How to 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.
In the case that you have an existing website already set up and running, you just have to add the necessary links. Another option would be to specifically build a new site just to promote a particular product or service. You only have to make more money than it takes to build or run the site.
Payment options
The way in which you are paid completely depends upon how the merchant has set up his affiliate system. Some merchants have completely built their own affiliate program. Others use Clickbank or Commission Junction. Anyway, they’re equipped with special types of software that assigns each affiliate marketer a special link that’s used in promoting the product. All this software does is to track the sales of every marketer. The commissions are periodically paid by the merchant. PayPal is often used for payment or another system.
Choice of products or services to promote
The two factors that have the most influence on your income are:
1. how large are the commissions?
2. how well the product or service sells
I don’t have to tell you that the selection of which program you will promote is vital and that you need to devote a lot of attention to it.
This choice of which product or service to promote, can be compared to picking stocks to invest in. In most cases, you will have far better results if you entirely comprehend what the company is doing. You should be more or less familiar with the products they sell or the kind of service they offer. The best thing is obviously if you have personally used the product or service yourself. Furthermore, it will be so much easier for you to write reviews or ads since you won’t have to strain yourself to come up with the right things to write.
Most of us are already promoting products to our friends and relatives, even if the owner of the product doesn’t pay you a dime. Think of a really good restaurant you went to or a really cool movie you’ve seen. So why then should you promote products online that you’ll feel uncomfortable recommending to your family and friends if they would ask you about it? Especially when the choice of products is so overwhelming.
Another interesting factor is if the programs offers tools to ease the life of their affiliates when they are promoting. What we mean by that are things like banners, text links, and of course graphics, in short: things that you can directly put on your web site. Off course you’re not obliged to use them; you can also model your own to it.
But I guess you will look the most to the commission rates, won’t you? After all, that’s why we’re in business. I would advice you to look for a minimum commission rate of 50%. This is certainly possible with products in digital format such as E-books for instance. Last but not least, pick programs or services that pay commission on multiple levels if it’s possible. This is also known as multi-tier. This means that if one of your website visitors purchases the product through your link and this visitor is so pleased with the product that he decides to become an affiliate himself, you still get a commission of the sales that he now makes a sale. In the beginning it won’t change a lot, but believe me, in the long term, it surely make a huge difference.
