Affiliate Network Rewards Programs

With so many affiliate networks out there, they all have to work really hard to get your business. To show their appreciation, a lot of network have their own rewards programs. Let’s take a look at a few programs and how they are rewarding their Top Affiliates.

Market Leverage REWARDS PROGRAM
In addition to a whole new site design, a new rewards program was recently added to Market Leverage. The network now boasts that they have “The Highest Paying Cash Rewards Program in the Industry“. With the Market Leverage rewards program, you would receive an American Express Cash Gift Card worth 1% of the amount you earned in that monthly reporting period. The minimum commission to each an American Express gift card is $1,000, which is much lower than many other networks.
Minimum Commission to Receive Reward: $1,000
Commission to Reward Ratio: 1%

- Join Market Leverage Affiliate Network

CX Digital Media REWARDS PROGRAM
Taking their rewards program to another level, CX Media Digital has a pyramid format and rewards in actual prizes and gift cards. To reach the first level of rewards point, you will first need to earn $15,000 in commission with the network. Rewards available on level 1 are in the range of $100.Once you’ve earned over $300,000 with the network, you can receive rewards such as a Panasonic TH-50PX60U 50″ Plasma HDTV valued at $2799.99.
Minimum Commission to Receive Reward: $15,000
Commission to Reward Ratio: Less than 1%

- Join CX Digital Affiliate Network

Rocket Profit REWARDS PROGRAM
Every month you earn over $5,000 with Rocket Profit, you can receive at least a $25 gift card, or all the way up to a $500 gift card. Rocket Profit offers a wide selection of gift card to choose from, whether it be Barnes and Noble, Home Depot or clothes from the Gap.
Minimum Commission to Receive Reward: $5,000
Commission to Reward Ratio: Less than 1%

- Join RocketProfit Affiliate Network

Copeac REWARDS PROGRAM
Increase you monthly earnings with Copeac by earning a gift card each month based on your performance. With a rather high minimum, an affiliate must generate $25,000 to earn a $50 gift card. If you are pushing some nice volume through the company and surpass $100,000 in commissions, you’ll walk away with an additional $500 gift card.
Minimum Commission to Receive Reward: $5,000
Commission to Reward Ratio: Less than 1%

- Join Copeac Affiliate Network

AFFILIATE NETWORKS REWARDS BREAK DOWN

From the chart shown above you can see a break down of each affiliate network rewards program based on the minimum commission you must make to receive a Level 1 reward and the Level 1 reward amount. The last % Ratio column is a break down of how much each rewards program actually “rewards” you, based on your earnings. For example, for every $100 you earn in commissions with Market Leverages, you would receive $1 in rewards value, or 1%. Taking that same example and applying it to COPEAC network, you would earn .20 for every $100 in commissions earned (.20%), towards a reward.

Which Affiliate Program rewards program works best for you, and have you received any rewards lately?

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What Makes an Awesome Affiliate Network?

With so many affiliate networks out there, how are you supposed to choose and what makes you work with one more than others. Here are just a few factors that come into play when I’m deciding what affiliate networks to work with.

A Personable Relationship
Probably my number one factor when working with a network is to have an established relationship with the company. Being able to contact my affiliate manager on AIM through out the day is a big plus. With most of the networks I am working with, I find that my affiliate manager has become a good friend, rather than just another business associate. I feel comfortable holding a regular conversation with many of account manager and am open with them on ideas on how to better increase campaigns and landing pages. I want to work with an affiliate manager that is fun and not always pushing offers down my throat.

Premium Rates & Exclusive Offers
Getting paid the top tier rates and receiving “premium” or “exclusive” offers is awesome. Going back to my “Personable Relationship” point, I would gladly stay with a company I have been working with for a while than jump to a new offer if they have an offer for a few percentage points more. A network that goes out of their way to bring you high rates, premium offers and tries to keep me happy will always get my business.

     
It’s Not Hard to Point Out Networks that Take the Extra Step!

These were just a couple of my BIG points that I look for when running with an affiliate network. If you are making money online, you are probably make some of your revenue (if not all) through an affiliate network… so what are you looking for when you join an affiliate network, or what do you love about your current revenue generating network?

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Picking the Right Niche Market

Everyone is always talking about niche marketing and how you can make good money if you dedicate yourself and target the right niche. So how are you supposed to know what niche market to target, without wasting your time and ad dollars. Here are a few quick questions and ideas to ask yourself when trying to find and target a new niche market.

1.) Make a Short List of Your Passions
It may sound cheesy or cliché, but it’s going to matter. For example, if you really enjoy watching or playing basketball, then creating a site based on basketball or selling basketball sports supplies, you will probably be that much more dedicated toward working on your site and getting it to work. Not only will you have an interest in your new niche area, but if it’s one of your passions, then you should know a lot about the topic and what you are talking about. Write a short list down of 5-10 passions of yours and see what you can come up with.

2.) Is this a Profitable Niche?
Once you have a few ideas and passions written down, take a look at them and see if there is a high demand or big money being spent in these markets. A very simple way to see if there is a lot of money to be made, is to do a simple Google search, then look at the advertisers on the right hand column. If you are seeing a lot of advertisers, there is usually a high demand for the product or service. Another obvious method for calculating is retail pricing. Will it be better for you to target a less competitive niche market (basketball skills training guides) and sell 100 items and make $10 or each, or try and target an over saturated market (sports tickets) and making $50-$100 per sale?

3.) Is there a Demand for this Niche?
Nearly just as important as how much people are willing to spend on your niche product or service, is how many people actually want it. Using the Google Traffic Estimator, you can get an idea on how often people are searching for a specific niche area or product. Not only will you be given estimates on daily search term traffic, but you can also use this tool as another resource to find how much others are paying to market in this niche, by looking at the average cpc cost.

Just using some simple “basketball” related terms, you can see there are multiple niche markets. You have less cost and traffic for targeting toward people that want to “increase vertical leap“, so it would be easier for you to take advantage of a larger portion of this niche market. On the opposite side, you could sell basketball tickets and memorabilia, where the average advertising is paying more money, with more traffic. Map out your passions and niche markets and see which opportunities make the most sense.

4.) Target Towards Yourself
Once again, going back to basing your new niche market on your passion… as a customer, learn to target towards yourself. If you are going to create a web site based on “increasing your vertical leap“, you should have prior / existing relation to the topic. If you were doing a search on Google for the same topic, what type of information would you want to find on the sites you are visiting. Since you are now the marketer and the potential buyer, you should be able to relate to your customers better than most. Create your new site and niche market to cater as much to your users as possible.

5.) Stay in It to Win It
If you are going to target to a niche market and find you are doing well with it, I would recommend focusing on this niche area for the long haul. Depending on what you are targeting it may be extremely difficult, or quite possible for you to become one of the main and prominent sites in this area. If you are going to target towards people looking to increase their basketball jumping ability vs. selling sports tickets, you will probably have a lot more success with the prior. Not only will you have less competition from heavily funded companies in search marketing, but if you provide a quality site and/or product in a small niche area, you can get a ton of exposure and sales from word of mouth. Before selecting your new niche market, ask yourself… “Can I become one of the top 5% marketers/sites in this area?”

These are just a few questions and tips to consider when starting in a new niche area. Niche marketing can be very fun and profitable, or very frustrating and a waste of time and money. Before jumping into a new niche market, make sure that you take the time and effort to map out your business plan.

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Focusing on a Niche Market: IronMan Movie

Initial numbers are out, and it’s no surprise… the IronMan movie is owning up the box office. As reported by Deadline Hollywood, here are what the first numbers look like and forecast:

‘IRON MAN’ FIRST SUMMER STRONGMAN: Friday’s $30 Million Dollar Marvel; $80+M Weekend, $30M Intl, 2008’s Biggest Yet

So what does this mean for you? Besides being one of the millions of people that are going to see this movie, why turn it around for once and make money off the movie, while enjoying it! If you have an interest in comics and or just like IronMan, the potential here is amazing. Just look at the Spiderman movie series, they have been marketing and commercializing the heck out of that movie since day one. If you got in early with promoting or marketing Spiderman products, you probably made out very well. Don’t let another Marvel Movie pass you buy without making some extra pocket change, not to mention you will be ready when the sequels come out too!

The IronMan movie has now been released and it’s already going to get massive overflow of people searching online for videos, screencaps, the IronMan story, comics and more… you name it! So how can you start promoting IronMan products or get in on the action. Be creative! Target to your audience and give them what they want. If you are good with ppc marketing, you can setup ad campaigns around IronMan, or you can simply setup an IronMan store and sell products, dvds and comics. Amazon.com and several other Affiliate Programs have thousands of IronMan products.

Another idea is to create a Build a Niche Store site. I created an IronMan comics sites just for the movie’s release. With the new movie coming out, you know there is going to be a huge interest in the comic book series. The creation of this IronMan comics site, using BANS, will also play into my case study for you to follow and watch. For now I have thrown together a basic design using the BANS program to give you an idea of what an out of the box site would look like. As of now, I have just registered a domain and created a header image for the site and will now document and write a tutorial of how I made the basic site into a monetized IronMan dedicated comic and memorabilia site. Through the week updates will follow with screen captures and what changes were made the to site. This should not only give you ideas on how to target to niche markets, but also how to monetize a page to the maximum.

What are your ideas for creating a revenue generating campaign around a new movie? If you are targeting towards a movie that is already bound for success, the branding and audience is already there. You just need to focus on providing a quality products and getting users to your site.

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April 2008 Blog Revenue Report

Goodbye to April and hello to May, it’s time for another ZacJohnson.com Blog Revenue Report. April was a good month and pretty much started off with me being in California for a week for EliteRetreat. The event was awesome and I decided to stay a few extra days to travel around the state and even visit Google. Due to my vacation time, I wasn’t able to post as much as I would have liked to during the month, but I still managed to make 25 posts… which isn’t that great. I should be averaging at least one a day and will aim for around 35-40 posts this month. With the recent Google PR Update, the blog also went from a PR4 to a PR5. Let’s take a look at how the blog’s revenue performed during April 2008, compared to March’s earnings of $3,463.53 profit.

APRIL 2008 BLOG REVENUE REPORT:

- Affiliate Sales/Referrals: $1808.31
- Private Ad Sales: $1100.00
- ScratchBack Top Spots: $21.25
Total Revenue: $2969.56

- Ad Spot on JoeTech.com
Total Costs: $10.00

Total Blog Income for April 2008: $2959.56

Previous month revenue numbers for the month were at a high of $3,465.53 and down a bit during April to $2,969.56. I’m not that concerned as the blog revenue is more of a case study than anything else, and also gives you an idea of how sales and affiliate earnings can fluctuate month to month. ScratchBack Top Spots were really slacking for the month, so I think I will be changing a few things up on the blog this month. Private sales were lower than previous month, but affiliate revenues were up.

As for advertising and maintenance costs, and the server costs are minimal since the blog is hosted on my own rack of network servers. While at Affiliate Summit West, I got to meet with Joe from JoeTech.com. I saw he recently added a few ad spots to his blog, so I decided to grab one of his 125×125 spots. Other than that, nothing special on costs or advertising for the blog.

You may have noticed the latest edition to the blog is the new “Super Affiliate Tips Newsletter” form in the top navigation bar. That is just one of the cool new features being added to the blog this month. I will have a dedicated post to this new mailing list early next week. Subscribe now and get exclusive posts and articles that won’t be featured on the blog, I’ll be sure to give away some goodies too. Lastly, since getting more active on Twitter this month, I’ve been able to talk and network with a lot more people and pick up some new readers. If you haven’t already, get on Twitter and follow me.

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