Not every affiliate program is sales related.  There are also tons of merchants who will pay affiliates for qualified and legitimate leads.  Pay per lead merchants are some of the best merchants to promote for a variety of reasons - the most important of which is that you can be compensated when your visitor completes an online lead form - the conversion rates are generally much higher because the visitors you refer don’t need to make a purchase to complete the action.. Some of the most popular pay per lead programs include merchants in the insurance, mortgage, and service businesses.

Of course, this comes with some caveats. Merchants will only pay affiliates for qualified AND legitimate leads.  That means that the person you refer not only has to completely fill out the entire form with real data, the lead has to qualify for the Merchant’s service. For example, sending a Michigan-based mortgage provider a lead from Russia isn’t going to get you any cash. That said, it is still much easier to get visitors to fill out a form than to buy something online so, in most cases, pre-selling and converting large numbers of visitors is easier. Of course, because the people you refer aren’t buying anything, the payout for leads are often less than standard affiliate sales percentage, but not always. It’s common to see larger commission numbers in industries like insurance and mortgage loans where the lead means big money for the service provider - keep that in mind when hunting for these types of affiliate programs.

A good place to start looking for affiliate programs with the most lucrative pay-per-lead programs are at larger affiliate networks like Commission Junction and Linkshare, but be on the look out for affiliate programs run right off the merchant’s website. Those are the gems. Also try a quick google search for specific terms like “mortgage lead affiliate program”. You can bet that if there are good pay-per-lead programs on the larger networks that there’ll be a lot of affiliate competition around those programs, so taking the time to find programs that aren’t heavily publicized could pay large dividends in time, effort and income later on.

Making Millions For Kevin Ham is all about the “O”…or the lack of it, really. Open up a new browser window right now and type in any word you can think of with a “.cm” at the end…chances are, you’ll find a domain owned by Kevin Ham called agoga.com populated by Yahoo ads. This recent article in BoomJ titled “The Man Who Owns The Internet” gives us a brief but enlightening view into how Kevin Ham, master of Web domains, built a $300 million empire from aggressive domaining. I’ll quote liberally here with no apologies just to wet your appetite. Check out the full article on BoomJ to really find out how a doctor turned domainer and became an internet mogul.

Here are some quotes from the article…

…Trained as a family doctor, he put off medicine after discovering the riches of the Web. Since 2000 he has quietly cobbled together a portfolio of some 300,000 domains that, combined with several other ventures, generate an estimated $70 million a year in revenue…

…Early on, he wrote software to snag expiring names on the cheap. He was one of the first to take advantage of a loophole that allows people to register a name and return it without cost after a free trial, on occasion grabbing hundreds of thousands of names in one swoop…

…Given Ham’s reach on the Web — his sites receive 30 million unique visitors a month — it’s remarkable that so few people know about him. Even in the clubby world of domainers, he’s a mystery man …

Although many of us are waiting for YouTube to finally announce the launch of it’s community profit sharing program, it’s probably not a good idea to hold your breath. If you’ve got tons of great video content just sitting there on your hard drive  and you’re itching to make a buck by doing  something with it, there are a couple of YouTube-like alternatives that will pay you money for your content. Check it…

Earn 5$ Per 1000 views on Metacafe

The first site on this list is Metacafe. The site has a rewards program based on the number of times your video is viewed by visitors. There isn’t much fine print here. It’s as simple as it gets. The more your videos are watched, the more you get paid. Under their current program, you’ll earn $5 for every 1000 times your video is viewed. There’s only one catch. Similar to a lot of affiliate programs and Google’s Adsense program, you don’t get paid until you hit the $100 minimum payment threshold (approximately 20,000 views). While it might seem an insurmountable hurdle, any YouTube video fan knows that 20,000 isn’t that hard to do if your video catches on. Good quick videos can be incredibly viral and a low budget video shot on a home camera can generate millions of views over its lifetime. Take this video of Freddie “the YYZ Guitar Hero” on YouTube, for example. Since October 2006, the video’s been viewed on YouTube over 5 MILLION times. In a profit-sharing program like Metacafe’s, this video would have earned….ummm…carry the two…… $25,000 to date (and counting).

Hold on, we’re not moving on just yet. There’s more. If you have a website but don’t have any videos of your own you’ll be able to get in on the action pretty soon. Metacafe is about to launch an affiliate program for publishers where you can easily embed videos into your website or blog (YouTube style) and get paid based on the number of views. It hasn’t been officially launched yet, but you can check it out on their affiliate page.

My Top For-Profit Pick: Revver

Revver, although similar, has a slightly different revenue model to Metacafe. In my opinion, this could be A LOT more lucrative than Metacafe’s basic per-view program because Revver’s publishing tools make videos 10 times more viral. Here’s how it works… Users still earn money based on the number of views a video gets. However, instead of paying per view and leaving the content as-is, Revver inserts advertisements onto users’ videos and pays them a 50/50 share of the profits from those ads. The more viewers a video gets, the more money you get. Here’s where the program really gets good…when you upload a video to Revver, in addition to attaching an ad, they also attach unique tracking technology to the video. Revver ads can be served like YouTube on ANY blog or site, anywhere on the Internet. Since ads are attached to the video itself and dynamically served wherever your video travels, there’s no restriction on how your videos are distributed. The more people email your video, post it to other websites or download it from P2P networks, the more money you could earn. Consider that for a second. Now we’re talkin!

One last thing on Revver - For Bloggers and other Wordpress users, Revver’s got their own plugin for video publishing within posts and sidebars. How…ahem…convenient.

Beating Google To the Punch: Flixya’s Embedded Adsense Ads

This one’s worth mentioning for historical purposes, but I think it’ll probably be phased out soon. Flixya is a lot like Revver in that is shares ad revenues on a 50/50 basis with its users. However, instead of using their own ads, Flixya uses Google Adsense to serve ads into video pages. Although they beat Google’s recent adsense-for-video program (fed by YouTube) to market, Google’s Adsense for video program is now available free to all adsense publishers as of a few months ago (which you can see in the right sidebar of this site). Publishers under Google’s adsense for video lets you keep 100% of the click revenue and it works seemlessly with Adsense serving related content in classic Google style, so I don’t see Flixya being a real player in the for-profit video sharing arena for very long. I thought I’d acknowledge it though. ;-).

Pay per sale affiliate programs are the most common type you’ll find on the Internet because there are so many e-tailers. The programs are based around you referring visitors (potential buyers) to a merchants website and being paid a commission when the visitor buys a product or a service from the merchant. Commissions can be earned as a flat fee (mostly related to the sale of services) or as a percentage of a sale. Commissions based on sales percentages are much more common and can range anywhere from 1% to up of 75%. What you’ll find is that most of the big e-tailors that have affiliate programs with a lot of affiliates, like Amazon or Dell for example, will pay out low percentage commissions because of the volume that they deal with. In contrast, there are a lot of smaller companies that sell information products, community subscriptions and downloadable software where commissions are much higher per sale. E-Harmony is a great example of an affiliate program that pays huge commissions for each sign up - the last time I checked they awarded their affiliates 100% of the sign up fee, which comes to around $100 a sign up….that’s a great payout just for someone clicking through! You can see how the numbers would add up quickly for high performing affiliates who have sites that draw thousands of visitors a day. Of course, that’s a double edged sword - really great affiliate programs draw a LOT of affiliates and competition can be fierce, so chose your programs wisely and spend time developing sites where you can stack up to the competition. Here are some quick tips for finding good pay per sale affiliate programs.

You may be wondering whether there’s a way to make money with video content on YouTube. The honest answer right now is “kindof”. At present, YouTube is strictly a free video sharing community and members should expect to upload and share their content without any anticipation of a profit. YouTube currently makes all of their profit from ads on their site, and there is no real mechanism for users to generate revenue directly from the videos that they upload. But that’s all expected to change soon.

Would it shock you to know that you’ve got less than 15-30 seconds to establish your credibility with new site visitors? Studies have shown that people make unbelievably quick decisions about a site’s value - it only takes most people a matter of seconds to scan a landing page and decide whether to stay or go elsewhere. Including good quality images that are relevant to the content on your site is one of the best ways to convince new visitors to stick around long enough to read your content and ads. I cant stress the next point enough. If you’re trying to make money online you’re in the business of getting and keeping people’s attention. If the majority of your visitors leave your site within 15-30 seconds, never to return, you’ve wasted time, effort and money getting them there, especially if you’re spending money to drive traffic with contextual advertising. Images should be thought of as an investment. They capture people’s attention far more quickly and effectively than any other element on a page, and pairing relevant, attractive images with your content says to visitors “this site is a credible and valuable resource for what I’m looking for.” The only problem is that most of us aren’t graphic designers or professional photographers who have tons of image stock to use. So where are the best places to find affordable royalty-free stock images? Here are a couple of great resources you can use to punch up a website without breaking the bank.

Before I dive into the pros and cons of this book, I think it’s important to acknowledge how significantly the book has impacted the way thousands of Internet publishers use and understand Adsense. At this writing, the book is just over a year old and it has been heralded as an instant classic in the growing world of Internet marketing. After making the New York Times best sellers list in 2006, The Adsense Code firmly established Joel Comm as an authority in the world of contextual advertising. Regardless of what I say in this post, the numbers tell the story. This book was a hit. Here’s why.

Although countless millions of websites run adsense ads, very few sites actually generate enough traffic to really see large, consistent adsense earnings. When web site traffic is low, infrequent and unpredictable, it’s tough for site owners to see how small tweaks in the placement or configuration of ads on a page affect click rates and earnings. This makes maximizing your adsense income difficult. But big numbers don’t lie. When a website is getting large amounts of consistent traffic, small changes in the way ads look and where ads are placed can make a big difference to the number of clicks they get.