Perplexed with affiliate marketing? There's no reason for you to be confused with this topic, as RevenueGateway offers this practical section: a brief guide on affiliate marketing for webmasters and visitors in general.

Generally referred to as affiliate marketing, the term also means pay for performance, performance-based, results-based, referral-based or revenue-sharing marketing. It's basically a partnership between a merchant and an affiliate where the latter is paid a commission based on the clicks, leads or sales referred to the merchant's website.

It's as simple as that. As a leading affiliate network, RevenueGateway has one of the highest commission rates in the industry. Here are ad units you need to familiarize yourself with:

CPA: Cost Per Action or Acquisition. The affiliate gets a commission each time a visitor clicks on an advertisement and takes action, whether in the form of a lead or a sale.

CPC: Cost Per Click. The affiliate gets a commission for every click on an advertisement, which can be a text link, a banner, a pop-up, etc.

CPL: Cost Per Lead. The affiliate gets a commission for every lead generated, that is, when a visitor clicks on an ad and fills out a sign-up form or enters his/her email address for a newsletter.

CPM: Cost Per Thousand Impressions. The affiliate gets a commission for every 1,000 ads viewed.

Affiliates under RevenueGateway's CPC or PPC (Pay Per Click) program must note that we give a keyword list for specific offers.

SEO Tips

Search engine optimization (SEO) plays an essential part in affiliate marketing. With a higher rank in search engines, you can attract more traffic, and a higher volume of traffic to your site translates to more clicks and leads, thus leading to more revenues for you.

RevenueGateway shares some tips on how you can boost your rankings up the search engine ladder:

Identify your most valuable search words by doing keyword research, a major aspect of your SEO strategy. This ensures that you'll have viable keyword phrases that online users actually search for. Various tools for keyword research are readily available for starters, try using Google's free Keyword Tool.

Gradually develop high-quality links. If links appear like mushrooms on your site over a short period of time, search engines might penalize you for extremely aggressive link building. The best strategy is to steadily recruit high-quality links from trusted sources and your patience will eventually pay off.

Focus on good content, the heart and soul of SEO. Useful and informative web copy never fails to entice visitors to websites. Obvious as this might sound, webmasters who are bent on getting high rankings will not succeed if they do not offer good content in the first place.

This is just the tip of the SEO iceberg. There are countless other tips that you can get if you subscribe to the RevenueGateway newsletter, but consider the ones above as a foundation on your quest to achieve higher rankings for your website.

Where To Buy Advertising

There is a wide variety of sites where you can buy advertising from, whether CPC, CPA, PPC or CPM ads. Below is a list of some of them.

http://www.adbrite.com
http://www.bidclix.com
http://www.clicksor.com
http://www.exactseek.com
http://www.google.com/adsense
http://www.peakclick.com
http://www.stellarads.com
http://www.topclickadvertising.com

Tools

To make your job easier in managing your PPC campaign, several tools are available online which you can choose from. These tools can assist you in monitoring statistics, automating your processes and managing your PPC campaign.

Adapt SEM http://www.adapt.com/
AdSupervision http://adsupervision.com/index.htm
AdWords Dominator http://www.adwordsdominator.com/
IndexTools Web Analytics http://wsww.indextools.com/products/index.html
LiveSTATS.Net http://advertising.microsoft.com/advertising/deepmetrix
PPCBidMax http://www.apexpacific.com/download2.html#PBM
PPCBidtracker http://searchmarketingtools.com/ppc/ppcbidtracker.html
SpeedPPC http://www.speedppc.com/

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