Cody's Chronicles

Before signing up to a companies affiliate program, it is important to know what to look for in a program, so that you don’t waste valuable time and marketing dollars promoting a product or service that does not suite your needs in the long run. I’ve listed a few things here that will help you make a more educated decision upfront, to help you avoid joining the wrong program.

#1) Payment Methods
How and when you get paid from the affiliate program you are thinking about joining should be one of the first things you find out. You do not want to be under a wrong impression before you get started. There are 3 main ways that an affiliate program will reimburse their affiliates for the traffic they generate for them. Most companies will offer only one of these 3 payment methods but some may offer all 3, giving you the affiliate, the choice as to which you would prefer. They are as follows:
Pay Per Click – (PPC)
This payment method rewards affiliates for each and every visitor they drive to a company’s website. If a company is going to offer this type of payout structure they will typically only offer a very small amount for each visitor, a few pennies to a few dollars at most. At on time this payout method was quite common, but as time goes on, it is becoming less popular.
Pay Per Action – (PPA)
This payment method rewards affiliates for each visitor they drive to a website that performs a certain action, such as signing up for a free consultation, downloading a trial software program or entering a contest. This payout method is common in industries that work primarily off of leads, such as loan institutions, credit card companies or marketing firms.
Pay Per Sale – (PPS)
This payment method is by far the most common within affiliate marketing and companies offering this payout method will reward affiliates for each visitor directed to their website which actually turns into a customer. In other words, the visitors you send to their website will need to purchase a product before you will get paid.

#2) Product Price & Percentage of Commission
Before promoting a companies product, make sure it is reasonably priced. It helps to check out some other competitors of that product to see if the company you are affiliated with has a competitive price. You will also want to check the payout percentage. This is the amount that you will be paid per each sale, visitor or action you generate. Typically, as mentioned earlier, you will be paid for each sale that is generated by visitors you referred to a company’s website. The percentage of the sale that you will receive will differ from company to company and offer to offer. You want to make sure you are receiving a fair commission for each sale you generate. It is important to know that a high commission is not the only thing that will make you successful with a program. Another important factor is the actual price of the product you are promoting.
-For Example:
Company A is selling notebooks for $10.00 each and is paying out a 75% commission. This means that for each sale you generate for company A, you will receive $7.50.
Company B is selling high performance automobile air filters for $150.00 each and is paying out a 15% commission. This means that for each sale you generate for company B, you will receive $22.50.
You need to take this into consideration when comparing different affiliate programs and deciding which affiliate program to join.

#3) Incentive Programs
This is another attribute companies will include with an affiliate program in hopes of attracting new affiliates. Incentive programs can offer many benefits for an affiliate, such as rewarding affiliates who generate the most amount of sales, offering advice or information on how to be a better affiliate, paying higher commission for larger orders, and paying affiliates for subsequent orders from customers who where originally referred to the company by the affiliate. For companies offering affiliate programs, this is a good way of increasing profits and sales because the more successful their affiliates are the more successful the company is going to be. You as an affiliate are also benefiting from incentive programs because they make you a better affiliate marketer. Keep an eye out for a company that offers incentives. It may just be the deciding factor when deciding to become an affiliate of company B, rather then company A.

#4) Good Reputation
Make sure the company has a good reputation. Always do research on the company you plan on working with. Knowing how long the company has been in business and knowing the company’s track record will help build confidence in your decision as you move forward. Read reviews, testimonials, and opinions of the products and companies when they are available and check public registries such as the Better Business Bureau and Dun and Bradstreet. These public resources review other companies and give advice to consumers as to a company’s background. If you have found a company through an affiliate program network, such as Commission Junction, check to see how long they have been a member of the network. If a company has been registered with an affiliate program network for a year or so, you can proceed with confidence that this company is actually a business, in business, to do business.

#5) Professional Website Design
You definitely do not want to join a company’s affiliate program that does not represent them selves professionally. Their website should be clear, concise and you should be able to find any piece of information you are looking for. If you can’t find the information you are looking for, you better be able to find some type of contact information to a department or an individual that is able to provide further information and assistance. You should be able to navigate the website easily and there should be very few broken links, or links that lead to nowhere. The design should be modern and professional without contrasting colors or annoying graphics. You yourself should want to purchase this companies product and feel comfortable doing so. Remember, the companies you affiliate with will reflect on you as well. You should only want to refer people to a company that is going to reflect well on your reputation as an affiliate marketer. This also helps in further marketing endeavors. Once you generate a visitor to a website for a company you are affiliated with, the visitor that you worked so hard to generate is now in another companies hands. You don’t want all your hard work to go to waste by spending time and money generating visitors to a website that you don’t think has the best possible potential of converting those visitors into buyers, especially if you only get paid from the actual purchases your visitors make.

#6) Good Customer Service
Make sure the company that you are affiliated with provides good customer service to their customers. If a company fails to provide adequate customer service, does not respond to questions or inquires in a timely manner, or treats their customers with a lack of professionalism. Many times they will turn to the affiliate for answers. The majority of the time the affiliate will not be able to give any type of relief. The affiliate is not responsible for any type of customer service related issue such as returns, complaints, or charge backs. Working with a company that does not care about their customers will reflect badly on your business and your reputation as an industry authority.

#7) Terms and Conditions
Each affiliate program you look to join will have a set of “terms and conditions” that they will expect you to follow as an affiliate. Make sure you read each programs terms and conditions before you register. Reading through these documents can be time consuming but I highly suggest doing so.  Learn everything you can about what is included within the program to help you avoid unforeseen complications in the future. Many of these terms and condition agreements are lengthy documents full of legalities which the company needs to put in place to avoid problems arising in the future with their affiliates. These documents also should very clearly state your rights and obligations as an affiliate. Terms and condition agreements will typically include program eligibility requirements, such as needing to have a website in order to participate in the program. They will list any fee’s that are you can expect to pay to become a part of the program. They will explained when affiliates get paid, how much and how often. They should also list any other stipulations such as contracts, exclusive selling rights, marketing guidelines and so on and so forth.

Keeping a few of these things in mind as you immerse yourself in the feild of affiliates, will help you reduce the pool of potential candidate companies you have to choose from. It’s better to choose right the first time rather than having to test trial different products and companies before you land on a winner. There is really no rush, but don’t take to long making your decision. The longer you avoid joining a program for one reason or another, the longer it will take to develope that addition money stream. So, at some point, just jump in!

Finding an affiliate program to join is not very difficult at all because most major companies as mentioned in the introduction offer affiliate programs. However, finding the right affiliate program can take some effort. I’ll introduce you to a few resources that you can use to expand your options. These resources will expose you to thousands of affiliate programs. After reading this post you should be aware of where you can go to join an affiliate program, and in the next post I’ll cover what exactly to look for in an affiliate program so you can be sure you are joining the one that works best for you.

Finding Stand Alone Programs
Stand alone programs is when a company hosts their own affiliate program. This means that they provide all the management and tracking capability for their affiliates. Typically this is not the preferred method for most companies because it requires advanced programming implementation and configuration. Many companies will choose to instead allow another company to run their affiliate program for them. These companies are called affiliate program networks. Affiliate program networks allow smaller companies without a huge budgets or employees with specialized skills the ability to still take advantage of this extremely effective marketing technique. For affiliates, such as yourself, finding a stand alone program merely requires browsing to the website of the company of interest, and looking for a link, usually on the home page, entitled “affiliate program”, “associate program”, or reseller options. This link will give you more information on what the program entails, what the payouts are based around, and how to sign-up.

Affiliate Program Networks
An affiliate program network is a company that manages affiliate programs for other companies. In order to provide an affiliate program so that advertisers can start recruiting affiliates, the advertiser, or grantor has to have tracking capability installed on the site and for affiliates, so that each party involved knows what visitors were generated by what affiliate and also which visitors turned into buyers. Advertisers must also provide accurate calculations of the amount of commissions they owe to their affiliates. All of this can be a daunting task to do alone, especially if the company is a startup with limited spending capital. By utilizing an affiliate program network, advertisers are able to gain access to all of these different features because the affiliate program networks have already developed these capabilities, and, considering they are on the forefront of affiliate marketing, advertisers will have access to the latest and greatest tracking and management utilities. So what does this mean for you as an affiliate? As an affiliate you can register with these networks, typically free of charge, and browse the mass databases of companies that are currently registered with them as affiliate program grantors, or advertisers. These databases will be categorized by industry and some affiliate program networks will actual focus on one particular industry. One important aspect to keep in mind is that affiliate program networks charge advertisers, or companies wanting to begin and affiliate program, large amounts of money to manage their affiliate program for them. This is how the affiliate program network websites make money. You as an affiliate however can join these program and allow them to track your affiliate marketing efforts for free. Some of the more popular and widely used affiliate programs networks on the internet today are:

Commission Junction (www.cj.com) – is a global leader in the online advertising channel of affiliate marketing. The company was founded in 1998 and has offices around the world. Commission Junction provides both advertisers and publishers a way to gauge the value of their existing affiliate marketing relationships by being able to analyze performance metrics. Becoming a registered affiliate with Commission Junction gives you immediate access to their entire inventory of links and allows you to begin placing their offers on your website, in your email marketing campaigns or in search engine listings. Commission Junction has many reputable companies listed in their database of Advertisers such as Ebay, Etronics, Fredericks of Hollywood, NetZero Platinum, Overture, Yahoo Personals, Best Buy, and Hewlett Packard along with hundreds of others. There are no signup fees, or restrictions other than standard disqualification for sites that deal with or contain offensive or abusive content.
Link Share (www.linkshare.com) – offers many services to its clientele such as a vast marketing network for e-commerce businesses, expert consultative services and patented technology. Link Share was founded in 1996 and is headquartered in New York City with offices in San Francisco, Chicago, London, and Tokyo. They report over 10 million partnerships in the network and claim to be the most successful pay for performance affiliate program network of its kind. They have many advanced tracking and manage tools, and like Commission Junction, Link Share has many reputable companies listed in their database of advertisers such as J.C. Penney, 1-800-Flowers.com, Avon, American Express, Office Depot, Champion, Radio Shack, AT&T, Wal-Mart, and Radisson Hotels along with hundreds of others. Each of Link Shares merchants has their own minimum payment structure and delivery so be sure to review all terms and condition of the merchant you decide to become an affiliate with to avoid confusion and frustration.
Click Bank (www.clickbank.com) – is a bit different than Commission Junction and Link Share in that they are a specialized retailer for digitally delivered products such as e-books, which stands for electronic books, and software. They are somewhat of a pioneer in selling digital products worldwide through the leverage of their affiliates. Click Bank was founded in 1998 and since has quickly become a global leader in the sale of digital goods online with more than 10,000 product advertisers and they currently have offices in Colorado and Idaho. Setting up an account is simple, fast and free and they offer commissions as high as 75%. They also pride themselves on never missing a payment to an affiliate since their first day of operation. Some notable products that are listed within their database include Yanik Silver and Jeff Ball’s “Get Fit While You Sit” e-book, Jim Edward’s “How to Write Your Own e-book in 7 Days” e-book, Rosalind Gardner’s “Super Affiliate Handbook” e-book along with several other e-books, and software programs.

Subscribing to Newsletters and RSS Feeds
If a company is wise, they will from time to time promote their affiliate program in a newsletter that is sent out to all their newsletter subscribers. This is a form of leveraging one marketing technique with another. This can be a good source for finding affiliate programs to join. You as an affiliate should be subscribing to newsletters from companies that deal with your industry or the industry that you are trying to market. This will keep you up to date on any new offers a company has. You may also want to subscribe to newsletters that deal with affiliate marketing. These types of newsletters will usually teach you new concepts about affiliate marketing as well as highlight random affiliate programs from new and upcoming companies. RSS feeds are also worth subscribing to because they provide information in much the same way as newsletters do, except RSS feeds are read and accessed by an RSS feed reader and newsletters are typically read and accessed by an email client. Subscribing to newsletters and RSS feeds will save you time and money. Subscribing to these services will allow information to be sent directly to you on a continual basis allowing you to focus on other tasks. Not every newsletters or RSS feed will provide you with the information you are ultimately after, so don’t get too frustrated when you start receiving information from companies that you were not anticipating on receiving. Sometimes it will take some experimentation before you come across that diamond in the ruff. That one source of information that is everything you need and then some. I have always subscribed to any newsletter that might have something interesting or valuable to offer, sometimes I’m right, and sometimes I’m wrong. The point is to try. If you find a dead end, at least you know what to watch out for next time.

Using Search Engines
Just like you would use a search engine to find basically anything else you are looking for on the internet, you can use search engines to help you find affiliate programs as well. The key to using search engines, regardless of what you are searching for, is determining which keywords to use in your searches. When searching for affiliate programs you could search for “affiliate programs”, “best affiliate programs”, “top affiliate programs”, “associate programs”, “becoming an affiliate” or “how to affiliate marketing”. These types of searches will most likely return websites that offer listings or information about many types of affiliate programs. You can however choose to narrow your search by using more specific keywords such as “fashion affiliate programs”, “computer affiliations”, “becoming magazine affiliate” or “online reseller program”. Each unique phrase will return many unique results so experiment with different search phrases. I also recommend using several different search engines. Not every search engine is the same and many search engines pull results from different indexes.  Some utilize Google, some utilize ask.com and some pull from their own proprietary index. Using several different search engines will expand your reach.

Using Web Directories
Using a Web directory to find affiliate programs can also be a very affective resource. Some of the internets most widely used directories include Yahoo’s Directory (dir.yahoo.com), The Open Directory Project (www.dmoz.org) and Best of the Web (botw.org). Most affiliate programs will be found within the “Business Opportunities” category under “Business to Business”. Use these directories to find even more affiliate programs to join.

With the information I have provided in this post, you hopefully should not have any problems finding and joining an affiliate program. But locating affiliate programs is only one step to making money with affiliate marketing. You need to know what to look for when joining so that you are not caught off gard and regret your decision of becomming an affiliate of a program that ultimately does not fulfill your needs.  Stay tuned because I will be covering these in future posts.

Before applying to become an affiliate of a company, you should do some preliminary research on the item or service you are interested in promoting. Before you decide to engage yourself in any particular industry, research the industry first. If you plan on promoting sporting goods, do a search using Google or Yahoo, for “sporting goods” or “sports equipment” to get a feel for your competition. As a general rule, it is usually safe to assume that the more competition you have, the higher the demand the product has. In most cases, if a product is in demand, implementing your marketing campaigns appropriately should allow you to attract many visitors away from your competition. If you can’t find any online retailers offering the product you are thinking about promoting, raise a red flag. The demand for this product might be to low to be fruitful. You can also use keyword analysis tools, or reverse search engines tools to gage how often a particular keyword is searched for. This is another way to measure demand. These tools track how often a keyword is searched for in search engines, usually within a month’s time. The more searches that are performed using a keyword that is related to your product, the higher the demand is going to be for that product. For Example: the word “electronics” is a very popular keyword that is searched for thousands of times a month. This tells us that people are indeed interested in electronics. There are many different keyword analysis tools available for you to download and use, but a very popular and accurate program is Word Tracker. This is a program you need to pay for. It is not free. You can learn more about this program by browsing to www.wordtracker.com. All in all, the more you know about an industry, the more likely you are to make a wise decision as to whether or not you think you can be successful within this industry.

You need to treat your affiliate marketing campaign as a business. The process of choosing a product to promote as an affiliate is similar to choosing a product to sell as a legitimate business. If you are just getting starting with affiliate programs and internet marketing, you should consider a few points when deciding on what to sell.

Brainstorm
Brainstorming is a technique that is used to develop ideas. When you are stuck with an assignment of making a hard decision, like choosing a product to start a business with, brainstorming can help eliminate some obvious choices. As it relates to choosing a product to promote, you will want to make a list of potential ideas. Write down your hobbies, your interests, your strengths, your weaknesses and what you are comfortable with. What are you knowledgeable in? What have you learned in life? Are you an expert on a particular topic? These are all potential business idea’s. Never exclude anything in your brainstorming sessions. Shooting down ideas before they are even ideas defeats the whole purpose of brainstorming, so no matter how far fetched or ludicrous the ideas are, write them down. You will fine tune your list after you have created it by considering the following:

Have an Interest
You don’t want to choose a product just because it has a high profit margin, or because it is a hot product at the time, because you risk the chance of loosing interest in the product, and then having to start from scratch. Choose a product that you have an interest in. This will help with the longevity of the business and allows your business to grow more rapidly.

Have Knowledge
Know something about your product. Not knowing anything about the product you are promoting will make it harder to promote the item. It is true that as an affiliate, you are not responsible for making the actual sale, but knowing a little bit about the product and the products demographic will help you generate more qualified leads for the company you are affiliated with. And generating qualified leads will increase the chances of turning those leads into cash.

Test Products Prior to Promotion
If you are going to be giving a product your personal seal of approval, it is a good idea to test the product first, before promoting it. You want to build trust in your visitors. You want them to think of you as a qualified expert in the field you are working within. You need to believe in a product in order to sell it affectively. And in order to believe in a product you should have first hand experience with the products. With this said, it is not a good idea to endorse a product that you would not use yourself. Complaints, returns and charge backs will damage your reputation as a legitimate source for valuable and useful information so before marketing a product, be comfortable in knowing that it is a good quality product.

Think Long Term
Make decisions based on the long term affect those decisions will have on your business. This is not a get rich quick strategy. Hopefully you will be earning money from you affiliations for several years in the future. Choose a product that you are comfortable with, and a product you can see yourself promoting and working with for the long term.

Using these few suggestions when choosing a product or company to be affiliate with will definitely render you more positive and more profitable results as your affiliate marketing campaigns get underway.