Efficient customer support

You should feel satisfied with service and support you get from your affiliate program owner. A good program highly values its affiliates and gives priority to its customer support system. As clients that you are sending to merchant are primarily your site’s visitors, you should be extremely picky about quality of customer service program renders. After all, your own site’s reputation is also at stake here!

Promotional materials

If you are planning to promote an affiliate program, you will need more materials then mere banners. Unfortunately, even many high-end affiliate programs do not carry enough promotional materials to satisfy need of affiliates. Promotional material should include: contents to build mini-sites, various ad articles, different kind of text links, product brochures or presentation, etc.

Commission payment policy

The affiliate program should have a sort of minimum payment policy, where you can receive commissions if even you have made just one or two sales. A reasonable amount is US $25. Less than that is not viable due to processing costs. Commission should be paid each month. If you are located outside of US, see if merchant makes payment through Paypal or other similar services or not. For most of countries checks issued in other countries are not a good option.

If an affiliate program meets all these above mentioned criteria, you can consider joining in this program. However, to get best result from your efforts, before signing up, you should also consider following rules:

You have to like product you are promoting Any salesman will confirm you that this is one of fundamental rules of selling. If you are selling a product or service you must have confidence in it. If you like product and will use it yourself gladly, you found a product to promote! Don’t waste your time with a product that is not up to your taste!

Promote a product or service consistent to your website’s subject matter If your site is all about soccer, you will be better off with products and service related to soccer. If this same site promotes,for example: pesticides, no matter how hard you try your success will be very limited! Before joining in any affiliate program first you should identify who your visitors are, what do they like and which products they will probably buy online. Once you know your niche market it’s lot easier to find products or services for it.

Many webmasters think that in order to make money through affiliate programs, all you have to do is to come up with a site and fill up site with affiliate links. Sooner all later people will click on them. Unfortunately this does not work! Making money through affiliate programs is also a business and like any business you have to have a proper business plan. Only a well prepared businessplan followed by its meticulous implementation can bring success to your affiliate endeavor.

How about affiliates? What are benefits they get from an affiliate relationship?

No product or service to carry Online business with your own product or service might be rewarding, but it requires substantial investment from your part. With carefully chosen affiliate programs you can have your online business without requirement of having your own products.

The investment is low as all you need is a website.

No need to have a merchant account Since you don’t carry your own products or services you do not have to go through hassle of having a merchant account to cater your clients. Your affiliate program owner will do everything. All you have to do is supply clients through your designated link.

Possibility of residual income Many programs pay you a commission from sales made to customers generated from affiliates, who have signed up as an affiliate following your link. This kind of affiliate system is called 2-tier system.

Visitor tracking system allows affiliate programs to pay you a commission when same visitor from your website makes repeat purchase.

Some affiliate programs that promote monthly or yearly subscription services pay a commission each month as long as customer referred by you stays subscribed.

Complement you website with added products and services If your site is dedicated to certain products or services, there must be other stuffs that go well together with your own products. It’s a good idea to seek out viable affiliate products of these items and promote through your site. Your visitors will love this and this will help building loyalty among your visitors.

Have new contents for your site many affiliate programs supply you with valuable marketing materials. Some of these materials can be nice addition to your site content bringing further value to your website.

Various Affiliate programs

There are two ways of running an affiliate program: The company owns and handles program itself, using certain software.

The company uses third party administered affiliate programs. The reasons why many companies prefer to hand over management of their affiliate programs include technical aspects, cost factor and human factors.

– Companies do not have to spend money on developing, running and updating software. – Proven technology allows companies to concentrate on their job of selling their products and services. – Many prospective affiliates prefer third party managed programs, because they rightfully ponder, in this case program owners have less chance to cheat their affiliates.

Find below a list of some leading third party affiliate program administrators:

http://www.befree.com http://www.linkshare.com http://www.cj.com http://www.clickbank.com

However, this does not mean that you should avoid company run affiliate programs. On contrary, some of most successful and best affiliate programs are run by owners.

If you find an affiliate program that suits your requirement and you feel that company is a reputable one, by any means you should give it a try!