How to Select an Affiliate Program

If you are interesting in earning residual income from an affiliate program, there are a number of things to keep in mind when choosing the right program for your own business needs. There are four main factors you should consider.

1. Profitability
2. Effective Sales Copy
3. Support
4. Number of Programs Promoted

Profitability

Profitability is a fairly straight forward topic but one that is often overlooked. Does the affiliate program offer a product that makes money? Don't be fooled by high commission figures or multi-tier payments alone. Instead, ask yourself these questions first:

• Is it a product that people want or need, and will buy?
• Is the commission rate sufficient to make your efforts to promote the product worthwhile?

If the answer to either of these questions above is "no," then you should probably continue to evaluate other affiliate programs for a more profitable product.

Effective Sales Copy

Visit the website and sales page of the product you have selected to confirm that the sales and advertising copy does a good job of selling the product. Be aware of the different ways that you can lose out on your commission (for example, the interested customer can call in their order via telephone).

Support

A good affiliate program merchant will provide you with much more than just a URL or link to join the program. Check for any useful promotional material such as sample ads, banners, articles, solo mailings, endorsements/reviews, signatures and more.

Ideally there will be an affiliate mailing list so that the merchant can convey useful news to you. You want your affiliate merchant to be reliable and not someone who will disband a program or make rule changes without telling you. Also, check out their security and privacy policy to determine how they will use your information (i.e., do they sell it to others).

Number of Programs Provided

How many affiliate programs should you promote? If you plan to promote a number of different programs on one page then you need to understand that the more products you have, the more diluted the effect or interest from potential customers. The one exception to this would be if the page is dedicated to, or all the products on the page, relate to the same topic.

If not, you need to keep the web pages separate. You can have as many products as you like, but do not underestimate the administrative work involved for you to maintain the pages. For example:

• Different procedures for signing up
• Different ways of creating affiliate links
• Different methods of payments, at different intervals
• How to manage and handle ongoing communications from every program

A good way to administrate your programs is to comprise and use a company which contains many affiliate programs under one umbrella. They can consolidate your commissions into one payment and have a standaradized format for affiliate links with no individual sign-ups required. Make sure that any single company you choose, however, meets the other criteria noted above.

Copyright M. A. Webb, 2005. All Rights Reserved

Source: http://LearnBizTips.blogspot.com

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