Martin Lee Affiliate Marketing

As promised in my previous article on your task as an affiliate marketer, today I’ll talk about what are the criteria you should consider when you go about selecting an affiliate program.

Depending on your strategy for promoting the program, the criteria might be slightly different. Let us first look at the common ones.

Niche - You select a program based on the niche you are in. It has to be at least fairly related to your niche. For example, if you promote an investment product on a dating website, your conversion will be very poor.

Commission Structure - The amount they pay you and the conditions for payment. Whether it is pay per sale, per per lead, pay per click, etc. Are there performance incentives? Is it just a one time payment or do you get paid on future sales?

Personally, I prefer a program that offers to pay me not just on the first sale, but for as long as the person whom I referred buys.

Cookie Duration - This measures how long the affiliate program will track and recognise your referral. For example, if the duration is one week, you will get paid if the person you refer completes the transaction within one week of visiting the site. If he buys on the eighth day, you are out of luck. Again, the longer the cookie duration, the better for you.

Website Conversion - This is one of the most important factor to consider. You want to promote a product that is able to convert into sales on their website! There is no point sending tons of traffic to a site only to find out that the percentage of buying is very low. A decent site has at least a 1% conversion. i.e. out of every 100 visitors, 1 will buy.

If you intend to promote a program in a big way, there is a need for you to get a friend to make an order through your affiliate link, and see whether it actually credits you for the sale. At the same time, it is a chance to test out whether the order process is as smooth as it should be.

Marketing Knowledge - Generally, I like to promote the product for someone who is street-smart in marketing. He uses autoresponders, has backend products, know how to upsell, etc. This ensures maximum profitability for both yourself and the merchant.

I will also analyse what the marketing strategy of the merchant is, and build my strategy around it.

Marketing Aids - It helps an awful lot if the merchant provides useful tools for your marketing. These include banners, classfied ads, sample pay per click ads and the keywords, articles, report, interviews, etc. I don’t really like to use those “cut and paste” emails as it doesn’t help you to build a relationship with your list. In fact, you might even lose credibility if people find out about it.

Trustworthiness - Make sure that the merchant you are promoting for pays your check on time! I have had a few cases whereby I had to chase for my commission payments months after they were due to me. One way of avoiding this problem is to stick with the big affiliate networks which always pay on time.

There might also be unscrupulous vendors who use their own affiliate links in their followup emails with the leads you give them. This overides your cookie and steals the commission from right under your nose.

The Most Important Factor

Now I come to the most important thing that you should consider.

Before you promote a product or service, you have to decide whether you want to use your name to endorse it. If you put your name on the line with a personal recommendation, conversion rates will be higher. But make sure you buy the product yourself to test it out to your satisfaction before you endorse it.

One thing you will eventually realise is that it actually takes a lot of time to review products so you are going to have to be selective of what you endorse.

The other approach is to drive traffic without endorsing the product. One way is to send pay per click traffic directly to the merchant’s website.

Another way is to promote them as advertisements on your website or in your emails. For such cases, you do not need to really test out the product yourself. Conversion rates will of course be much lower. Nevertheless, care should still be taken that the product is of at least decent quality as some of your visitors might associate the inferior product with you.

Popularity: 46% [?]