No Comments Written by Robert on August 12, 2008 – 9:04 am

Unlike contextual advertising with Google AdSense or the YPN, monetizing your traffic with affiliate marketing programs from Commission Junction requires that a sale be made by a customer that you refer.

You can earn money with Commission Junction, LinkShare and Pepperjam. Affiliate networks exist that provide you with opportunities to monetize your Web site traffic.

Where Google AdSense and YPN pay on a per-click basis, Commission Junction pays a percentage of the total sale made at the merchant Web site.

Commission Junction is widely recognized as a leader in affiliate marketing

Commission Junction is recognized as one of the leaders in affiliate marketing and offers publishers access to promote some of the top brands in the country.

Commission Junction is widely recognized as a leader in affiliate marketing for both advertisers and publishers. The Commission Junction Web site, located at www.cj.com, connects online merchants with online publishers through advanced affiliate tracking and reporting software. Commission Junction provides you with various ways to promote merchant products or services on a pay-for-performance basis.

With Commission Junction, you simply add a banner or text link on your Web site and get paid when you refer a sale to one of your merchant partners. Commission Junction has over 2,000 merchants covering just about every area of e-commerce. Regardless of your Web site topic, there is a good chance that a merchant in the Commission Junction system sells a product relevant to your content.

After you join Commission Junction as a publisher, you can then browse through the list of available affiliate programs. When you find a program that is related to your Web site content, you then need to join that individual program.

Depending on the program, your application may need to be individually approved; some programs automatically approve each publisher that attempts to join. After you join an individual affiliate program, you then receive a link code that is specific to your affiliate account. Any traffic that you send to the merchant from this link is tracked, and any sales are credited to your account.

The percentage you receive of each transaction varies from merchant to merchant, so be sure to do a lot of testing to see what program makes you the most money. With a cost-per-sale-based affiliate program, you are directly rewarded for sending high-quality traffic instead of receiving payment on a per-click basis. This makes the commission model very attractive to niche Web site owners with targeted Web traffic.

One of the more effective strategies for monetizing your Web site with affiliate marketing programs is through affiliate marketing search arbitrage. Affiliate marketing search arbitrage is a process where you purchase traffic on a pay-per-click basis and “sell” that traffic to a merchant for a specified commission payout. For example, say you purchase a group of keywords on a pay-per-click basis from Google AdWords related to gourmet food, such as gourmet cheese, Italian olive oil, and Gorgonzola cheese.

You can send your PPC traffic to igourmet.com for 12 percent of any sales that occur as a result of the traffic. In essence, you act as a traffic broker, and you profit when the amount of money that you pay for the traffic is less than the amount of commission you get in return. The two primary affiliate marketing search arbitrage strategies are known as direct linking and landing page driven. Direct linking is when you purchase traffic from pay-per-click search engines and send the traffic directly to the merchant partner using an affiliate tracking URL.

Direct linking does not require that you have a Web site because you send all traffic from the search engine to the merchant. In contrast, the landing page driven form of affiliate marketing search arbitrage requires that you purchase traffic from pay-per-click search engines and send the traffic through your Web site prior to the traffic eventually arriving at your merchant partner. Note that if you use the landing page driven form of affiliate marketing search arbitrage, you can enhance the amount of money you make by building search-engine-optimized landing pages.

Earn Money with LinkShare

An alternative to Commission Junction is another industry leader, LinkShare. LinkShare offers a variety of affiliate programs, from large brands like the NFL Shop, to small, niche-specific merchants such as igourmet.com. LinkShare offers advanced reporting features that allow you to carefully track affiliate payments by merchant and analyze the success of your traffic-generation strategies. LinkShare also includes many private, invitation-only affiliate programs such as Saks Fifth Avenue and J.Crew that can provide significant value to your Web site if you gain admittance to their programs.

Very similar to Commission Junction, LinkShare offers you the opportunity to promote products and earn a percentage of all referred sales. LinkShare, located at www.linkshare.com, was founded in 1996 and has since grown to be a true pioneer in the field of online affiliate marketing.

The size and variety of the affiliate programs available within the LinkShare network is one of the most attractive features of the company. This wide scope of programs allows room for publishers in nearly every niche imaginable. Some of the large brands included in the LinkShare network are American Express, Wal-Mart, Land’s End, Radio Shack, and the NFL Shop. Promoting largely branded items can prove to be a double-edged sword.

On one hand, these large brands already have a certain degree of trust built with the consumers. Viewers of your Web site are more likely to apply for an American Express card than apply for a credit card they have never heard of. Branded items also offer a unique opportunity for your SEO efforts. The search volume for highly branded keywords is significant and can result in significant revenue if you can rank within the top ten organic results for a top brand term. On the other hand, there are some challenges that arise when promoting highly branded products or services.

One issue is saturation. For example, you can find NFL Shop products on every major comparison-shopping engine, as well as countless other authorized NFL vendor Web sites. Typically, there is far more competition when promoting highly branded products. This same principle applies to SEO and ranking for brand-related keywords. The stronger and more numerous the competitors, the harder it is to rank well in the search-engine results.

Earn money with Pepperjam Network

One of the newest affiliate networks to gain momentum and attention is Pepperjam Network. Pepperjam Network, located at www.pepperjamnetwork.com, is a next-generation affiliate marketing network with innovative features that the other networks do not offer, including the ability to chat in real time with existing merchant partners.

In addition, the Pepperjam Chat module allows you to approach prospective merchant partners to negotiate commission payouts and to learn more about the program, thereby allowing you to proactively manage your business and build partnerships based on open communication. Pepperjam Network was the first affiliate network to offer a measure of affiliate and merchant transparency.

The Pepperjam Network Transparency System works on a five-point rating system, with an affiliate or merchant score of zero meaning nontransparent, and a score of five meaning fully transparent. The Pepperjam affiliate transparency system provides merchants with assurance that the practices and methods used by affiliates are accurate and consistent with the merchant’s terms of service.

The Pepperjam merchant transparency system provides affiliates with a measure of transparency as it relates to a merchant’s history of timely payment and overall satisfaction within the Pepperjam Network. Numerous other affiliate networks exist that provide you with opportunities to monetize your Web site traffic, including Performics, located at www.performics.com, Link Connector, located at www.linkconnector.com, and ShareASale, located at www.shareasale.com.