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How does an affiliate program work?
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The principle behind affiliate program is very simple. A merchant would like to extend his sales reach beyond his internal resources. He does this by recruiting people who will work to promote his business on "commission basis". He can accomplish this in two ways: 1. Run his own affiliate program or 2. Sign up with a third party affiliate management company.
As an affiliate, your concern is to choose that affiliate program that is suited to your needs. You need to register or apply to the program to be an affiliate. Sign up is mostly easy and straightforward. You will be asked for the usual information, inlcuding the name that you want to appear in your payment cheques:)
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Once you are accepted into the program, you will be given a username and password which you will use to access the Affiliates area. From the Affiliates area, you can get the text links and banners that you will use to promote your Merchant. You simply have to cut and paste these html codes in your website.
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What to look for in an Affiliate Program?
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Because of the ease of setting up an affiliate program, there are now so many affiliate programs to choose from. These are some of the factors that you may want to consider before you decide to sign up:
Commission level - The higher the commission, the more motivating. Look for programs that offer at least 20% commission.
Cookie tracking - for how long will you be credited for a sale from the date of the first
visit. The longer the tracking, the better. Thre are some Affiliate managers that offer up
to three years or even lifetime. But there are some that only gives you credit for 7
days. Personally, I would not sign up for anything below 30 days.
Easy sign up - If a program requires too much information and the sign-up procedure is
too complicated, it can be daunting.
Payment Schedule - how is the commission going to be paid? How often? Monthly is the most
desired. Every quarter is not so palatable, at least, for me.
Reputation - Who is offering the program? Is he reputable? Is he affiliated with a reputable
third party affiliate manager?
Creatives - What kind of marketing support does the company provide? What is the quality
of their banners?
Customer support - Will you be able to reach this company if you have questions or concerns?
Easy Online Monitoring - How are you able to monitor your earnings? Is there a real-time tracking?
Conversion potential - Aside from commission, this I would say is the most important.
Look out for products that have high conversion potential. Read their pitch page carefully to
better understand their product.
Website quality - How is the merchant's website? Does it look reliable or trustworthy? Remember,
you will be sending visitors to their site.
Follow-up - Look for managers who are diligent in follow-up; providing regular updates, new products to promote, new incentives, new creatives.
Obviously, you cannot be an affiliate of just about anything. Your merchants should be related to what your business is. If your website is about Pets, you can sign up as an affiliate of pet-related books and supplies. To advertise cosmetics on your webpage doesn't come across as very professional.
You can start by going through the following sites to seek for products/services that you would like to represent.
www.shareasale.com
www.cj.com
www.linkshare.com
www.clickbank.com
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How to make affiliate programs work for you
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When you sign up for affiliate programs, you will notice that they have 1 thing to say. "Just promote us and we will do the rest. Just put our banners and see the money rolling. In reality, it is not that easy.
Because there are so many affiliates and so many similar products, competition is very keen. It will take months before you actually see some figures coming in. Even if you put banners all over your site, if you do not have enough visitors, who is going to click on these banners? So the first thing you need to focus on is driving traffic to your site.
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A word on banners
Big banners can be attractive but they also require a lot of bandwidth. As a result, they can affect your site's download speed. Choose smaller banners as they are faster to load.
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Secondly, you can do over and above what "normal affiliates" do: which is just to post banners and links.
Here are some of the marketing activities that superaffiliates do:
Email Marketing - Super affiliates are successful Internet entrepreneurs themselves. They have busy websites that draw a lot of visitors. From this heavy traffic, they are able to build a huge opt-in list. They are able to tailor fit their email messages to their opt-in list everytime they have a good affiliate opportunity.
Build special websites - Super affiliates can sniff good affilaite opportunities and when they see one, they focus on this Merchant and build websites that solely promote this products.
Write articles and reviews - Super affiliates are very knowledgeable about the products that they endorse, or at least, appear to be. They submit articles, write reviews about the products that they promote.
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