Making money from affiliate marketing often involves promoting a wide range of products to your audience. From the blogger who makes some extra money from their blog to the professional affiliate marketer, most people will promote at least a few dozen products over their affiliate marketing career, and affiliate marketing training often involves teaching you how to find highly profitable products with little or no competition. But if you have already found a niche you like and are just looking for affiliate programs to promote ask yourself the following questions before you join a particular affiliate program.
What Are You Promoting?
Most affiliate networks vet advertisers before they accept their affiliate programs, but if you are dealing directly with an advertiser individual affiliate program make sure they are a reliable and legitimate business or you risk your readers being scammed along with you. This way you can also check if they offer good selling products that you don’t mind promoting to your audience.
Is It Under An Affiliate Network You Should Join?
Most companies run affiliate programs using established affiliate networks such as the Google Affiliate Network or Shareasale just to name a few, while many ebook publishers like using E-Junkie shopping cart and affiliate marketing features. But there are hundreds of other affiliate networks available, and you’ll need to decide if it’s worth joining a particular affiliate network for just a product.
Payment Terms And Comissions
Most advertisers will claim that their particular affiliate product will sell a hundred times a day, and boast about how easy is to make payout only from sales of their product, but take this with a pinch of salt and use a spreadsheet to do some numbers based on your blog visitors, their engagement level and how difficult to promote a particular product is. For example, some high end products will have really high comissions, but require a longer sales funnel involving several emails and autoresponders before people actually make a purchase. If you are just looking for products to monetize your blog that may not be suitable. If you don’t believe you can make payout on a reasonable amount of time, look for an affiliate network that has this particular product or a similar one.
Tracking System
Any affiliate program worth promoting should clearly explain how a referral for your website is tracked, and for how long a person referred by you remains as such, even if they don’t make a purchase on that particular visit. Some people can take two months to make a purchase, for example, and if it was you who referred them it would be a pity you didn’t get the sale because the tracking expired. Another thing to ask about is what happens if somebody clicks on somebody else’s affiliate link while your tracking is active. Does your tracking just disappear? That could be unfavourable if your prospects do lots of research before buying, as they could easily click on another affiliate link before buying.
Statistics
Take a look at the statistics panel, and make sure you are comfortable with the information provided so you can optimise your campaign accordingly and increase the sales (or just leave an affiliate program your audience isn’t reacting well to). Some people like highly detailed statistics, while others prefer simpler ones with just the basic data, but usually you’ll want to see at detailed list of how many clicks you get on a daily basis, if only to know that everything is working fine in terms of links, and the amount of sales. Before joining you should check the click per sale ratios, and the percentage of rejected leads (those that the vendor claimed as invalid) and the average values per sale from other affiliates.
Think about all those things before you join an affiliate marketing program you don’t know about, and you’ll be on your way to making a living off affiliate marketing instead of chasing unpaid comissions and risk your audience anger.
