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How to choose the RIGHT affiliate programs ?Affiliate programs are basically partnerships between a company that has products to sell, and a person or company that wishes to help sell those products. If you join an affiliate program you are basically becoming a salesperson for that company. If you make any sales for them, they will pay you a percentage of that sale. All you do is refer someone else's product or service, and then get paid a "referral fee" for every sale that is made. (You are assigned a special URL that tracks all of the visitors you send to their web site and all of the sales that you generate.) It's extremely easy to do because you just post a link, a banner, or a short recommendation letter on your web site -- or perhaps recommend the product or service in your newsletter or e-zine -- and then collect a percentage of the profits when a sale is made! You don't ever worry about… Ø
Collecting the money … or anything else for that matter! You just do the promotion and collect your referral fee from the resulting sales! That's why joining an affiliate program can be a great way to… A)
Start your very own online business without the usual hassles
and expense of product development and fulfillment. … and that's just for starters! The truth is, joining affiliate programs can be extremely profitable… if you know what you're doing, that is! Avoid The Deadly Mistakes That Most Affiliates Make! Rule #1: Go for quality! Remember
that any recommendation you make will reflect directly on you.
If you recommend a good quality product or service that is reasonably
priced, your customers will continue to trust you and be interested
in future recommendations that you make. If your customers have
a bad experience with a product or service that you recommend,
however, they will likely hesitate to act on any new offers you
So
be sure that you do your homework before recommending anything
to your customers. Try the product or service yourself. Talk to
other people who have bought it. Make sure that you are recommending
a high quality product that comes from a company who offers great
customer service and Don't ever promote something that's going to hurt your reputation! Rule #2: Look for a program that offers top commissions. It is perfectly reasonable for you to expect to be paid 20% to 50% of the profits on each product sold -- 5% to 10% is really low. Ultimately, you should look for companies who understand the "lifetime value" of new customers you send them, and who appreciate your efforts enough to compensate you generously. Rule #3: Make sure they have a high sales conversion ratio. When joining an Affiliate Program, make sure that the site is turning a reasonable number of visitors into sales. If they're not, your efforts directing traffic to their web site will be completely wasted. Look for sites that have at least a 1% conversion ratio (i.e. 1 out of every 100 visitors buy). Check out their web site and their sales copy to see if it "makes you want to buy." After all, while it's your job to send them targeted traffic, it's their job to turn these prospects into paying customers. Rule #4: Match the product or service to the theme of your site. If you sell golf clubs, then you shouldn't choose affiliate products like weight loss pills to promote on your web site. Your customers see you as a golf expert -- not a weight loss expert. So it makes sense that while they will be very interested to learn what brand of golf bag or golf balls you recommend, you are going to lose their trust and respect if you start trying to recommend weight loss products to them. Find out what your target market is looking for and then choose affiliate products that meet their needs while complementing your own product or service. Rule #5: Be sure that you're getting credit for all of your sales. Find out what kind of tracking software the Affiliate Program that you're interested in joining uses. You want to go with a company that uses quality affiliate tracking software that is reliable and tracks ALL of your sales. Why I emphasize "all" is because you want to make sure they track online, phone, fax, and snail mail orders. Many companies only track online orders, and this means that you will never get credit for anywhere from 5 - 10% of your affiliate sales! Also,
make sure the Affiliate Program you join uses "cookie tracking"
because this helps to ensure that you will be credited for the
sales of people who don't buy the first time they visit, but come
back later to Rule #6: Look for programs that allow you to access all of your sales statistics in Real Time. Real Time statistics are important because they allow you to see how different banners, text links, and recommendations are doing. For example, on your site you might discover after some testing that a banner on your resource page doesn't pull nearly as well as a personal recommendation under your newsletter subscription box. So you can adjust which banners and text links you use, and where they are placed, based on what you learn from your Real Time sales statistics. Rule #7: Look for a program that teaches you the "best" techniques. 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. And they'll also tell you which techniques work well in which circumstances. Because their success is linked with yours, the Affiliate Program you join should be ready, willing, and able to teach you everything you need to know to start earning excellent commissions. ***MOST IMPORTANT RULE*** Avoid falling victim to the "Flea Market Syndrome"! It's absolutely critical that you don't allow Affiliate Programs to clutter up your main site or the main goal of your page. Don't go crazy and start promoting 10 or 15 different affiliate products on your site, thinking that if you can make a lot of money by joining 1 affiliate program, you'll make even more money by joining 10. Your site will end up looking like a giant flea market! You'll come across as unprofessional because it will look like you are trying to make a quick buck rather than do your visitors a "favor" by recommending one or two really quality products. The most profitable way to approach Affiliate Programs is to choose one really good quality product and promote it to the best of your abilities. This is the approach that top affiliates in our program are using to earn commission checks of $4,000 to $8,000+ each month! Now granted, these affiliates have high traffic sites; however, this same technique is earning our "average" affiliates $1,000 to $2,500 every month! That's how powerful focusing your energy on promoting one product can be! And of course, once you've maximized your profits with one affiliate product, you can choose another and start the process all over again. Don’t choose 10 programs and try to promote them all at once. This doesn't work. More is NOT always better! You will devalue your site and destroy your credibility by coming across as "greedy" rather than "helpful." Remember that just because one vitamin a day is good for you, it doesn't mean that 5 or 10 are even better! If you promote too many Affiliate Programs on your site, you'll end up confusing your visitors because your web site will lack focus. They'll be overwhelmed and just click away… and you won't end up making any money at all! So remember to stay targeted! ----------------------------------------------- The
above article is an excerpt from Corey Rudyl's Internet
Marketing Secrets There is one more excellent resource that I can recommend you is Dr.Ken Evoy's Affiliate Master Course. You can get the course for FREE by downloadling (it will just take few minutes to download) the entire course as a BOOK so that can you can offline. Download Instruction
To download Dr.Ken Evoy's "The Affiliate Master Course", just right-click on the book cover above with your mouse, then click on either "Save Link As" in Netscape or "Save Target As" in Explorer.
Once you select "save target as" or "save link as" a download screen will come up asking you where you want to save the file to on your computer.
Find the folder you'd like to save the files in and then click on "Save." When you have finished downloading the file just go to the folder you downloaded the file to and double click to read and open. Note: You'll need The Free Acrobat Reader (or the full version of Acrobat) version 3 or higher to read these sections. You can download the Free Reader from Adobe by clicking here. http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep.html _______________________
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