23 May
6 Affiliate Marketing Tips For Finding Good Affiliate Programs
These six affiliate marketing basics will show you how to identify potential affiliate marketing opportunities you can profit from, and avoid those that will waste your time.
Affiliate Marketing Tips 1: Try The Product First
Have you found an affiliate product you’re interested in promoting?
Try it yourself first. Talk to other people who have purchased it as well. Make sure that you are recommending a high-quality product that comes from a company that backs up what they sell with a strong guarantee.
It’s a good idea to approach them as a customer would. If you phone them and they’re rude to you, or you get an answering machine, think how that would affect the customers you refer to them.
Affiliate Marketing Tips 2: Look For Generous Commissions
It’s perfectly reasonable for you to expect to be paid 20% to 50% of the profits on each product sold. If the company only offers 5% to 10%, keep on looking. You should only do business with affiliate companies that understand the “lifetime value” of new customers you refer, and appreciate your efforts enough to offer the commissions you deserve.
Affiliate Marketing Tips 3: Make Sure Their Site Converts Visitors
Before you join a company’s affiliate program, make sure the company’s website is turning a reasonable number of visitors into sales. If their website doesn’t have a decent conversion rate, then all the effort you put into directing traffic to their site will be wasted.
Look for sites that have at least a 1% conversion ratio (in other words, 1 out of every 100 visitors makes a purchase). Check out their website and their salescopy to see if it makes YOU want to buy. After all, it’s your job to send them targeted traffic — but it’s their job to turn these prospects into paying customers.
Affiliate Marketing Tips 4: Find Out How They Calculate A Sale
The tracking software the company uses is very important to your bottom line. Look for a program that tracks all of your sales.
You want to make sure that they track phone, fax, and snail-mail orders, as well as any that are made directly on the website. Many companies only track online orders — which means their affiliates don’t get credit for anywhere from 5% ? 10% of the sales they help the company make!
And don’t forget that visitors often don’t buy on their first visit to a site. Make sure the affiliate program you join uses cookie tracking. This ensures that people who return to buy something on a future visit will be counted if you sent them in the first place.
Affiliate Marketing Tips 5: Make Sure They Offer Sales Statistics in Real Time
You should have access to real-time statistics that allow you to see exactly how many sales you have made — whenever you want. The affiliate program you join should give you a username and password that you can use to see your own personal affiliate sales information on their website.
These stats will help you improve your performance by showing exactly how well different banners, text links, and recommendations are doing. For example, you might discover after some testing that text links on your blog consistently pull better than any banner ads you’ve created.
That’s the kind of information you need to ensure that your affiliate marketing efforts are yielding maximum results.
Affiliate Marketing Tips #6: Make Sure They Offer Resources to Help You Generate Sales
A good affiliate program will provide you with everything you need to be successful. They’ll provide you with traffic-generating banners, text links, and recommendation letter templates. They’ll tell you which techniques work well in which circumstances.
The affiliate program you join should be eager to teach you what you need to know to start earning excellent commissions. After all, your success is their success.
Looking to learn how to make extra money online with affiliate programs? Visit www.InternetMarketing.com to learn more about affiliate marketers.
