In this holiday season online shopping is hotter than ever! According to US Commerce Department online sales continue to grow with a robust 25-27 percent this year over 1992. Online holiday shopping at a rate of 10 percent is also considerably outpacing
5.7 percent growth of overall retail sales. Goldman Sachs predicts 23 percent of all gift-buying this holiday season will take place online!So, if you don’t have a product of your own to sell online, how can you profit from this exciting trend?
One of finest ways of making money online is to promote other people’s products or services by becoming their affiliates. Affiliate is a term used for a website that drives traffic to another website in exchange for a predetermined commission.
Thanks to success of several affiliate programs in early days of online business, most merchant websites, today, use some kind of affiliate programs to promote their sites and generate sales.
Considering sheer numbers of affiliate programs available on Internet, you may feel overwhelmed. However, if you set some basic criteria, it would be lot easier to find a good program that suits your need.
Free sign up
The affiliate program that you are planning to join must be absolutely free. There are way too many good programs available for free, why should you pay for one? Moreover, programs that require payments to join are mostly multi Level Marketing (MLM) programs. Although, there may be many good MLM programs existing on Internet, I don’t think it’s a viable option for an average person.
Good commission
You deserve handsome compensation for all your hard work! No matter, how you look into it, in most of cases, promoting a product or service is not an easy job. Since you are doing uphill struggle of bringing client to merchant’s door, your commission should be real good one. What is an acceptable commission anyway? If you are promoting an information product, don’t go for less than 50 percent. For more tangible products and services your bare minimum commission should be 15 percent of sale. If you are promoting monthly subscription, choose a program that pays a portion of subscription fee as recurring commission to you as long as client referred by you stays subscribed.
Tow-tier affiliate program
An affiliate program which pays certain percent as a commission from sale for bringing in a client and another if that client brings in other clients. Two-tier affiliate programs are more preferable since once a client base is built, it becomes a great source of residual income.
Quality affiliate tracking system
The merchant should have a very good and well-organized affiliate sales tracking management software system. You have to be absolutely comfortable with statistics generated by affiliate program. The program should show such important aspects as repurchase, if any, by client referred by you, your second tier affiliates, activities by your second tier clients, etc.If you do not feel comfortable with tracking system provided by a merchant, better stick to merchants, who use third party affiliate managing system. At least, you will know that a dishonest merchant won’t be able to defraud you.
