6 Affiliate Marketing Tips For Finding Good Affiliate Programs

Posted by Chuck Anderson on May 4, 2010 under Affiliate Marketing | Be the First to Comment

Here are the top six affiliate marketing tips to help you figure out how to identify profitable affiliate marketing opportunities and avoid the ones that are a total waste of time and money.

Affiliate Marketing Tips 1: Try The Product First

Have you found an affiliate product you’re interested in promoting? A little bit of homework ensures that you can make an honest recommendation. You want to make sure they are very professional before you join their program.

We strongly urge you to try it yourself first.Then you’ll be able to offer an honest recommendation. Talk to other people who have purchased it as well. Make sure you are recommending a high-quality product from a company that is reputable enough to back up what they sell.

Test their customer service too. For example, if you phone them and they’re rude to you, they put you on hold forever, or you get an answering machine, then the customers you send them could have similar experiences.

Affiliate Marketing Tips 2: Expect Good 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

There’s no point sending visitors to a website that doesn’t convert. All that effort for nothing.

Check out their website and their salescopy to see if it makes YOU want to buy. Look for a conversion rate of at least 1% — in other words, one out of every 100 visitors makes a purchase. Why you go to the trouble of sending targeted traffic to them, but they’re not turning these prospects into paying customers?.

Affiliate Marketing Tips 4: Make Sure You’ll Get Credit For Every Sale

The company’s affiliate tracking software is going to make a big difference to how much money you make. The best programs track all of your sales.

You want to get credit for phone, fax, and snail-mail orders, not just online sales. Many companies only track online orders — so their affiliates don’t get credit for anywhere from 5% ? 10% of their sales!

Also, make sure the affiliate program you join uses “cookie tracking.” This ensures that you’ll be credited for the purchase made by people who don’t buy on their first time to the site, but return to buy something on a future visit.

Affiliate Marketing Tips 5: Make Sure They Offer Sales Statistics in Real Time

When you join an affiliate program, the company should give you a special username and password that you can use to access your own personal affiliate sales information on their website whenever you want. These should be real-time statistics that allow you to see exactly how many sales you have made.

With real-time statistics, you can discover exactly how well different banners, text links, and recommendations are doing. For example, with a bit of testing, you might discover that a product review on your Reviews page doesn’t pull nearly as well as a personal recommendation on your blog.

You need to be aware of your stats so you can quickly aim your affiliate marketing efforts where they’ll get best results.

Affiliate Marketing Tips #6: Make Sure They Offer Marketing Resources To Help You Make 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 start a home business with affiliate programs? Visit www.InternetMarketing.com to learn more about affiliate marketing software.