Commission per sale, per lead or per click?
Its been roughly a year, when I started investigating affiliate business models and internet marketing more seriously. Part of the reason was my current job where marketing and SEO is practiced more actively than on my previous jobs. And then I just wanted to know if there are serious home business opportunities on Internet, where I could use my former skills and knowledge of web programming. As a programmer I could do freelancer jobs, but I know it is just for casual income. Doing a business targets on its ultimate to less work and more profit even it is more common to achieve more profit with more work and resources. From individual point of view, we all would like to get more free time and have no financial limits, when spending that time. Normal day job can never fulfill these requirements.
One dilemma I’m still struggling is, whether I should focus on one of these three profit models:
- Commission per sale
- Commission per lead
- Commission per click
Mostly I have done different kind of testing whole this year, or at least now I can face the truth and see that most of the work done so far has been testing. Sure when I put my first PPC campaign on Adwords I was excited, but when days and weeks passed and I didn’t find any sales, excitement changed to frustration. I found, that starting an online business from scratch is more difficult than I expected. Pay Per Click advertising is lucrative to start, but I have realized that you need a lot of money to test and find golden keywords, that people use on search engines when they are ready to buy. Search network and content network behave differently. On search engines people mostly are trying to find information, I should say free information and when they are on buying mood, they often prefer to go to the local search and use quite product specific search phrases.
Commission per sale
The most important thing I think with the first option, CPS is to create confident relationships. When people trust to your product OR evaluation and recommendation skills, they are ready to use your affiliate links. It can take several, even ten years to build this plausibility. There are several tricks you can take to achieve plausibility. You can use authority website themes, which look like other big names websites. This is a pure psychology, but can be also lead to unethical ways of marketing. Another good way to get more plausibility is to interview other marketers and create interesting content. Good example I’ve been following are teleseminars broadcasted on Affilorama.com (see: Recent video lessons). People are quite ready to give interviews and recommendations because they get free publicity. It’s a win-win situation for both sides.
Commission per lead
Little easier to achieve some profit from Internet marketing activities for me has been the second model, CPL or CPA from the other side of coin. As told on previous blog post, it is easier to get people to give some of their information, than to use credit card. I’ve made some hundreds of dollars with this model recently, but again found it surprisingly hard to use PPC for marketing. Again there is a challenge to find right keywords, demographics and sites where to market. Of course there would be more millionaires, if it were easy. Special care has to be used on tracking and constant changing of offers. It can be technically challenging and again require a lot of time and money for testing the markets. There is one insight I got some months ago with CPA marketing and it was that the true nature of Internet business is actually traffic brokering. You try to find traffic to your target site as much as possible with as low price as possible. Traffic can come from PPC, Media Buy, SEO or Social Media like Twitter. All of these sources have their own specialties.
Commission per click
Third method was something I realized just recently last spring. I have had Adsense account from 2004, but never really used time to find its possibilities. Now when I tried CPS and CPL I found, that Adsense really fits to the same category as a profit model. You can get commission from user click. Again its all about finding traffic sources and correct keywords. I made a good success with Adsense, contrary to the most comments people use to say. Main discovery I made some months ago was a site model, which is very logical when you think it again. Normal blogs and sites never gave me but some dollars a month if even that. I found, that because people are mostly searching for free information and audio-visual experiences from internet, why not give them opportunity to search what they want? So I used a script to generate my own search engine, which has Adsense ads added to the result page. Now with some intelligent page structure you can get Google to show almost any kind of ads on your site. Its far more easy way than creating blog posts, that has only one title and body whereas search result on custom search engine has as many titles and results pages as people find. In onpage SEO the importance of keywords increases from H1 element to page title alement to URL so its really important to have keywords on url and title.
For some month I have been collecting most profitable keywords for adsense and they were not “Mesolethioma” based as we are told by most of the sites. They might be expensive to advertice, but people tend to bid different amount of money to content network, usually much less than search network. When I was in a belief, that Adsense is not as lucrative as might have been five years ago and it will give only from 0.01 to max of 2 dollars per click if have found some higher bidded keywords. But I was wrong! I just can’t give exact commission per click for two reasons: 1) it is impossible because Google doesn’t show exact statistics for it. I have an estimation based on constant check of my account. 2) publishing stats is against Google terms of service. Keywords I have found highly profitable at the moment are “online criminal justice degree”, “online insurance quotes”, “help desk software” and “austin dwi attorney” and keywords related to these subjects. Their CPC is up to $6 / click!
On upcoming posts I’ll go deeper to cost per click profit model show how to create custom search engine and how to market and drive traffic to it. As a final note, Adsense is not only option in this model, there are several other networks and ways to get paying advertisers to your site.
- CPA Marketing Woes
- Google Arbitrage – Still applicable?
- Some perspectives to Internet marketing business
- Why Article Marketing?
- Collecting Keyword Filtered Twitter Followers with PHP
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This blog is really interesting. Do you think its worth it to sign up for Adsense? My friend had told me about it and told me to try it. What do you think is the best way to make money while at home? I just got screwed at my job and I’m now jobless. The founder of our company left with all our funding and I’m applying around but I’m interested in online businesses. If you’re not busy, do you think you can help show me the steps in starting up Adsense please or an online business? You’re like an online prodigy. I’m still reading your blogs and had save it to my favorites. I hope to learn more from your blogs.
Yes, I think it is worth of subscribing to Adsense, plus some sales and CPA networks as well. Some subscription process makes from couple of days to weeks because of all kind of confirmations. So I personally suggest to start subscribing as soon as possible. On future post I’ll be more precise with this, but addition to Adsense I recommend cj.com, shareasale.com, clickbank.com, affiliate.com and maxbounty.com. Thats a good punch of affiliate networks, that makes possible to do almost anykind of product promoting. Of cource there are other possibilities to do internet business, but I refer now to internet marketing and advertising business.
Best way is to start as soon as possible and try different tactics, but you may need to compromise between marketing things you like the most and things that are the most affortable and profitable.
Don’t expect fast results with IM if you dont have funds to start. Create a plan for a year and be realistic of what you may achieve in that period. I still recommend IM as a secondary job on beginning like they used to recommend on MLM business because first year or two may not bring you whole income, at least here in Finland we have so high standard of living I could not live with IM at the moment. But on the other part of the world they could.
Im going to put one post for using Adsense on Custon Search Engine related site next week. You could try that approach, its all free info and scripts that I’m sharing.
Great post! I have been wondering this subject lately a lot.
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