Kiwi-s.com - Pay per sale affiliate programs Still worth joining

PPS programs are the single most used commission model for affiliate programs online. The reasons are many, but the simplicity and fairness of this commission model are two important factors.

Not to long ago - before google adsense - getting paid for anything else than sales were uncommon. In most niches, affiliate programs offering a PPC or PPL commission where unheard of.

Other commission models - mainly pay per click - were only used in a few, highly competitive niches. As many other things in the affiliate marketing business, the first websites offering a PPC option were of an adult nature - or pornography if you will.

Today, a PPC affiliate program can be found in most niches and other commission models are growing in numbers every day.

Even though the number of affiliate programs offering other commission models are more today than it was yesterday, they are still vastly outnumbered by the PPS alternatives.

This means that, even though it's tempting to get paid per click, the chance of finding the best affiliate program is higher if you search among the PPS alternatives. As there are many affiliate programs competing for the same crowd of affiliates, they use the only means they have to compete; size of commission.

This should be easy enough to compare, but if you look closely you'll see a few other factors important for the overall performance. An affiliate program offering a high, percentage based commission isn't always better than a program of lower commission. You need to look at a few things to determine which program to join;

Instead of staring oneself blind looking solely on the size of commission, affiliates should always research the websites of the affiliate programs before joining them. See if the prices are competitive, website easy to navigate and if they have products likely to appeal to your visitors. The key is to find an affiliate program likely to treat your referrals well, and convert them into paying customers.

If the products are expensive, the decision to buy a product can take quite some time, if you are promoting such products - be sure to look at the length of cookie. The minimum length should be no less than 30 days, otherwise you stand to loose to many of your converting visitors when their cookies expire before they actually convert.

Another important thing is recurring commission. If the affiliate program in question is offering recurring - or residual - commission, roughly 5% of the buyers will return and make additional purchases. This is of course highly dependent of niche. Referring players to a poker affiliate program will generate recurring commission far more often than if you are promoting car rentals or such, but this should be taken into consideration when calculating the potential commission.

Once you have found the best pay per sale affiliate program, it's much easier to compare it to the various PPC, PPM or PPL affiliate programs in your niche, to see which commission model likely to make the best revenue. An easy calculation of how many clicks, leads or impressions you need to deliver to meet the expected value of the PPS commission for one sale. If the amount of clicks needed are high, the PPS option is likely your best option, if its low - you might be better off with a pay per click affiliate program. The same applies when looking at PPM or PPL affiliate programs.