2. The Sites That Pay Well

Let me explain this by way of an example. I was looking for an insurance site to market and I came across this insurance quoting site. Now I know that roughly 1% of subscribers to my property investment website would be interested enough in what I recommend to fill out an enquiry form or quotation form if I wrote a sales pitch about a particular insurance site.

So I looked at what this insurance quoting site was offering to affiliates and I was stunned. They were offering 1p for every quotation request regardless of if they take out the insurance. Wow wee! Let’s say this insurance quoting site was super duper and 2% of my subscribers responded, then I could expect to earn:

Now I don’t know what your time is worth, but there is no way I could justify writing a newsletter about an insurance quoting website if all I could expect to earn is a few quid.

So I can hope you can see that you have to be affiliated with websites that pay a decent amount. The way you determine this is not as easy as it seems. In the above example you can see that there is no point in getting involved with a website that pays 1p per lead, but what about a merchant that offers £100 per validated lead where successful validation only occurs 1% of the time or £100 commission per sale where a sale only occurs 0.2% of the time?

The way you determine which sites pay out the most is by looking at the statistic ‘Earnings per click’, ‘EPC,’ 7 Day EPC or something like that. The middlemen websites calculate how much the merchants pay out relative to the number of clicks generated by all affiliates over a period of time. So for example you could have two merchants, one offering £100 per validated lead, and the other offering £50 per lead and they both could have received 1,000 clicks over the last seven days from all the affiliates. Then compare this:

We can deduce that the earnings per click are:

So we can see that even though Company A offers a headline commission of £100 per lead, a clear £50 higher than Company B, you actually earn more from Company B because they validate leads less strictly. So Company B would be the choice to affiliate with if they both offered the same product or service. What is to be learned here is do not get seduced by the headline commission. It’s better to go with a merchant who offers you £1 per click/lead/ sale and pays out rather than a one who offers you £100 per click/lead/sale and pays out nothing! And trust me there are merchants out there who promise the world and pay out nothing, so beware.

This is also applicable for pay per sale. You may have the scenario where 1,000 clicks result in:

So the EPC would be:

So company B has a website that converts better than company A. It may be because it has a better sales pitch or a better product or service. Whatever it is you should promote Company B’s website as the EPC is higher.

If there is no data on the merchant because they are new then look at what they are offering and see if it looks reasonable. For each type of commission consider the following.

Pay Per Click

This is fairly obvious to deduce. Either you like the amount or not! It’s easily trackable so if they’re offering you an amount that you’re happy with then go for it. My threshold is around 50p per click. I would happily place a link on my site if the merchant would pay me 50p per click. Obviously it’s a personal choice and you have to decide what you’re happy with.