There are so many different things you can promote as an affiliate. It’s exciting and freeing, really.
You’re always looking for ways to maximize your earnings. You want to make sure you’re promoting high quality products that your customers will really love. But, beyond that, you want to earn as much as you can, with as little effort as you can.
One of the questions you have to ask yourself is whether you prefer to have an instant payment as an affiliate or if you are okay with promotions that don’t pay you instantly.
There are pluses and drawbacks to either method.
You might be thinking that the obvious best option is to have an instant payment. We all want things instantly. The sooner the better, right?
Maybe.
The Benefit of Being Paid Instantly
You do a promotion because you want to earn for it. Should you really have to wait for that payment? You’ve heard horror stories of it taking weeks or months or longer to be paid for an affiliate promotion. Sometimes, it’s the fault of the product creator or person paying you.
When you’re paid instantly, that problem melts away. The money goes directly into your PayPal account (or wherever it’s going). You get instant satisfaction and instant access to your cash. You don’t have to wait. Awesome!
Also, you might notice that merchants paying instantly (via JV Zoo or Warrior Plus, for example), will often pay you 100% commissions… that really sounds enticing, right? It is, and then again it isn’t always, as we’ll discuss in just a moment.
The Drawback of Being Paid Instantly
Not so fast—this isn’t always a perfect scenario. For one thing, many great products aren’t available for instant payment at all. That can be really frustrating. And you wouldn’t want to bypass a product that will be a great fit for your buyers just because you wouldn’t be paid instantly on it—that’s not smart business.
You also have to factor in that you have to consider refunds. Some people will likely refund the product you’re promoting, no matter how great it is. That’s okay and it’s to be expected. But, getting paid instantly can lead to you counting your chickens before they’re hatched.
You have to refund people who ask for it, depending on the guidelines of the seller. In some cases, the seller or payment processor initiates the refund, taking the money straight back out of your account. This is a huge problem if you’ve already transferred or spent the money. Just because the money is in your account doesn’t mean you can necessarily rest easily with it.
The other drawback, to follow up on the 100% commission possibility, is that the merchant is only paying you a commission for the sale of the one product. They’re getting the email address of a buyer added to their email list. When they promote their other products to that buyer, or when they promote as an affiliate themselves, you get nothing.
The Benefit of a Long Term Payment
Before we go further, we should really define what “long term” really is. Sometimes a merchant will pay you at the end of the month that the purchase happened in, and that isn’t really long, especially for purchases that occurred late in the month.
Sometimes the merchant will wait until the end of the month after the refund period expires. That can mean 30 or 60 days of extra waiting.
If you trust the product creator (and hopefully you’re only promoting product creators you can really trust) then there’s no problem waiting for a long term payment.
In fact, there are benefits, in some cases. Typically those instant payment platforms will only pay you for the specific product you’re promoting and maybe the upsell, and nothing more. That can be okay…
But other payment platforms, like Nanacast (which I use for almost all of my products except IMIT), allow the product creator to pay you for EVERY product a customer that you refer buys. So, you might promote one product as an affiliate. You don’t get paid instantly, and you’re okay with that. But then some of your customers go on to buy more and more and more. Your long term payment is looking even better.
In some cases, you’ll be paid more if you’re willing to wait. This is how my affiliate program with Nanacast works, at least.
And, for those who earn a certain amount by promoting my products, I pay weekly. That’s almost as good as instant, right?
The Drawback of a Long Term Payment
The drawback of a long term payment is obvious—you don’t get paid instantly.
But in most cases, isn’t that okay? As long as the product you’re promoting is worth it and you trust the product creator, it’s often to your benefit.
The Most Important Part of Choosing What To Promote Is…
Hopefully, you can see that whether you’re getting paid instantly or long term usually isn’t the most important factor for what you promote.
Sure, promote something that pays you instantly if you need the cash and you find a great product. But, otherwise, don’t be turned off by a longer term payment.
The most important part of choosing what to promote is how the product will benefit your buyer. You should always put your buyer first.
Unfortunately, too few product creators pay attention to that. They promote, promote, promote based on what they think will benefit them the most.
The trick is on them, of course. If you pay attention to what will best benefit your buyer, you’ll be much more richly rewarded. You’ll earn good commissions but you’ll also earn the trust of your buyer.
Find and promote great products you know your audience can really benefit from, that’s the bottom line.
Try a Mixture
It also doesn’t have to be one or the other when it comes to instant pay promotions or long term pay promotions. You can promote a mixture of both. In fact, that will probably happen naturally if you focus on promoting what’s best for your audience at the time.
Promote some instant payment products, especially when you might not be as familiar with the seller. That way, you know you’ll be paid fairly.
Promote some long term payment products, especially when you know that your buyers will be cookied and you’ll be paid on everything they go on to buy, such as the things you promote for me as an affiliate through Nanacast.
Long Term or Instant? The Choice is Yours
Ultimately, you have to do what’s going to be best for your business. Promote wisely to your audience and you’ll end up with a great overall income.
Evaluate each affiliate promotion on a case by case basis. It’s a great time to be an affiliate in online business. There truly are a lot of different options out there and it’s easy to choose the one that will work for you.
As long as you’re always putting your audience first, the terms of payment don’t matter quite as much.