subpublishers like you to place the AuctionAds widget on your Web site. The AuctionAds widget requires you to place a short JavaScript code on your Web site that displays live eBay auctions to your visitors based on your site content.

AuctionAds pays you directly for any traffic that you send through the widget that results in either a new eBay member sign-up, sale, or both. Because AuctionAds is paid based on eBay’s highest commission tier, you can make more money than you would by simply being an eBay affiliate.

AuctionAds is recognized as one of the fastest growing affiliate networks of all time. Within four months of its launch, more than 25,000 publishers joined the AuctionAds program. One of the reasons AuctionAds became so popular is its ease of use and because it allows eBay publishers to make more money than they would alone. Using AuctionAds is as easy as selecting keywords that relate to your Web site and placing basic JavaScript code into your Web page. In turn, the AuctionAds widget displays appropriate eBay auction items on your Web site.

If you are not already a top paying eBay affiliate, using the AuctionAds system guarantees that you make more revenue than you would make using the eBay affiliate program on your own. By having your referred members and transactions run through the AuctionAds program, you receive a higher payout than you would normally earn. AuctionAds has proven to be extremely lucrative for niche Web sites. Almost every type of product you can imagine is available on eBay, so do not be afraid to use the AuctionAds widget on your niche content pages.

Advertise Cost-per-Action Offers with Hydra Network

Similar to AzoogleAds, Hydra Network provides CPA offers to Web publishers looking to monetize Web site traffic. Hydra Network has a very diverse range of offers from many different industries, including e-commerce, education, insurance, telecommunications, credit cards, media, and electronics. One of the easiest ways to monetize Web site traffic with Hydra Network is by promoting free gift cards. You receive a flat fee ranging from 75 cents to $1.50 for every visitor you send to an offer page that completes the required action to receive a free gift card.

Similar to AzoogleAds, the Hydra Network is another leading cost-per-action (CPA) affiliate program network. Any time an affiliate of the Hydra Network refers a visitor who completes a specific action, the affiliate is paid a predetermined amount of money. These actions can range from signing up for a free trial of Blockbuster Online to registering to win a $500 Sam’s Club gift card.

Naturally, the more complex and valuable the action, the higher the payout can be. Payouts range from as little as 75 cents to as much as several hundred dollars per lead generated by your Web site. Although AzoogleAds has a large amount of advertisers, it has recently become completely saturated by ringtones and dating offers.

If these niches are not something you want to explore, the Hydra Network may prove to be a better fit for your Web site. The Hydra Network currently has an extremely impressive number of available CPA offers, many of which do not require any actual purchases to be made. The diversity of CPA offers within the Hydra Network makes the company an obvious choice if you want to monetize your Web site. No matter what the theme, there is bound to be something relevant with the Hydra Network.

Also, the CPA model means that you do not need to worry about order size or value. The only metric you need to analyze is your traffic’s conversion rate for a given offer. There are also multiple offers within each niche, so if one does not prove successful, you can always swap another offer in its place and see how the new offer performs.

Within the Hydra Network, there are numerous offers that revolve around giveaways, free trials, and contest drawings. These offers tend to convert extremely well because they often do not require the user to input a credit card number and make a purchase. However, these offers typically have low payouts ranging from 50 cents to a few dollars per lead generated from your Web site.

As always, test to see what works best for your Web site. Can you make more money by sending numerous, low-CPA conversions, or by sending fewer, higher-paying conversions? Whichever method results in the highest profit for your Web site is clearly the approach you should take. Also, keep in mind that through testing different offers on your Web site you may find that certain offers convert better on one of your pages over another. Test out the various CPA offers that relate best to the content of your Web site, and stick with the one that produces at the highest rate.

A brief word of caution: Using pay-per-click (PPC) traffic in an attempt to drive conversions to low-paying CPA offers is a challenging approach. If an offer pays out $1.50, you need to ensure that you do not spend more than $1.50 to attain that conversion. Choose your keywords wisely, and keep a close eye on your PPC campaigns if you decide to try this route.

Advertise Cost-per-Action Offers with AzoogleAds

Affiliate marketing networks such as LinkShare or Commission Junction pay affiliates on a variable percentage-of-sale basis; newer affiliate marketing networks such as AzoogleAds that pay affiliates on a flat cost-per-action, or CPA, basis are an increasingly popular alternative.

CPA networks pay as little as a few cents to as much as several hundred dollars when a visitor to your Web site is referred to another Web site such as Blockbuster or Match.com and performs an action, such as inputting an e-mail address, signing-up for a free product trial, completing an e-commerce sale, or applying for a credit card. CPA offers are popular because of the fixed payout structure and potentially lucrative compensation model. Moreover, CPA networks tend to take a more hands-on approach to managing top affiliates than traditional affiliate networks, which make the CPA model extremely attractive to some of the highest producing affiliates on the Internet.

An increasingly popular affiliate network structure and payment method is cost-per-action, or CPA. One of the leaders in CPA affiliate marketing is AzoogleAds, located at www.azoogle.com. CPA advertising allows merchants to specify a flat rate for a defined action such as an e-mail submission or contact form completion.

For example, if you send a visitor to a merchant Web site, and that visitor successfully fills out a lead box with his personal information, you receive a predetermined amount of money. A CPA payout removes any fluctuation in payments by the merchant and guarantees you a set dollar amount each time a visitor completes a desired action. CPA affiliate marketing is popular with many affiliate marketers because of the flat payout structure; often the specified action does not require the referred visitor to spend any money.

This usually leads to significantly higher conversion rates than traditional percentage-ofsale- based affiliate marketing. Although CPA-based offers provide an alternative method for monetizing Web traffic, CPA offers tend to be better if your Web site focuses on specific verticals, such as real estate, music, dating, or financial services.

In fact, CPA networks such as AzoogleAds tend to have limited monetization potential if your Web site traffic is focused on e-commerce. For example, if your Web site traffic is mostly about topics such as gardening or cosmetics, you are better off promoting a traditional percentage-of-salebased affiliate offer from a network like Commission Junction. However, if your Web site is about real estate or financial services, you are better off promoting a flat cost-per-action-based affiliate offer such as a micro loan or a credit repair service.

You can join AzoogleAds for free and begin promoting CPA offers within minutes. You are required to provide basic information about you and your business, including contact information and a valid tax identification number.

AzoogleAds’ popularity and Internet marketing presence is a double-edged sword for new Web publishers. The fact that AzoogleAds is a large, reputable company is positive because it can help to settle any uneasiness you as an affiliate may have about actually getting paid for your sales. However, the popularity of AzoogleAds also means that the highest CPA offers presented in the network are being used by some of the largest publishers online.

The popularity of AzoogleAds can make competing for traffic relevant to high CPA offers extremely difficult. If you plan to use pay-per-click (PPC) traffic to drive conversions to a CPA offer through AzoogleAds, be aware that you may go head-to-head with pay-per-click industry pros, and they know what they are doing.

If you are not an experienced pay-per-click expert, the SEO techniques learned in this blog post represent a more realistic and sustainable option for monetizing your Web traffic. If you spend time growing your own Web site and traffic stream, you can always try out different methods of monetization such as the high CPA offers from AzoogleAds and other networks.