Newbie questions and comments on affiliates.

How the heck does this work?

[littlecubpanda]

1) Are there any affiliate programs that pay for clicks/impressions vs. sales? (Let me guess: "No")

2) Is Clickbank the best? What are the others?

3) Why do some affiliate sites not provide ANY affiliate banners/links/marketing tools? It would take maybe an hour of time to set up a simple affiliate page w/ banners and marketing info, but I've noticed a lot of Clickbank sites don't even bother!

4) One site I checked (which appeared to have very high 'gravity' on Clickback) forces you (the customer) to go to a 30 minute forced flash presentation with no exterior links. You can't even click on the main page once you're there, you're just stuck, watching this awful presentation. Is this how this stuff is supposed to generate sales?

5) Can/couldn't affiliates potentially negatively affect Adsense clicks yet utterly fail to make up for that lost revenue in later sales? I would suspect so. Unless you have very high traffic, affiliate ads will draw traffic away from your site yet you might be lucky to convert one or two sales a month, if at all. Meanwhile, you've lost a lot of potential Adsense clicks.

6) Do you need 10,000+ traffic a day for this to be viable? Because that's what I'm guessing.

(Sorry if this is too many questions, feel free to delete)

[LifeinAsia]

1/2) There are many programs besides AdSense that pay for clicks- Chitika, Media.net, and many others. Several companies pay (not usually much) for impressions as well. Most have traffic requirements.

3) You'll have to ask them. Most likely, they want affiliates to actually do some work to earn commissions instead of just slapping up a banner.

4) You'll have to ask them.

5) (On the other hand, that $.05 AdSense click may have cost you the commission on a $250 purchase.) Not all affiliates use AdSense. Not all AdSense publishers are affiliates. Different types of advertising works on different sites or even different pages on the same site. Test to see what works best for you.

6) I used affiliate programs before I had 10K visitors/day. As previously mentioned, some programs may require traffic minimums before accepting you. In those cases, yes.

[piatkow]

Are there any affiliate programs that pay for clicks/impressions vs. sales? (Let me guess: "No")

Well by definition if it pays for sales its an affiliate and if it pays on clicks or impressions its an advert. A rather pedantic distinction from one point of view but if you are Googling on "affiliate" to find an alternative ad network to Adsense ....

3)I would guess that they expect the link to be built into content, something that I have done when putting reviews on line. The idea is that the punter is more likely to follow a text link than a banner link. If that isn't your field then move on to something that is.

4)No idea either

5/6) My experience is that if you use an affiliate banner and an Adsense ad in the same way on your page then Adsense will get a massively higher CTR.

[littlecubpanda]

"I would guess that they expect the link to be built into content, something that I have done when putting reviews on line. The idea is that the punter is more likely to follow a text link than a banner link. If that isn't your field then move on to something that is. "

Ahh makes sense now. I get it. Yep, I've seen that.

"My experience is that if you use an affiliate banner and an Adsense ad in the same way on your page then Adsense will get a massively higher CTR. "

Now that's something. Can you explain further?