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How to Find a High Quality Affiliate Program that Matches
Your Unique Selling Position?
Promoting
the right affiliate programs for your website is a decisive
factor to determine whether you can make money online via
affiliate programs. This article reveals how to select affiliate
program to promote and make sure you can become successful.
When a newbie begins an online business, the temptation
can be high to join most any affiliate program they see in
the hopes of making extra money. Given the amount of products
and services that newbies get presented with, and since newbies
have a burning desire to make money fast, it is easy to see
how the online newbie can get lured into joining a lot of
affiliate programs without knowing if they should join them
or not.
For the newbie, the danger in joining lots of affiliate programs
is multi-faceted. Joining affiliate programs takes time, time
the newbie could be using defining their USP, learning about
getting targeted traffic, or learning other Internet marketing
skills that will actually generate revenue for them.
In addition, the newbie who joins lots of affiliate programs
in the hopes of making instant profits, is at risk of being
disappointed when they don't make money by joining the latest
affiliate program and that leads to yet further "unproductivity"
and poor use of time.
So, what steps do newbies take to identify the best affiliate
program(s) that matches their USP? It will differ based on
the goal of each newbie Internet marketer, but here's a small
set of steps that are useful to start with:
*Define how the affiliate program's offering complements
your USP.
You should be able to clearly map out what the affiliate
program's offering (product or service) will be useful to
patrons or visitors of your web site, list or customer base.
If the product that you will be promoting is something that
will be useful to you and people you sell or try to sell to,
it may be a useful affiliate program to join.
*Make sure that you fully review the product offered by the
affiliate program, use it, and make your own assessment of
it.
Don't promote a product from any affiliate program unless
you own the product yourself and love it. If you own and love
the product that you are promoting, you will be able to sell
it more effectively because your energy and excitement level
will show through in the deliver of your message to would
be customer. In addition, you will be able to list and explain
in detail the features of the product or service that the
affiliate program is offering.
*Make certain that the web site that sells the affiliate
program is set up correctly to sell the product, and sell
it well.
The web site that sells the product of the affiliate program
should be professional in its layout, design, sales copy,
and delivery of the product itself. The web site should have
a mechanism to capture the names and emails of the visitors.
The web site should also have a strong auto responder series
in place to follow up with and sell the visitors of that site
on the product.
*Check to see if the affiliate program should be tracked
with cookies so that the referring web site will get credit
for each affiliate sale, even the sales that come as a result
of the auto responder series.
If the affiliate program doesn't use cookies to track referrals,
do not sign up.
*Take a look to see if the affiliate program is two-tier
so that you can earn money from recruiting other affiliates
to that affiliate program.
Most of the the noteworthy and professional affiliate programs
will be two-tier although there are some notable ones that
aren't, Clickbank being the most widespread. At the very minimum,
the affiliate program should offer some sort of incentive
to recruit new affiliates. If an affiliate program is not
two-tier, make sure that you determine whether or not the
product(s) being sold are professional and have good conversion
rates.
*Ensure that the affiliate program makes it easy to sign
up, complete with welcome email and full contact information
of the point person who can answer any questions.
If the affiliate program isn't run by a third party like
Clickbank, the affiliate program sign up form should also
ask for your EIN # or your Tax ID # for proper reporting.
For the business owner who has established a business identity,
this is key for accurate bookkeeping. Some marketers have
gotten away from welcome emails to their new affiliate partners
because the potential affiliate partners sometimes do not
want to give their name and email, they'd just like to join
and make money with no 'marketing' messages hitting their
Inbox.
*A strong affiliate program ideally should have plenty of
help tools including any or all of the following:
real-time tracking, solo email templates (even though I
suggest writing your own), graphics, banners, etc.
For the newbie, the better the help tools, the easier it
will be for them to feel comfortable selling the product.
In addition, the affiliate program should offer follow up
emails to all affiliates offering help to sell more products
as well as relaying success stories of how other affiliates
have made strong sales numbers.
*Ideally, the affiliate program's affiliate links should
be unique to the affiliate but should also be structured so
that the link is distinctly protected from would be commission
thieves.
The affiliate link ID should not be visible in the URL after
the would be customer gets to the sales page of the product
in question. For the newbie, the abovementioned steps will
help mitigate wasting time and will maximize their time and
efforts. The best affiliate program for the newbie is the
one that satisfies most or all of these criteria and sells
a product that meshes well with the newbie's USP.
Author Karl Augustine, "9 Deadly Mistakes To Avoid When Starting
An Online Business" Publisher, "Starting Smart!" e-zine Starting
an online business www.9mistakes-online.com
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