An affiliate program is, at the bottom line, a commissioned sales job. Like the Fuller Brush salesman of old, you are an independent representative of a company, offering their products or services to potential customers. When one of them buys, you get a percentage of the sale. But, in the high-tech version, you have a few very powerful advantages over the classic door-to-door sales rep.

To start, you can represent multiple products from more than one company at a time, on as many web sites as you own, in as many markets as you choose. You don’t have to travel anywhere, yet the web puts you in front of a worldwide market. This gives you an incredible diversity of products, markets, and “neighborhoods” to sell in, all from right in front of your computer screen. You could possibly make multiple sales at one time, yet you never have to deal with door-slammed-in-your-face rejection. On the Internet, you don’t always even have to make a sale to earn a commission. Some affiliate programs will pay you if someone just clicks on a link at your site, fills out an application, or even asks for more information. And here’s the best part – your web sites work for you around the clock, every day.

Commission rates vary by type of product. Physical goods (that have to be shipped) tend to pay lower rates than products like software or ebooks that can be digitally delivered. However, 5% of a $2000 TV is more than 50% of a $50 ebook, so you have to remember to look at the big picture when deciding what affiliate products to offer. For best affiliate sales results, you’ll want to offer products and services designed to appeal to the target audience of your web site. For example, it makes no sense to place affiliate links to mechanic’s tools on a cooking site, while it makes perfect sense to place them on a site about restoring cars.

There are several ways to join affiliate programs. Some companies operate their own program, and you will apply through the company web site. But many merchants choose to operate through an affiliate network. These third-party companies offer sign-up, tracking, payment, and overall affiliate program management services to merchants and affiliate marketers. A few top names are Commission Junction, LinkShare, and Clickbank. Just search for “affiliate program” or “affiliate network” and you’re bound to find more.

Your sales and clicks are tracked by software. It’s your responsibility to make sure your links follow the guidelines stated by your merchant or affiliate network. Some browsers, ad-blocking software, link cloakers, and coding techniques (such as frames) can prevent the tracking links on your site from working properly, and you may not get credit if one of your clicks leads to a sale. Most all affiliate marketers sooner or later run into this, and when it happens, it’s not intentional, so don’t feel victimized. Technology is very good, but it’s not perfect.

For almost every Internet marketer, affiliate marketing offers a fast and inexpensive way to get started in an online business. These programs can help you generate income while you learn the ropes and work towards developing your own product or service, if that’s your goal. And yes, you can even become an affiliate for the Fuller Brush Company!

John Calder is the owner/editor of The Ezine Dot Net. Subscribe Today and get real information YOU can use to help build your online business today! http://www.TheEzine.Net
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I was therefore thrilled when one of my friendly affiliate competitors got in touch to tell me that he’d started his own Internet dating service and affiliate program.

Having launched a community membership site myself last year, I could fully appreciate the huge amount of time and money my friend had invested to develop this new site. He was justifiably proud of his accomplishment and I was excited by the prospect of having a product to promote that would benefit everyone – my customers, my friend and myself.

Unfortunately, it didn’t quite work out that way.

The first stumbling block was the low commission he offered. His top rate was 30%, with no commissions on recurring sales.

This puzzled me. As an affiliate marketer of dating programs, he should have been aware that new sites offer at least 50% on new and recurring sales to entice good affiliates to sign up. If commissions on recurring sales are not offered, then the rates on new sales should be increased to between 70 and 100 percent.

In most cases, his affiliate program would have struck out for me at that point. However, as this was my friend’s site, it occurred to me that perhaps his product was so unique that the potential for high volume sales might offset the lower commission. Hoping for the best, I continued my review.

When I got to the site, the first thing I noticed was ‘6 registered members’ prominently displayed at the top of the homepage. That normally wouldn’t be a problem, except for the fact that my customers are looking for friends and soul mates. If I send them to a site where there are only six people to meet, they’ll likely be disappointed. Worse, by wasting their time, they lose trust in my judgement and then I will lose them as customers.

That’s not good. My customers are literally my bread and butter. Giving them what they want and expect is how I stay in business. Paying for traffic that I send to a merchant site where there is nothing to buy, will put me out of business.

(This is how a membership site should be structured. When starting a dating service, the merchant pays for advertising to bring people to their site. To entice visitors to sign up as members, he will initially offer his services for fr*ee. When the database is large enough to attract paying customers, the affiliate program manager then invites potential affiliates to join their program.)

Although my friend’s program had already struck out for my customers and me, I was still curious, so I kept on looking.

Next I clicked on a link labeled ‘Dating Resources’. Expecting to find Internet dating tips and advice, I found links and banners pointing to Lavalife, FriendFinder and other affiliated dating sites instead. When I asked him about placing affiliate programs on his site, my friend said he simply wanted to supplement his income until the dating service got *rolling*. I can understand his motivation. However, what he doesn’t understand is the concept of customer ‘hijacking’.

As an affiliate, you pay good money to get visitors to your site. You presell your merchants’ products and expect the merchant to honor their end of the bargain by making the sale and sending your commission check. You don’t pay for the merchant to send YOUR customers to THEIR affiliated merchants.

I didn’t need to look any further. I told my friend that I would hold off on signing up and why. Fortunately, he understood and has already alleviated some of the problems I mentioned.

Knowing when NOT to sign up for an affiliate program can sometimes be a tough call. However, you can simplify the process considerably. Put yourself inside your customer’s head. If the product won’t work for them, the program strikes out. Simple as that.

Copyright 2003 (c) Rosalind Gardner, All Rights Reserved.

1. The affiliate program has a great payment structure. For me, a high commission that is also a high percentage of the purchase price is essential. Nothing under 25% commission.
2. Make sure the affiliate program you are joining has a good looking site. You do not want to be sending visitors to a site that you do not like yourself.
3. Make sure they offer a comprehensive affiliate statistics page that lists the number of click throughs, number of sales and amount earned. This should be broken down per month.
4. Also make sure that the affiliate statistics are updated automatically and immediately. You do not want to find out today about a sale you made a week ago.
5. Ensure they give a wide variety of text links, banners and graphics to put on your web page. Although I prefer text links, certain types of banners and graphics still work well.
6. Know how often you are going to be paid. If you are tossing up between 2 programs and one pays monthly and the other pays quarterly, the one that pays monthly is better. You do not want to wait months before getting paid for your hard work!
7. See if the affiliate program gives examples of how the top affiliates are doing. This can be a great pointer to whether it is good or not. If some affiliates are earning many thousands per month, it is a good affiliate program.
8. Along these lines, also see if they give examples of what marketing methods these successful affiliates are using to get the best results.
9. An affiliate program that offers a special monthly newsletter just for the affiliates is great. Here you can get extra tips and techniques that are working well.
10. See if they offer email notification when you make a sale or get an affiliate signed up under you (if it is a 2-tier program). It is good to see “You have made another sale” in your inbox.
11. Ensure top level support is given. If they cannot answer your query straight away make sure they can respond within 48 hours.

There is tremendous demand for affiliate programs and choosing the right one is no easy task. Make sure you do plenty of research before joining one.

David McKenzie of http://www.brisney.com. For great ideas on promoting your web site or marketing your affiliate programs subscribe to our Free twice monthly
newsletter by sending a blank email to mailto:brisney@brisney.com

With a single tier program you earn a commission on any sales you make and that is it. If you are running your own affiliate program, you pay your affiliates a commission for any sales they refer and that is all.

However, with a two-tier program, affiliates are allowed to recruit sub-affiliates and are paid a small percentage of the sales these sub-affiliates generate. For example, the affiliates may earn a 30% commission for selling product X himself; and when one of the sub-affiliates makes a sale, the affiliate may get a 10% commission as well. This is very profitable for the affiliate as he can recruit an army of sub-affiliates, all earning commissions for him without any effort on his part except for the initial recruiting process.

If you are starting an affiliate program of your own should it be two-tier or single tier? Some might shy away from the seeming expense of a two-tier program. But is it really that expensive? Many affiliate program managers make the wrong decision on this.

Let’s look at an example. You have an affiliate program up and running and an average affiliate joins your program. Mr. Average has a web site that receives average traffic. He also has an ezine with thousands of subscribers published monthly. Mr. Average posts your affiliate links to his web site and promotes your product to his ezine list.

Initially, he generates good sales. However, a point comes when he saturates his market with your product and his sales begin to drop. He begins to lose interest in your program and your sales remain small. What happens if you set up a two-tier program? Rather than trying to keep your commission pay outs small, you motivate your existing affiliates to recruit other people to your program. This will exponentially increase your affiliate sales. Would it not be worth paying the referring affiliate a percentage of their sub-affiliates’ sales? Now when Mr. Average joins your affiliate program this is what would happen. When he has saturated his market with your product, he would now promote your affiliate program to his customers and ezine subscribers. Many of Mr. Average’s customers and subscribers decide to join the affiliate program. This in turn will motivate Mr. Average to continue promoting your products and recruiting affiliates.

Now what is the situation?

1. Your income increases because of increased sales.
2. You have a much larger customer base to which you can sell ‘backend’ products.
3. An increase in your income because of the life time loyalty of the customers referred by your affiliate.
4. An army of sub-affiliates who will sell your products, and in turn promote your affiliate program to their customers and subscribers.

The little extra in affiliate sales commission pay outs will be more than compensated for by the exponential sales increase. This is why the two-tier affiliate program is a guaranteed winner and should be the automatic choice for potential affiliates and affiliate program managers.

Written by John Lynch – For details of two-tier Affiliate Programs go to: http://www.merchant-account-service.com/affiliate_programs.html

When you are searching for products to promote at Commission Junction (CJ) check the EPC in your account manager. EPC = earnings per hundred clicks. If a product has a $50 EPC on average an affiliate earns $50 dollars per every hundred visitors they send to the product or merchant’s website. CJ will give you a weekly and a 3 month average EPC. The higher the EPC the more money affiliates are earning.

When searching for a product at ClickBank look at the product’s gravity. This is done in score form and the criteria is how many affiliates are selling the product and how well the product is selling. This does not give you an average of how much the product is earning per hundred visitors but if the product has a high gravity score than it is selling well.

One thing to keep in mind is that just because a product has a high EPC or Gravity score doesn’t mean everything. I have had success with products that have had high and low EPC’s and Gravity. These metrics should only be used as a guide. A Niche product might not have a lot of affiliates promoting it so the gravity could be low, but it could still be very profitable. A product could have a low EPC but maybe it’s not being advertised effectively.

One disadvantage of high gravity is the higher the gravity the higher the number of affiliates promoting the product. That means more competition. EPC doesn’t quite work the same way, you can have 1 person promoting a product and you will still see the EPC whether it is high or low. With CJ there is a “Network Earnings” indicator bar that goes from one to five to show how many affiliates are promoting a merchant’s website. One being not many affiliates and five being a lot of affiliates.

You have to be a little more careful when promoting an in-house affiliate product. The reasons for this is there are no 3rd parties involved to make sure that everything is kept honest. Try to find out a companies reputation before promoting their products. You can search for the company name, product name, search affiliate forums and search engines to find out if affiliates have horror or success stories about the company. No matter how good a product is or sells there will always be some complaints. Nobody has a 100% success or customer satisfaction rate.

Before promoting any product visit the website and ask yourself the following:

Is the website easy to navigate?

Does the website look professional?

If I was looking to buy this product, would this website convince me to do so?

If there are a few competing affiliate products in the same market that interest you, try promoting them all. Test which one is the best seller and promote that one the most. If you have 2 that are profitable keep promoting both. I have promoted many products and constantly weed out the losers. Sometimes you will try 3 products and they will all lose money, sometimes they will all make money, sometimes 1 out of 3 will make money. The important thing is weeding out the losers and finding winners.

Robert Walter has been marketing online successfully for over 5 years. Learn how you can master Adwords and make a lot of money with your affiliate products at http://hot-product-reviews.com. Visit Rob’s Blog to learn free Adwords tips at http://pay-per-click-marketing.blogspot.com

We’re going to discuss how you can make money from these freebie seekers by not selling them any products.

You’re going to send these people to companies which will pay you for each lead you send them.

These pay per lead companies will pay you each time you send them a visitor who does one of a few things:

1. Fills out a form to request a free sample.
2. Downloads a free software program.
3. Signs up for a newsletter.

What’s important to know is that these people will not be handing over any money to the company. Yet, you can still generate an income by sending visitors to these companies.

That’s because these companies know that they will make back the money they invest in paying for the leads.

Here is a reputable company which will bring you quality pay per lead offers: http://www.azoogleads.com.

There are many others in various niches. You can find them through Google.

You’ve found the lead companies. Now you need to find the freebie seekers and do some match making. Have a look at any of the various keyword research tools on the market. You’ll find tons of people searching free stuff.

These freebie seekers don’t stop at just one freebie. When they’re on a roll, they’ll practically run over anybody that gets in their way to find more free offers.

There’s another similar market that you could even tackle. That’s the coupon market. People who are searching for all sorts of coupons and rebates for products online.

There are enough companies using Adwords to advertise their sites that you could set up a content site and make money by placing Adsense ads on your sites.

I used to wonder how these sites were making money when their focus was on free stuff. Now using pay per lead programs and Adsense, I can see how much money there is flowing in this niche.

First, I tried online surveys, but they didn’t work out. Or at least, I didn’t make what they were promising. I thought I’d get at least a few surveys per day, at $10 or more each. It’s been two months now and I’ll be surprised if I made more than $5. Most of the incentives include being entered into sweepstakes of $1000 or more. Great for some, but I’ve never been lucky to win anything like that.

Next, I tried applying to some work at home jobs through a database that lists available jobs. I found two sites, and I had to pay to access both. Not a lot, mind you, but it still seemed like a bit of a joke. I must’ve applied to at least 2-3 dozen jobs online and maybe heard back from ONE company. And it turned out to be some sales program. No thanks.

Lastly, I decided maybe starting some kind of home business might be the ticket. However I didn’t want to have to sell anything, or do any kind of telemarketing. That somewhat limited my choices I guess, but I’m just not a salesperson type. The first company that contacted me sounded promising at first, as it was run by moms who worked at home. But after looking into it more, I realized it involved lots of selling, a lot of money to invest in the company, and the most I could make from it was maybe $150/month if I was lucky! After mulling it over for a couple of days, the company called me back to ask if I was interested in joining up. I said “No thanks but I don’t want to be a slave for only $150 a month. I can make more than that working two weeks at Starbucks!?” Sure, $150 a month might be all fine and dandy for some people, but for the amount of money I had to invest, and the amount of selling I would’ve had to do, it wasn’t worth it for me. I wanted to make more money than that to make it worth my time.

So finally, after filling out a few “Home Business Match-Up” surveys, I received an email for this one company that told me I could make up to $300 over and over. Naturally I was skeptical. Who wouldn’t be? However, when I went to the website and called the hotline number, everything they said made sense. I checked them out on the Better Business Bureau and another similar site, and they looked to be legitimate. So I figured, what the heck?

Within a couple of weeks I was on my way to making money online by being an affiliate for Windows Casino. A week later, I added Amazon.com to my site. I made a short Power Point ad for my site and emailed it to everyone I knew. I’ve had lots of traffic and things are looking up. Some people said this company was a scam. Others said they’ve made some good money from it. Those people were the ones who made the effort and advertised their site on their own. It’s been my opinion that you get out of it what you put into it. If you just sit back and wait for something to happen, nothing will.

The great thing about being an affiliate is that it’s free to sign up. They provide you with banners and text for your site and 24/7 access to view your sales/tracking reports. I’ve signed up with several affiliates now and I’m marketing/advertising each one on various forums etc. It’s great fun and I’m enjoying it. And, if I don’t make a lot of money from this business, I’ve definitely learned a lot to help me in the future.

If this sounds like something you might be into, by all means, check out my site and hear what they have to say. You’ll be glad you did!
Loretta Wood worked in one of the biggest casinos in British Columbia, Canada. She’s now an affiliate promoting Windows Casino and her site will be growing in the coming months to include online shopping as well as various gambling sites. You can check out her site at http://www.rettsbestbet.com/workathome