Choose Carefully How You Receive Your Affiliate Payments
20 August 2010
No matter what line of online work you end up in, you're most likely going to run across
affiliate marketing in some form or fashion. Whether you're working to make an extra few dollars per sale by acting as an affiliate for someone else, or setting up your own affiliate option via your business, this brand of marketing is one of the most solid of the Internet genre.There are many things to be considered with affiliate marketing, none the least of which is how payments will be handled. For the sake of this article, we'll take a general look at affiliate payment preferences and discuss how they affect both affiliate marketers and business owners providing an affiliate option.There are quite a few different types of payment structures you can deal with, but we better stick with the big three for the purposes of affiliate marketing. If it's not direct deposit, paper check or a medium like PayPal, then it's really not worth discussing.
These are the top three in the field because of their reliability and usability. However, the idea isn't just to pick one for your preference and go for it, especially if you're offering the affiliate option. You'll want to have all three of these as a viable payment option. First, let's look at direct deposit. This is where a company will put the money earned directly into an affiliate's bank account, usually accessed by a debit card. In countries - and banks - where this is accepted, direct deposit is definitely a preferred payment method of the affiliate genre. The most trusted method, without a doubt, is the paper check. If you're an affiliate marketer in America working for a company in America, then there's nothing like the tried-and-true paper check with your name on it. It's a low-risk and low-cost process for the company and the affiliate has the sense of working a real job with the paycheck.However, this isn't always a viable option. Say you're an affiliate in Australia and working for a company in Sweden. How does that work? Will they pay that high cost to ship your check, or will you have to? For these types of situations, which occur quite regularly, direct deposit sometimes works better. Or there's a universal method used - PayPal.PayPal is probably the king of international affiliate transactions. However, this shouldn't be the only option. Because while PayPal is certainly convenient and almost instantaneous, most people in the marketing business have a merchant account that gets charged a percentage for every transaction.If you're an affiliate that can realistically receive a paper check, then you probably wouldn't want to sign up with a company that only used PayPal. It's actually less convenient for you.So, as you can tell, it's better for everyone to have all three of these options available. They're all low-cost, all reliable and all easy to deal with. Obviously, the paper checks require a legitimate company and direct deposit requires dealing with banks, but they're legitimate and trusted forms of payment.
