Pay Per Lead Payment Structure for Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing continues to be an excellent way for the technologically disinclined to make an attempt at sharing in on the large amounts of profits to be made online in today’s market.  As retailers and merchants turn more and more to the Internet for advertising and promoting their products due to its low overhead and excellent returns, new opportunities continue to spring up for driven, self-starting individuals to capitalize as well.  New businesses especially are finding the Internet attractive due to no need for a brick and mortar storefront, a lease, or the normal expenditures involved in running a business in the physical world.  Businesses set up wholly on the Internet are the new trend, but advertising is always necessary, whether a business exists online or not.  Affiliate marketing has shown itself as one of the most successful alternatives for merchants, advertisers, the affiliates that represent them, and the programs that bring them together.  As money and profit is the driving force behind these endeavors, it is an excellent idea to understand how affiliate programs pay their affiliate commissions out, and what effort is required to motivate this.  One way many affiliate programs pay is based on a pay per lead system.

The pay per lead (PPL) structure for payment in affiliate programs can be a successful way to entice affiliates to represent a product or offer.  No purchase is necessary by the customer in order for the affiliate to be paid.  A cashless transaction where the customer simply fills out a form with contact information for later use is usually the only action that needs to be motivated by the affiliate’s efforts in order to receive an agreed upon commission.  While this may seem simple enough at face value, affiliates may find this difficult as many online users are wary about giving out certain information due to the rampant rise of identity theft online.  Nonetheless, with the right persuasive efforts, even the most skeptical of customers will succumb to a seasoned affiliate’s effort for information.  Usually a request for contact information is paired with an offer of a free gift in return; always an excellent incentive for the seemingly innocuous act of providing an email address to a merchant for later use.  Unfortunately for merchants and affiliate managers, pay per lead can be manipulated by shrewd affiliate marketers with fraud on their minds.  It is for this reason most leads are investigated in order to make sure they are legitimate before the affiliate commission is paid.  For affiliates and affiliate programs that remain on the up and up, this is not a concern, and will be unaffected, always receiving due compensation for their excellent affiliate efforts.