Cody Moya’s article “Choosing the best affiliate programs” is reprinted here. [Read Article]


Cody Moya’s article is reprinted here.

Choosing the best affiliate programs

What every affiliate hopes for is the day they open the mailbox and find it stuffed with big checks. While this is the dream, making it a reality involves lots of hard work and the ability to find the best affiliate programs – the ones that have great products to sell at highly competitive prices. Those affiliate programs really are out there, but they can be hidden behind all those other programs that are selling worthless or overpriced junk. You will never make strong commissions selling inferior products, so it is important to seek out the best merchandise you can.

One of the best, and most proven strategies, is to find your market niche, and exploit that niche as much as you can. Exploiting your niche does not mean marketing worthless or overpriced items to your target audience; that is a sure recipe for failure. Rather, exploiting a niche means finding people who share a particular passion and providing them, through your merchant partners, with the very best products in that niche category.

Even small niche categories can be surprisingly profitable for affiliates, since those people are much more likely to buy than are casual web site visitors or internet surfers.

Once you have found your niche, look for strong affiliate programs that service that niche category. The next step is to build a web site, a newsletter and quality web site content devoted to that niche category. The enthusiasts in these niche categories tend to be a discerning bunch, so it is important that the information provided be topical, useful and accurate.

It is important to offer the visitors to your targeted web site some sort of freebie for signing up. This freebie can consist of a free mini series of articles in their niche, for example. This is done to encourage visitors to the site to sign up for more. After they have provided their email address, be sure to deliver the promised premium right away. This can be done through an auto responder service.

After you have gotten those visitors to sign up, and built their trust through providing expert level articles in their area of interest, you can begin marketing subtly for your affiliated merchants. It is important that the marketing be subtle, and not blatant attempts to sell a product. Again, those consumers who fall into niche categories tend to be very educated and savvy about web marketing. Subtle marketing works better for most niche categories.

When choosing the best affiliate programs for your niche category, it is important to make sure they are properly targeted to your niche. Niche categories tend to be super concentrated, and the people who are looking to buy custom tied fishing flies may not be as receptive to merchants selling other types of lures. It is important to do some basic market research and to understand your target market.

It is also important to make sure that the commission being offered by the affiliate program is sufficient to pay for your time and your investment. While marketing to a targeted list of email subscribers is a low cost form of advertising, it is not free. You need to make sure that the commission percentage will adequately compensate you for your time and effort.

When evaluating an affiliate program, be sure to visit the merchant web site and make sure that their site is professional looking, and that it has a solid marketing plan in place. Is the sales content compelling? Does it make you want to learn more about the products being offered? It is important to look at the page objectively, from the point of view of a potential customer not just as a potential affiliate partner.

It is also important to at least look at the products. After all, you will be attaching your good name to their products and recommending them to your subscribers. Recommending inferior or poorly made products to your customers is a sure way to shoot yourself in the foot and damage your reputation.

And finally, make sure there is a good tracking method in place for the affiliate program. Be sure you can see how many visitors you have referred to the merchant, and how much commission you are entitled to. The ability to track in real time is always the preferred method, though weekly or monthly reports can be acceptable in some cases.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Cody Moya writes about How to Earn As Affiliate in his Free Courses on Internet Marketing. You can sign up for his free Courses and get additional information at his website: http://FreeInternetMarketingCourses.com

*IMNewswatch would like to thank Cody Moya for granting permission to reprint this article.