How can you pick the right products or services to promote?
With affiliate marketing it’s your goal to recommend a website to your online visitors. If they indeed buy the promoted service or product then you receive a commission of that sale. The interest for merchant is that he has made another sale that he wouldn’t have made if you hadn’t sent your visitors to his site, and you as an affiliate are happy because receive a commission of the sale, without having to worry about product creation, inventory etc.
If you have already created a website earlier, you can just put a links to the merchant’s site, or a banner ad or even a review of the product or service. But you could also design a new site from scratch especially to promote one product. As long as you would receive more money from commissions than it costs to create or run your website, you’re doing fine.
Payment options
In principle, how you are paid will depend on the merchant. There are merchants that set up their own affiliate program and build everything up themselves while others choose to use existing billing and marketing solutions such as Clickbank or Commission Junction. Anyhow, in most cases, they will use a special type of software in order to assign a special link to each affiliate. The use of this link is not optional. The software can only track the sales all the affiliates if the affiliates use this special link in their promotion efforts. Some merchant still pay commissions by sending a check, others use PayPal for payment or a similar payment system.
How to pick the right products or services
This can be really tough as there are gazillions of products sold online and on the outside, they usually all look pretty and shining. These are the two main factors with the biggest influence on earnings:
1. size of the commissions?
2. how well the product or service you promote, sells
So you will understand that the choice of which program you’re going to promote is not really a detail and requires all your attention.
It’s a bit like picking stocks on the stock market: In general, your results will be much better if you fully understand and are already familiar with the products you that you promote. This way, you’ll be able to separate the wheat from the chaff much better. You will also write ads so much easier because you won’t have to strain yourself coming up with the right things to say.
Furthermore, my advice would be to only select products that you aren’t embarrassed to endorse. In other words, products that you’ll feel comfortable recommending to your family and friends if they would ask you about it.
You can also look for affiliate programs that offer promo tools to their affiliates. These can be banners, text links, and of course graphics, or any other things that you can directly put on your website. It’s also possible to refrain from using them, but to model your own after it instead.
But I guess in most cases, it will be still the commission rates that are the deciding factor, isn’t it? Why are you in business after all? I advise you to limit yourself to only select products or services with a commission rate of at least 50%. This may seem like much but especially for digital products such as ebooks for instance this is certainly attainable. Furthermore, it’s always interesting if you can pick programs that pay multi-tier commissions if it’s possible. This means payment on multiple levels. If you have a visitor who buys from your link you are paid a commission. So far so good. Suppose that this visitor is so pleased with the product that he decides to become an affiliate himself. Each time that this person makes a sale, you still receive a commission from that sale because you were the one who referred this affiliate. How cool is that? Off course, it will not make a big difference in the beginning, but in the long term, it surely can make a huge difference, believe me.
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