I’ve used so many affilate scheme I can’t remember them all. Fortunately I have a text file of the usernames and passwords, and I’ve been logging in this week to see which has been worthwhile and which has been a waste of my time.
To use the cliche there is no such thing as a free lunch, so I looked at the classic catches of these schemes.
The Minimum Payout
This can be anything sometimes USD 25, other times USD 100, but it is always too high, and you will likely delete your link out of frustration before reaching it, or the company will go bust.
The Cheque Payment
Most schemes are run by US companies: So their forced US style address format will result in the cheque taking ages to arrive, and when it does the bank fees might make it worthless.
The Store Credit
Why would anyone want ten bucks of acmestore.com credit, when they could have ten bucks of legal tender? Now Perhaps store credit at amazon.com would be useful, but anywhere else its useless to me, everybody wants good ol’ legal tender which can be used at any store.
The Pay-per-sale
Some ad providers only pay you when a clicker makes a purchase on their site. You have no way of knowing what a clicker does once he leaves your site, and so you must trust, but who are you trusting?
The Dishonest Brokers
Before filling in the “Publishers” application form perform a search on your favourite engine for “company name AND sucks” and “company name AND problems”, the latter is better because many forums and blogs moderate and remove the word sucks for fear of being sued. You don’t want to waste time filling in a form, clicking a confirmation link in an email, and adding code to your sites only to learn that you will never see a penny.
Don’t count your chickens before they’ve hatched
There are many people who check their balance every hour, of every day, watching it increase, shucks there is even an Adsense widget for the statusbar of windows. But remember it is not your until the money is in your bank account or hand.
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