One of the easiest ways to make cash online is through affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is selling a company’s product through your website, blog, or email service. In essence, you get paid when your traffic buys their product. In this article, I will give you a first-hand review and advantages of one of the largest affiliate marketing companies – Commission Junction.

Hundreds Of Affiliate Programs In One Place

One of the best aspects of Commission Junction is that it has hundreds of affiliate programs to choose from. Also, more affiliate programs are added each and every week. The affiliate programs are divided by category (i.e. beauty, family, online services) so it is very simple to find affiliates that relate to your website.

Live Tracking And Reports

Commission Junction has live tracking and reports that are updated often. You can add a little bit of code that tracks which page on your website your ad clicks come from. If visitors to your website have to login, you can even track which visitor clicks which ad. This is great for determining which ads get the best click-thru rate and sales. Also, the commission reports are updated real-time so at any point, you can see how much money you have made and where that money came from.

Automatic Payouts

One thing I like about Commission Junction is that you don’t have to request your payment to be paid. Now there are monthly minimums (around $50 – $100) that must be met before you can get paid, but once that limit is reached and your commissions have been approved, they will send your payment. In fact, the first time I received a check from Commission Junction, I was on vacation. I came back home, checked the mail, and there was my first check!

While Commission Junction is a very good affiliate marketing program, there are also some disadvantages to using Commission Junction. Look for my next article describing some of the disadvantages of using Commission Junction.

Is PPC Dead?

No. PPC still has about 80% of the marketplace of online advertising, but that percentage is dropping as CPA becomes more popular. In addition, many marketers like to use PPC in combination with CPA and other models. Sometimes they will simply split up their offers between different models and other times they will integrate their campaigns to boost the power of the CPA network.

This is done with PPC to CPA marketing. Marketers build a PPC campaign and use the power of the Google AdWords campaign to start build an advertising campaign that is well revealed as well as targeted. But, then they link it to the CPA offers in a network by setting the destination URL to the CPA offer. So, in that model the two work together, even though you are paying for the privilege. You have to pay for use of the Google AdWords campaign, but you can set a daily limit and budget that with respect to the amount of leads you generate so that it is still profitable for you even though you are marketing someone else’s products, not your own.

How Much Does It Cost?

The cost to be a publisher with a CPA network is free. The cost to start generating leads can vary, however, depending on the method you choose. If you choose a PPC-to-CPA strategy, it’s not unreasonable to assume that you can spend anywhere from $1,000 to $5,000 on a suitable Google keyword campaign before even knowing what the conversion rate of that campaign might end up being. There are people who have done PPC-to-CPA with $20 and then generated sufficient leads to reinvest the monies and get more leads, and so on.

But, that’s very rare. So, if you don’t have a whole lot of money, stick with some of the strategies that don’t demand much cash, but will require you to work at it. That way, all you’re out is time and even that’s not wasted as you begin to learn the ropes through good experience. The cost to implement a campaign as an advertiser can vary from network to network. There are networks that can try to charge excessive fees. Some make you pay a “setup fee” of $2,500 to $10,000. In addition, there are costs for each sale of lead that your campaign generates, which can range between 20 and 30%. So, if your offer is $1, you would end up paying between $1.20 and $1.30, when all is said and done. You can estimate the actual conversion rate of a campaign and how well you are doing with CPA because it is performance based.

So, if you know you are paying $1,000 to get 50 sales or leads, what you’re actually paying is $20.00 for each lead. That’s why this model is popular with advertisers. The return on investment can be easily calculated, especially if you are doing pay-per-sale as your action. You know how much profit you make on a sale, and you know how much each lead cost you. So, you know your net profit!

Voila!

A CPA network owner is going to make much more money than either the advertiser or publisher, but they also carry far more risk and have large startup costs. They have to set up a website that can track performance of campaigns and also hire affiliate manages to manage accounts. They have to have enough of a cash cushion so that if an advertiser defaults on an account, they can still pay the publisher and retain a valuable asset. We’ll go over more of the intricacies of being a CPA network owner in future posts.

Everyone Is Just Getting Started

The nice thing about getting into CPA network marketing right now is that everyone is in the same boat! It is in its infancy and the time to make big money is now. So, just as when a product is introduced into a marketplace it can have a surge in sales due to its novelty. However, as it becomes more established (which is where we’re headed now), the potential for making money increases exponentially until the market is saturated.

Many Internet marketers would suggest that PPC marketing is so competitive and the market has gotten so saturated, that it is becoming much harder to turn a profit in this area. The audience on the Internet, especially in English-speaking countries, has become so jaded at these ads that they may just subconsciously ignore them, producing fewer clicks. Or they are aware of many of the schemes that worked before and are likely to avoid the, particularly handing out email addresses only to be put on a spam list.

So, any strategy that allows publishers to get income where they just have to involve the individual enough to get them to perform some action is a viable way to overcome buyer resistance and make money online, without having to actually make a sale. And, as new websites, online services, and strategies appear on how to make money with CPA, everyone is on an equal footing to make the most of this once-in-a-lifetime chance!