Affiliate Programs Part II: Joining An Affiliate Program

As with any marketing venture, you need to be careful in the selection of an affiliate program. The benefit of an affiliate program is that it gives you another way to make money from your website visitors. Instead of selling them a product yourself, you send them to a partner and take a cut.

On the downside though, your affiliate ads will take the place of a different ad that you could have put in that same spot.You have to make sure that each advertising position on your site is bringing in the maximum revenue possible. If you’re not getting the most from your site, you’re throwing money away.

The key to success is to choose the right program, right from the beginning. Now, a lot of commercial sites run affiliate programs. That’s because they know that they only have to pay a commission if a sale is actually made; it’s a proven way to generate revenue without risk. What that means for you is that when it comes to choosing an affiliate program, you’re going to have a huge range to choose from. What it all boils down to though is product and price.

While it might be tempting to go for the program that pays the highest commissions, the program won’t pay you a penny if your visitors won’t go there or won’t buy once they get there. You have to be certain that the service you’re promoting is of genuine interest to the kind of visitors you get to your website, whether you’re buying them from search engines or anywhere else.

Sure, you can work backwards: You find a high-paying affiliate program and create a small site to send users to it, but do you know where to buy traffic for a program like that? You’re going to have to research the field, check out the most popular sites, and negotiate banner campaigns and link exchanges.

That’s fine if you want to invest the time and the effort. But it’s much easier to find an affiliate program operating in a field you’re familiar with, and use that program to earn extra cash. For example, suppose you had set up a dating site. You might make some money selling subscriptions, but you might make even more by joining Match.com’s affiliate program and referring your visitors to them. Unless you’re planning to be the Internet’s biggest dating site, you’re not going to be able to compete directly and beat them, but you can help them — and make money doing it.

Or rather than sell your users directly to a competitor, you can look for services that complement your own. Visitors to your dating site, for example, might be interested in buying flowers, books on relationships or tickets on singles cruises. Instead of selling just one product such as membership subscriptions, you’d be selling a whole range of different goods to the same people and increasing the sources of your income.

Here are some tips to selecting an affiliate program that is lucrative and right for you:

Don’t accept less than 25% commission. You can find affiliate programs with great payment structures and high percentages of the purchase price in just about every field. In fact, many affiliate programs pay out 50%-75% depending on the type of product. Would you rather be paid $1 or $20 every time you make a sale? $20 of course!! I like to work with affiliate programs that payout anywhere from $15 – $60 for each customer conversion.

Don’t get me wrong, there is a time and place for $1 payout programs and as entrepreneurs you should always keep your eyes open for opportunities, but from personal experience, the higher payouts seem to work best for people just starting out.

Effective product sales page – Your success as an affiliate depends highly on how effective the sales website is for the affiliate program you belong to. I’m not talking about your personal website; I’m talking about the owners of the affiliate program themselves, the site you are sending people to. If you are sending people to a website that is constructed very poorly and has a low sales conversion rate, you are not going to make any profits. But if you send people from your website to a website that captures the customers attention and effectively conveniences them to buy the product, you will make much more profits per customer.

The amount of competition – If there is too much competition in the affiliate program that you join, it will be harder for you to make money. When there are too many affiliates vying for the same customers, the profits that can be made by one individual become less and less. I would say that it’s a good idea for beginners to stir away from the really competitive products. You will have a much better time with programs that have relatively low competition. Don’t get me wrong, you can compete in any affiliate program but you need to learn certain skills, to turn a profit.

In Demand Products – This is a very important thing to look for in affiliate programs. Choose something that people really want and find a way to give it to them. For example: millions of people in the U.S. feel they are overweight, and want to lose that weight. It’s your job to find an affiliate program that fits these peoples needs. Sell them diet pills or workout tapes, even workout equipment. Here’s another example: Many people want to find someone to date. Well you’ve seen all the online dating services. Guess what, most of those have affiliate programs that you can join. Direct a person who wants a date to that dating service website and you will make a nice commission.

Payout Durations – Be sure to check how often the affiliate program will be sending you pay checks. You don’t want to be stuck waiting 3-6 months to be paid. I usually like to stick with affiliate programs that pay every 1-2 weeks. Sometimes I will join affiliate programs that pay every month, but anything over one month is just too long to wait for. You have to think about your advertising budget. If you only have enough money to advertise for two weeks, and you get paid every three months, you are going to run out of money to advertise with. The quicker you get paid, the quicker you can take that money and reinvest it to increase your profits.

Payout Minimums - Almost every affiliate program has a minimum payout amount. Most of the time affiliates programs will require that you earn $25 – $100 before they will ever send you a check. This is fine, because you should be able to hit this amount easily. If it’s more than $300 then I would stir away from that program. Sometimes you will join an affiliate program and make some money, but you may decide for some reason that that particular program is not working out. If you did not hit the minimum payout then you will never be paid. Another reason to pick a low minimum payout is that it may take you awhile to hit the minimum, so the lower the payout level the quicker you will get your money.

Look for examples of marketing methods that successful affiliates are using to get the best results.

Make sure that top-level support is given. If they can’t answer your questions promptly and intelligently, you don’t want to work with them.

Look for programs that offer a wide variety of promotional tools to put on your web page, including text links, banners, articles, brandable ebooks, etc.

Look for comprehensive statistics pages that list the number of click- throughs, sales and earnings so you can see how you’re doing. The information should be broken down by month.

Examples of Affiliate Merchants (coming soon – part 3)