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Recruiting Affiliates: Part 2

You should understand that many affiliates have been doing this for some time and they know exactly what they want or don’t want. The kind of plan you choose to use when paying your affiliates will decide, in many instances, who will join with you and who won’t. There are three main plan categories for you to choose between. Furthermore, there are tiers. We’ll begin with the plans, and then continue onto a talk about tiers.

Pay-per-click, or PPC, plans are the type of programs you may have heard mentioned most often. This kind of affiliate plan, as well as the other choices, is performance based. The way it works is easy. A visitor to a website notices a banner ad or another kind link to a site. He or she clicks on that link. Every click is worth a certain amount of money to the web master of that site. While this is a wonderful plan, there has been some worry recently about “click fraud”, which means clicks are being made with the only purpose being to generate more money for the host site.

Pay-per-sale, or PPS, plans enable greater discretion. With this type of plan the seller only pays the affiliate if a sale is made. Whatever the commission rate is, the seller pays according to the price of the item sold.

Pay-per-lead, or PPL, is the last kind of commission plan. With this arrangement the seller will pay the commission to the affiliate whenever a lead is created. This can result from either directed traffic that visits the seller’s site and registers for something, or is a lead based on a pre-determined criterion.

Now let’s discuss tiers. Tiers work in an easy to understand manner. It all boils down to referrals. Let’s pretend you set up 2 tiers. The first tier is affiliates who approached you directly. They will earn commission on both the traffic they generate and on the traffic generated by their referrals. The second tier consists of affiliates who were sent to you by another affiliate. These affiliates earn commission on their referred visitors, and the first tier affiliate also earns a lower commission, without having to do any work.

These are the main choices you have regarding setting up an affiliate plan. You can iron out the details whatever way suits you best. Keep in mind that the primary question is whether or not your plan will be competitive enough to make affiliates want to join.