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Here are the top six affiliate marketing tips to help you figure out how to identify profitable affiliate marketing opportunities and avoid the ones that are a total waste of time and money.
Tip 1: Try The Product First
Have you found an affiliate product you’re interested in promoting?
We strongly urge you to try it yourself first.Then you’ll be able to offer an honest recommendation. Talk to other people who have purchased it as well. Make sure you are recommending a high-quality product from a company that is reputable enough to back up what they sell.
And check their customer service too. How do they treat you over the phone? Do they put you on hold for hours? Then you should be concerned that customers you refer to them will have similar experiences.
Tip 2: Hold Out For Generous Commissions
It’s perfectly reasonable for you to expect to be paid 20% to 50% of the profits on each product sold. If the company only offers 5% to 10%, keep on looking. You should only do business with affiliate companies that understand the “lifetime value” of new customers you refer, and appreciate your efforts enough to offer the commissions you deserve.
Tip 3: Look For A High Sales Conversion Ratio
Before you join a company’s affiliate program, make sure the company’s website is turning a reasonable number of visitors into sales. If their website doesn’t have a decent conversion rate, then all the effort you put into directing traffic to their site will be wasted.
Look for sites that have at least a 1% conversion ratio (in other words, 1 out of every 100 visitors makes a purchase). Check out their website and their salescopy to see if it makes YOU want to buy. After all, it’s your job to send them targeted traffic — but it’s their job to turn these prospects into paying customers.
Tip 4: Make Sure You’ll Get Credit For Every Sale
Before you join a company’s affiliate program, find out what kind of tracking software they use. Look for a program that uses reliable affiliate tracking software that tracks all of your sales.
You want to make sure that they track phone, fax, and snail-mail orders, as well as any that are made directly on the website. Many companies only track online orders — which means their affiliates don’t get credit for anywhere from 5% – 10% of the sales they help the company make!
Also, make sure the affiliate program you join uses “cookie tracking.” This ensures that you’ll be credited for the purchase made by people who don’t buy on their first time to the site, but return to buy something on a future visit.
Tip 5: Make Sure They Offer Sales Statistics in Real Time
When you join an affiliate program, the company should give you a special username and password that you can use to access your own personal affiliate sales information on their website whenever you want. These should be real-time statistics that allow you to see exactly how many sales you have made.
With real-time statistics, you can discover exactly how well different banners, text links, and recommendations are doing. For example, with a bit of testing, you might discover that a product review on your Reviews page doesn’t pull nearly as well as a personal recommendation on your blog.
That’s the kind of information you need to ensure that your affiliate marketing efforts are yielding maximum results.
Tip #6: Make Sure They Offer Resources to Help You Generate Sales
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. They’ll 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.
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Although they usually take a little cut, I find the the good affiliate networks cover a lot of these bases for you. I spent some time goggling “affiliate networks” and found a lot of very good resources. Also, when I come across a product or service I thinks is interesting, I always look for an “affiliate” or “Partners” link and check out their program, if they have one.
hello i found that info to be very helpful thank you god bless.
You are right too look for a company that will pay you ….most have [0] database ,cloaking you from seeing your sales …/or you not getting paid anyway;ssome more of that ‘[hellfire']garage.
Hi,
You’ve put together a great article. Especially for the newer marketers. I found it really helpful,
Thanks for your work,
John
Hi,
I am new to the internet sales & marketing business. I found your 6 affiliate marketing tips to be well written for a beginner. I now feel more confident in researching a product I want to sell and negotiating with the owner before spending time and money on this product. Thank you
Carl Stifter
Thanks,
This info is very timely, as I just had some affiliate programs affixed to my blog.
As for demanding 10% to 20% of each sale when you’re just beginning may be a little unrealistic. As I build more of an audience,and if that audience makes purchases, then I’ll surely demand more of a cut.
Otherwise, the rest of the info was very helpful.
This is a helpful tips. I save this for reference and daily use. Thanks a lot
On the subject of trying the product first, I might add that I found out from experience that there are companies that will offer an evaluation copy of their product but understandably they won’t advertise this. You would never know unless you ask. So its a good idea to ask especially if purchasing the product poses a challenge. This is an excellent article, clear, concise and to the point. I might add also that by becoming an affiliate of internetmarketing.com I have learn’t so much about internet marketing that I would not hesitate to recommend that newby’s do so as a means of getting education in Internet marketing.
Any reputable affiliate program will provide banners and text links to put on your website and if you go to ClickBank Marketplace you can get good product info.
This article will be very helpful to those new to internet marketing.
The most important thing you need is…a mailing list. The money is in the list !
There’s a lot of information available on the net like on this blog website. Absorb all the info you can and watch out for misleading scams and products. I totally agree with point 4 in this post. There are affiliate programs where you will never see your commissions.
Does clickbank use cookie tracking? I am worried about the vendors that put their link in the email followups. Do I still get credit for the sale?
These are some very nice tips. Some people offer product simply to make money but never actually try the product first. This is always the best idea to do. Thanks for this post.
The easiest way to promote your products is to start using article marketing. All you need to do is write original and informative articles on topics that relate to the product you promote. Simple say a little about yourself and invite the reader to your website to make the article a free way of getting visitors to view your products and other information you wish to share.