Let’s say these people buy something. You’ll earn a commission for anything they buy that fits Amazon’s rules.

Amazon commissions are low compared to many other affiliate programs, but some affiliates have found that the ease of selling physical products on Amazon (as opposed to selling digital products in a lesser-known location) makes up for the low commission rates. Also, the reimbursement rates are low.

Let’s talk about selling digital products in a lesser known place: there is a platform called ClickBank.com where people sell digital e-books. A person or company writes an e-book and puts it up for sale and promotion on the ClickBank marketplace.

The person or company is known as a vendor at ClickBank. Each provider can set their own commission rates and some set them as high as 75%.

For a $37 or $97 ebook, 75% is a lot. The commission is much higher, but the conversion rates, that is, how many people click on your link and buy, can be much lower.

In addition to Amazon products and e-books, there are many other affiliate marketing options. Almost any topic you can imagine will have some kind of affiliate program related to it.

CPA offers

In addition to receiving a commission for physical products and digital ebooks, you can also promote CPA offers. CPA stands for cost per action.

The action can often be something simple like filling out a form, requesting something, giving your email address, or sometimes signing up for an offer.

So the way this works is that you would somehow lure people into the offer and if they complete the offer you would get a set amount of money. Normally this money is low, like a dollar or two dollars, but with some offers it can be quite high.

There are medical offers where people sign up to receive a medical item by mail and only pay for shipping and handling, but then if they don’t cancel or return the item, their credit card will be charged for the full amount of the item .

These offers often pay substantially better than one where the person would only give their email address. However, these offers may also have higher return and refund rates.

Google AdSense / Contextual Marketing

Another method of affiliate marketing that a lot of people engage in is Google AdSense. Google advertising. If you build a website that gets a lot of traffic but you really can’t figure out what kind of ads or affiliate links to put in, then AdSense may work for you.

You sign up for an AdSense account and AdSense gives you a block of code. You paste this code on your website and where the code is, AdSense will serve ads. AdSense will read the words on your page and decide what the page is about and send ads related to that. When someone clicks on the ads, you will earn money. Some topics are worth more than others. For example, trips can be worth more than prescriptions.