What is best - Affiliate Schemes or PPC?  

Firstly a quick explanation making money via affiliates is where a visitor to your website or blog follows one of your links and makes a purchase. You then get a percentage of this purchase. Examples of affiliates are the merchants found in affiliate networks such as Click Bank and Commission junction.

PPC (pay per click) is where you get paid for a visitor to your website or blog clicking on one of the ads – there is no sale required. Examples of this are Google AdSense and Yahoo Publisher network.
 

Benefits of Affiliate Schemes

Higher Commission

Firstly the commission is usually greater than from PPC ads this can run up to big 3 figure sums per sale depending on the product.

Recurring Commission

Some affiliate schemes have recurring commission an example of this is a membership site that pays a percentage of the monthly membership fee to the affiliate every month the customer remains a member. This can bring in a steady stream of income.

Multiple tiers

Some affiliate schemes have multiple tiers. Not only do you get a commission on people you refer but you get a commission on people they refer too.

Downside of Affiliate schemes.

Loss of commission through time lag of purchase

Most affiliate schemes have a time limit from when the referred visitor arrives and when the product is purchased. If time limit this is exceeded then no commission is paid. People usually take their time to purchase something so if this time limit is low there is a high risk of losing some commissions.

Commission theft.

As more and more people are becoming internet and affiliate savvy they are realising that instead of paying for a product they can make a saving by joining the affiliate scheme and earning the commission back on their purchase. You lose all the commission even though it was your hard work that created the lead.

Relationship management.

If you are part of several affiliate schemes it can take time and effort to manage the relationship with these different schemes. Things such as managing usernames, passwords plus tracking what is and what isn’t working for each scheme take time. Time that is increased with each new affiliate scheme you join.

Benefits of PPC

No Sale required

With PPC schemes like Google AdSense and Yahoo Publisher Network you only require a click to get commission. You don’t require a sale. Once the surfer has clicked on the ad the money is yours and there’s no way you can lose it.

The PPC network sells the advertising space on your site for you.

The network does all the hard work of getting 1000s of advertisers signed up. Using content targeting-technology they then display advertisers relevant to your web page. This means they do all the hard work – all you need to do is provide the content and the traffic. This saves you a hell of a lot of time and effort.

Downside of PPC schemes
Payment for click can be low.

Payment on ads can pay as little as 1 cent so it would obviously take many clicks to earn major money with this. You can however earn around $2 a click (in some cases more) it all depends the subject of your web page and how much competition there is from advertisers for it.

Being banned from the scheme

To protect its advertisers PPC providers such as Google are very strict on click fraud (where publishers click on their own ads to make themselves money). If they find any of their publishers clicking on their own ads they will quite rightly ban that publisher from the scheme for life.

However there have been some instances where innocent publishers have been banned either by malicious attacks or mistakes. In these instances the publisher can lose a major revenue stream.

Conclusion

On average I think that the PPC model is the best way to earn money from your visitors. It saves you time on managing multiple schemes and means you can concentrate more on content creation and marketing. You also don’t stand to lose commission via theft.

However if your website is in an area that only attracts small sums for the PPC ads it’s definitely worth looking at what affiliate schemes out there compliment your site.

What I do is have a split of around 90% of my pages serving PPC ads and the remaining 10% promoting carefully selected affiliate schemes.