2 Tier Affiliate Programs Explained
By Eric Edelstein
Affiliates are getting cleverer by the day. So these days, affiliates know the difference between the different types of traffic they can get paid for. There are a lot of definitions though – CPM, CPC, CPA, CPL, CPD and many more.
CPM is impressions, when the publisher (the website owner) gets paid every time a banner is shown.
CPC is clicks, where the publisher (or email marketer and other marketers) gets paid every time a banner or text link is clicked upon.
The other ways of getting paid are grouped together under the term performance marketing – and this is where the term is most commonly used as well.
An is a marketer who sends visitors to another site using a variety of methods (such as placing banners or text links on their own site, buying sponsored listings on search engines, email marketing and many other different methods) and gets paid when an action happens. This action can be a lead (CPL stands for Cost per Lead), a Sale (CPS stands for Cost per Sale), a download (CPD stands for Cost per download) and many other variations.
Some in the Internet industry refer to performance based marketing as CPA (cost per acquisition), although the term is also sometimes used for specific types of campaigns such as leads or sales.
Now that we’ve got over the hard part, the rest is easy to understand.
The gets paid for sending visitors to a specific landing page where an action happens – either a lead, a sale, a download or some other sort of action that the advertiser requires. As an example, some advertisers are looking to build up their databases, so they pay for each opt in email address they receive, others want leads from specific locations, so they pay for zip codes, and then try convince the visitors after they fill in their zip code, to fill in a more detailed lead form.
The common denominator is that the gets paid when an action happens.
A 2 Tier program is simply finding new marketers to sign up under you to do EXACTLY what you are doing – sending visitors to different offers and getting paid when the visitors perform some sort of action. So why would you want other marketers to sign up under you to promote the same offers? Simple – you get paid a percentage of the amount the you refer gets paid? Sounds complicated?
Don’t worry, it’s not hard to understand. As an example, say John promotes 5 different offers on a single network. He gets paid for every lead, sale, email and zip code he generates from these different offers. John now tells Mark about the Network and gets Mark to sign up using a banner or text link that has John’s referral code built into it. Mark now signs up to the Network under John and starts promoting various offers and advertisers from the Network. These offers DON’T have to be the same offers that John is promoting.
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