Affiliate Networks

Affiliate networks are networks of merchants that gives money for clicks, sales, impressions or leads. Affiliate networks offer a wide range of affiliate programs, with a central administration system to track your revenue.

The advantages of joining an affiliate network as an affiliate are:

• Free to sign up (the merchants pay fees to list their programs)
• Programs are categorised so it is easy to locate suitable programs
• Partner with hundreds of advertisers from one interface.
• Trusted third party that tracks and reports on ads.
• One monthly cheque for all program payments.
• Provides online tools to help publishers optimize their performance.
• Reliability of merchants

Affiliate networks can be divided into groups according to their payment systems:
pay per click
pay per impression
pay per lead / sale
pay per popup

Information

• Some networks have a minimum traffic requirement, i.e. Affiliate Fuel requires 1000 unique visitors per day to join.

• Check the payment times and minimum before signing up, you shouldn't have to wait months for payment or wait for it to reach hundreds of dollars before you are paid.

• Not all networks support all the major countries so do check.

Glossary of terms

PPC - Pay per click
CPA - Cost per action (usually filling out a form or making a purchase)
CPC - Cost per click through
CPM - Cost per thousand impressions
Two tier - Affiliates earn commissions on their conversions as well as conversions of webmasters they refer to the program.
PPI - Pay per impression
PPL - Pay per lead, payment is based solely based on qualifying leads.
PPS - Pay per sale, payment is based solely based on qualifying sales.
Payment threshold - the minimum accumulated commission an affiliate must earn to trigger payment from an affiliate program.