Finding affiliate programs products and services through the internet is a very simple process as well as being more rewarding than having to create and manage your own products or services.
Selecting The Right Products Or Services
With large numbers of individuals all over the planet getting online everyday to purchase products, there is a huge opportunity for affiliates to market a vendors goods as well as produce a very large income at the same time. All you have to do is remember some basic rules and avoid the common marketing mistakes.
The key to every affiliate marketer’s goal is to select worthy and profitable affiliate programs and to employ excellent promotion methods in advertising or the selling of the products to customers.
So, look into the following tips and propositions on how to best select the affiliate platform that is right for you and your niche.
Information is needed to make the appropriate choices and it helps when you have already focused your search to a distinct niche, which might be the theme of your website (if you already have one). In this way, you will point yourself at a program that perfectly matches your niche, wants and resources that you are offering.
You can become a member of affiliate forums and join a few Affiliate Newsletters so that you can discover some tips and get help from seasoned affiliate marketers and SEO Experts for free, but be aware enough to study their ideas before you buy into them.
The Internet allows you to easily find affiliate networks which are ideal sites to look for choices as this is the place merchants and affiliates like you meet. The merchants advertise their available affiliate programs to interested affiliates some as high as 75% but the norm would be programs that pay 50% or more where you can join that network for free such as Clickbank, PayDotCom or Commission Junction.
Watch Our Video Below To Find Hot Selling Affiliate Products
[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Pg922mfKrU]
Make Sure You Check Out How To Make Money With Clickbank
Third party networks also known as associate networks are helpful as they give you admission to a huge range of vendors from a large diverse marketplace all at the same time. You can easily track and compare their records, operations, advantages, goods and facilities.
Where To Find The Best Programs
Clickbank would have to be the easiest of these to join and find suitable products especially if you are just starting out as there is not any approval required from vendors you just select the right product and start promoting.
So, although you have choices, the next question is which among those options is the right one for you and your websites or blogs. First off, you really need to ask yourself a very important question and that is, if you would recommend the product or service to your friends or family, since if you cannot convince yourself or your family and friends to buy it, how are you going to write convincing web copy to sell it to your visitors.
It’s probably a good idea to move on to the next suitable product in your niche and preferably one that you yourself would use.
So as an example, you are hosting your website to target people in Indian and you have discovered that they are interested in weight loss pharmacy pills and you don’t have the resources to create this product yourself, then the next step would be to find an affiliate program that does. What I would do is type something into Google search along these lines “Affiliate Marketing” and see what comes up and then keep narrowing my search until I find something suitable.
Make Sure The Product or Service You Promote Has A Good Reputation
Another factor you need to consider when deciding on what to promote is that of the vendors previous products and reputation in the marketplace, meaning looking into their previous and present sales details, their proven and tested affiliate marketing systems and their associates experiences with them.
However, your success when promoting the program truly depends on you and the effort that you put into it, this one is still the most important aspect even before you pick a product to promote.
The sales records don’t only show how good the affiliates are, but they speak about the products reliability, market availability and the company or the vendors standing in general. Moreover, research it carefully make sure you study the vendor’s commission plan, because your sole purpose for joining the program is to make money, therefore make sure you will be paid for all the efforts you are undertaking fairly.
If you don’t have the time to advertise effectively the affiliate products or services through making banners, artwork or unique articles, try to go with vendors that help you create these for your own websites. Remember that affiliate advertising is a symbiotic relationship, therefore ensure your associate partner is able to help you while you help him advertise his goods and services and make sales.
Write down all the pro’s and con’s of each product or service that you’re looking at so that you may clearly see the difference among your choices, you know a bit like a marketing plan – and then later on, compare the benefits of those programs with your own checklist. Take the time to collect all of the info you need to choose the proper affiliate programs, and keep in mind an educated choice is the advisable selection.
Take it slowly there is no need to rush into anything even though on occasion you will be tempered to dive on a product launch to make some fast cash.
You might also like to see our tutorials on Promoting Your Money Sites as well as Money Sites Advanced Tactics.
Already involved with an affiliate program and I having a hard time getting my site in a position for selling the products!
Hi Peter
Before I give you any suggestions can you please let me know what you have done to promote your site online or have you just created the site and that is it.
Hi Growmap
Thanks for the information I am sure some of our users could really benefit form this information….
I know this post is more about downloadable products available at ClickBank; however, this time of year many sites that have traffic could benefit from offering gifts on their existing sites. As Peter has found, you must have traffic to sell anything so if you already have traffic why not offer them what they’re going to be seeking out for the next couple of months anyway?
I work with a gift affiliate program paying 12-20% with a huge inventory of products that will fit most any niche from Official Sports Logo products to pocket knives to business card holders. Their products could sell well in almost any niche and I will personally send anyone interested more traffic from Social Networking and provide incoming links too.
I linked a post on how to evaluate an ecommerce store that provides more information on this gift store to this comment. If you have any suggestions on what else I can do to increase interest and support their affiliates I’m all ears.
I vote for my own products. Cheaper – better conversions – and if promoted to my email list – much more money in my pocket 😉
Hi Alex
It is much better to have your own products at the end of the day but before diving into that market it is really a very good idea to understand how different products are promoted by the many different vendors and affiliate networks that are available. This will help you to understand how to do a successful lauch of your own products in the future.
My vote is for digital products rather than focusing on physical products (but I’m not saying that I don’t promote them, since I know that they are very profitable as well). It’s just that digital products offer higher commissions, given that they don’t really have to reproduce the product.
About having your own product is good, but it takes a lot of effort to promote them plus the split testings that you need to do, argh that’s really a pain in the a$$. However, accomplishing something like that will really make you feel proud about yourself. I’m looking in to that as well, but not now 🙂
I enjoyed reading this entry and the comments too Ron.
Hi Jason and welcome back..
Yes many people think that it is very easy to set up their own product simply buy paying for a PLR product that they can market…
However I think that you and me are very aware that it is not that easy to do, you need your own product which has to be something unique that offers complete value to your customers, and if you don’t one of two things can happen.
You will receive no sales for all your efforts or your will have sales but experience a very high rate of refunds.
For anyone wanting to get into the online world to sell their own products they should always do a stretch in affiliate marketing first to learn the ropes of selling online and what the many strategies are they can use in the promotion of their future product release.
So for me I would have to agree with Jason on the promotion of digital products as an affiliate…
It might be two years since you penned this post Ron but the points you made are still valid.
Doing your homework (due diligence) applies to any business activity and affiliate marketing is no different. I agree that finding merchants who provide adequate resources is a bonus, however, the downside is that a proliferation of mini-sites spring up with identical content.
If you’re working a niche that is a personal passion it shouldn’t require too much effort to take the merchant resources, particularly articles, and rewrite them to create unique content for your website and subsequent mailings to subscribers.
Those subscribers are probably on several lists in that niche so unless you stand out from the others you may be missing out on commissions.
Hi Jonathon
Yes by doing your due diligence you can easily stay ahead of the game and an even bigger bonus is that you can spot a scam very fast. This also helps to build relationships with others online which is another very important aspect that is very rarely discussed.
As for the mini-sites you are right you need to be creating your own content to place on them especially if you want free search traffic. If you have access to a resource like this you simply use the content that is provided to create your own, it’s no different really than doing research and then re-writing the content in your own words or from your user experience.
Another strategy you might want to adopt is also re-writing the emails you receive to make them unique to you and your subscribers. I really can’t count the amount of times I receive the exact same email from 5 or 6 different people on a daily basis. This for me is the fastest way to lose credibility in my eyes and if I see it happening I know the person has never used the product and is just doing a copy and paste exercise into their Autoresponder with no consideration of whether it is a benefit to me or not. Simply chasing some commissions at my expense.
Always good to revisit articles from time to time. Perhaps you could pen one titled “The Difference Between Automation, Shortcuts and Idleness” to cover those lazy copy’n’paste affiliates.
Hi JR
I am afraid that there will always be Copy N Paste affiliates I have written extensively about this on my blog and many still simply think that they will make money doing it. Only last week I came across a site that had taken eight pages off our site word for word including images. When I politely asked them to take them down their response was very hostile.
Unfortunately for them they were hot linking to my images so I simply edited those images with a few choice words of wisdom and again politely asked if they could remove my content. Still a hostile response so I contacted Godaddy their hosting provider and they took their whole site down with-in a week.
So far, I have been very careful in choosing the right affiliate programs for my blog and niche websites. My main affiliate programs that really pay right now are Clickbank and WSO affiliate program. But for other niches, I use Amazon, CJ and legitimate CPA networks.
Dan Lew
Hi Ron,
A newer program that is out there now with a vast amount of products and decent commissions is JVZoo.
Hi
Yes I am also using JVZoo it is very easy to set up and has some great products listed that you can promote as an affiliate. Some of the offers also hook straight into the Warrior Forum which is another positive aspect of this affiliate network.