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How To Choose A Successful Affiliate Program

The ultimate question for you should be which affiliate program do I choose? But also: Is it right for me? Do I get everything I envisioned out of it? With the amount of information available today, it is a difficult task to begin with. And most important, are the sources even trustworthy? In some situations, you could face legal consequences; be aware and use your common sense and seek legal advice if you’re unclear on anything concerning your business.

In some cases the affiliate program you choose, pays huge amounts of commissions, however the question here is: “How much money do I have to spend in order to get one customer signed up?” At this point, it is simply a question of how committed you’re willing to get; sometimes your second, even if it has less of a payout, might be the better choice.

Your Action Plan should be: Research – Research – Research ……… and again Research There are some affiliate programs that offer only one way to make money, there are others that give you a combination of ways to earn your commission. In order to accomplish your objective of referring prospects to your advertisers program, choosing an affiliate program that offers you more than one way to earn money is the best choice.

In all honesty, the survival of your business could depend entirely on choosing the program which combines the best of all the actions your potential customer makes, while visiting your referral site – this may or may not include one of the following: The purchase of the product or service. Residual commissions for repeated purchases of same customer. The click of your referral link. The download for a trial product. In other words, look for a combination of any of the above pay options and choose the one with the best return on your investment.

PPS (Pay Per Sale) is what you will encounter most of the time in affiliate programs; it’s safe to say, it is the most common one you will encounter when looking for your opportunity. So, pay attention to the commission percentage; promoting sales for $150, if you’re getting 25%, will leave you profiting $37.50, however, if you’re only getting 10%, you’re making only $15 on the same sale; you can see the importance of your commission percentage. More importantly, keep in mind overhead; you need to bring in money for after you have paid for advertising, etc; again the ROI (return on investment) needs to be in the positive part of your balance sheet.

Pay Per Lead (PPL) is another popular form of affiliate marketing; based on acquiring information from the visitor for the retailer’s site. Because there is no actual purchase required, visitors are more apt to leave their personal information in return leaving you a commission, however this is also why the commission is less generous than other types of affiliate marketing.

PPA or Pay Per Action rests almost entirely on how you present the free trial your customer will receive. The goal is to get the customer to try a certain product or service before he takes the action to pay for it. The risk of course, lies on them not actually buying the product at the end of the trial period. The commission for this type of promoting is on the lower end of the scale – you will be much better off, if you can get a commissioning from the sale as well. Risk: They may simply cancel the program rather than purchase it.

Pay Per Click The first and most famous of all affiliate marketing programs is called Pay Per Click. Thousands of merchants lost money when this affiliate marketing program technology became the target of malicious hackers. The sophisticated software programs that they developed to circumvent the tracking methods caused this form of affiliate marketing to become unpopular. However, the pay per click model is enjoying a rebound in use. It has been adopted by contextual (“text”) advertising companies, who are using encrypted reporting and tracking features behind this technology to prevent fraud. Advantage: The easiest affiliate marketing programs to promote, with a growing number of contextual ad providers to choose from. Risk: Many of these contextual ad providers’ referral links use a large amount of website page space. Commissions can be very small i.e., $.005 per click or have extremely high payout levels, i.e. commissions only paid after 1,000 clicks.

Look out for part 2 How To Make Visitors Remember The Visit To Your Website.

If you are into affiliate marketing look at Johns website for one of the best paying affiliate marketing products out there – Period! The question isn’t really affiliate marketing versus selling one’s own products it is your commitment to the work. Copyright information…. This article is free for reproduction but must be reproduced in its entirety & this copyright statement must be included.