What Is Pay Per Lead (PPL)?

It's no secret that you're hungry for leads. It would help if you had them to grow your business and make money—but finding them in a sea of noise is hard enough, let alone turning those leads into customers. An advertiser or marketer pays an affiliate based on the number of leads converted to the advertiser in a pay-per-lead (PPL) affiliate marketing program. If you're not familiar with affiliate marketing, it's pretty simple: Affiliates are people who promote products or services on behalf of brands they believe in. When someone clicks through their link and makes a purchase, the affiliate receives a portion of that sale as commission. With PPL, however, the affiliate doesn't just get paid when someone purchases from their website; they also get paid established on how many people click through their links to sign up for something like an email newsletter or software trial offer—and then convert into customers by making actual purchases later on down the line. The more people an affiliate gets to sign up for something like this, the more money they can potentially make from each lead! PPL is a sneaky way of gaming the system, and we're not just saying that because it's an affiliate strategy. It's true: PPL can be abused and that's because its design is inherently dishonest. When you look at PPL, it seems like it was designed to incentivize affiliates to be honest, and forthright in their reporting of leads they find and bring to the advertiser. This is one of the reasons why advertisers love it so much—they feel like it gives them more control over who they work with and what kind of leads they get. But this isn't always the case. If you look closely at how most PPL programs are set up, you'll see that affiliates have incentives to report false or misleading information about their leads—in other words, cheat! This happens when the affiliate is looking for more money from the advertiser by showing them weak or fabricated leads (i.e., fake people). It also occurs when an affiliate wants more money from another affiliate (i.e., your competition).