Commission Junction

Commission Junction is not what I would personally consider the best affiliate program to use, but it is extremely popular among established marketers and it has a very good reputation.

A recent PC Data Online report showed that 40% of the Top 50 websites were CJ users, so you can't really argue with statistics like that.

The reason I'd flag it up as one to be wary of - particularly in the early days of your web business - is because they deactivate publisher accounts that do not generate any valid commissions for an extended period of time ie 6 months.

In addition, if you have earned commission in the past, and then cease to earn commissions over a period of 6 months, they will charge you a Dormant Account Fee until you have no funds left, then they'll deactivate your account.

When you're struggling to build traffic in the early days, you're probably best steering clear of Commission Junction and going for a more sympathetic program like Tradedoubler or Webgains, though I can understand why this do this as it makes sure that affiliates are working hard to shift their products.

However, when you're confident of being able to put some regular business their way, CJ has an extensive and impressive product range and you know that you're dealing with a reputable and established affiliate business.

What's on offer with Commission Junction?

CJ offers all the normal functions of an affiliate program such as performance reports, transaction reports, advertiser search and so on.

The reason I'm not such a big fan of this program is that I don't find the navigation and layout as intuitive as other sites that I use, however, if they're partnered with products that you know a lot about and are keen to sell, you really have to get on with it and make do.

As you can see from the screen grab below, it works in exactly the same way that other affiliate programs do, in that you find an advertiser, select the products that you want to sell, choose the dimensions of the ad that you want to use, and the HTML is automatically created for you.

In the example above you can see the ad options that I'm given for Zonealarm, a popular Firewall product that I like to advertise.

The graphic below is an example of the sort of banner ad that you're given, and this ad contains my personal affiliate code so that whenever anybody clicks it and goes on to buy, I take a commission through my Commission Junction account.

One of the things I do like very much about this affiliate program is the extensive range of advertisers available and the clear categories into which they're sorted.

This makes finding partners very easy and for my own websites, there are plenty of potential advertisers to chose from.

In addition, CJ makes life easier by creating 'Smartzones', which are a simple way of organising a retrieving the ads that you use regularly.

You can also encrypt your links and hide your tracking codes just by clicking on a checkbox, and this makes life very easy if that's an important function for you.

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