Affiliate Programs are Cool

Being a wannabe web entrepreneur, I’m always on the look out for new ways to monetize my websites. One of the most popular ways to monetize websites these days is by using Google Adsense, Google’s PPC text ad program (see far right column). To be honest though, I’m not a big fan of the program. It seems to me that it is far too easy to fraudulently click on ads to make money. Plus it doesn’t seem like a great deal for advertisers as they are paying just for traffic to their site and not for legitimate sales opportunities. So I’ve been testing other affiliate programs lately.

The first affiliate program I tried, after Adsense was Text-Link-Ads.com. Text-Link-Ads.com is just that, text-based link advertisements. I think Text-Link-Ads.com has a much more developed idea then Google Adsense for three main reasons. The first is that advertisers hand select which website they want their ads displayed on. This gives advertisers more control over their target demographic, which is what advertising is all about. Secondly, the ad software you install on your website generates legitimate HTML links. This is probably my favorite feature of Text-Link-Ads. Not only are you advertising on your demographic’s key websites, but you are also boosting your website’s page ranking by purchasing a link to your website from a website with related information. The third and final reason why Text-Link-Ads.com is superior to Google Adsense is advertiser’s don’t pay per click. As I stated above, a major downside to Google Adsense is the opportunity for fraudulent clicks. Text-link-ads has found an excellent alternative to this. When you set out to purchase ad space, you pay for an entire month. So regardless of how many clicks you receive, you pay one flat rate. I believe the monthly rate is determined by the Text-Link-Ads system and not by the publishers, but I can’t confirm that due to laziness.

All in all, I feel Text-Link-Ads.com has an exceptional product and offers a much more lucrative alternative to PPC advertising.

There is another form of advertising gaining popularity as of late. It’s called CPL or CPA. This, to me, seems to be the most effecient way to advertise at least from an advertiser’s stand point. The way Cost Per Lead advertising works is, ad publishers receive a percentage of every sale made that originates from their website. Advertisers dish out a portion of their sale to the referring publisher. Obviously CPL is going to yield much lower in conversion than PPC, but the payout is going to be larger than any PPC campaign.

I recently created an account with Commission Junction, a very robust CPL advertising company. The great thing about Commission Junction is that the publisher can search through their rather large list of advertisements to determine what would work best on your website. The amount of information about each ad listing is amazing. Commission Junction tells you upfront the average amount made per one hundred clicks and per one thousand ad impressions. It really is a great service.

With so many possibilities of fraud with PPC advertising, I feel it won’t be long before such services will be shut down. With such a large potential for income with CPL services, I expect to see a large movement to drop PPC and move to CPL.

Tags: CPL, CPA, PPC, Adsense, Text-Link-Ads, Commission Junction, affiliate programs, advertising