How To Choose An Affiliate Marketing Network

Choosing many different affiliate programs may be counter productive in the long run, specially if you are just starting up your affiliate marketing business. More affiliate networks means more things to keep track of and manage, more accounts to accumulate enough money for a payout and often much more time spend managing instead of promoting. And since you won’t make any affiliate sales from managing your affiliate networks, it’s better to focus on the ones more likely to bring you higher levels of profit. So before joining yet another affiliate network because it has an interesting product, ask yourself the following questions:

Do You Need To Pay?

Having to pay somebody for the pleasure of advertising their products and generate sales for them is often nothing more than an affiliate marketing scam, so unless you know for a fact that it’s a legitimate affiliate network offering something that makes the fee worth it, it’s better to just give it a pass. There are many free to join affiliate marketing networks available, so why pay to join yet another one?

Payment Terms

There are three things to look at in terms of payment from an affiliate network: frequency, payment method and minimum cashout amount. Most affiliate networks will pay after 60 or 90 days of a sale, and to lower their costs they also require you to reach a minimum payout amount to get paid. But if you are only promoting a product or two, and they don’t have really high comissions, chances are you’ll never reach payout. Even worse, some networks will make your unpaid earnings expire after a certain period. Read all the small letter and make sure the payment system works for you.

Read Reviews

Before joining an affiliate network read reviews, and look specially for those that aren’t positive or at least don’t have an affiliate link on them, as they’ll probably be more balance. There will be some cases of people complaining about not being paid because they didn’t read the small letter and never made enough money to request payout. But if you see a trend of sales being revoked after the fact, unpaid comissions and misleading analytics just save yourself the trouble.

Look At Their Other Advertisers

You are probably considering joining another affiliate network because you saw a product you want to promote, and it happens to be on it. But if you can only promote a single product because everything else is not really worth your time or suits your audience you risk that advertiser pulling out before you have made enough in affiliate fees to cash out. Also, a healthy amount of large retailers can indicate a profitable affiliate network with enough collective sales to attract and keep the big players.