How to rate an affiliate program?
By Bruno Delepierre - http://www.4allsites.com
Affiliate marketing has become a very popular method for merchants to increase sales. By giving affiliates a piece of the cake merchants make sure that a lot of people promote their service or product and they’ll see a boost in sales, leads or clicks. Nowadays you can find literally thousands of affiliate programs. You will have to think very hard before you will find something where you won’t have an affiliate program for.
I often receive e-mails from websites who would like me to tell them which programs they should use on their website. You can understand that this is pretty hard for us as we don’t know a lot on that specific site. However I can point out some basic points that you could use to " rate " a merchant for your site.
Learn from your traffic
I don’t have to tell you that visitors are the single most important thing for a webmaster. You can have a wonderful website but without others to see it, it’s useless. In order to find a suiting merchant you will have to analyse your traffic. First step of course is getting a tracker for your site. If you are really interested in making money with affiliate programs, add a genuine tracker ( not a counter ! ) to your site. There are some very good free trackers around there that allow you to have decent statistics on your traffic. Get to know your visitors and learn from your knowledge. Add an affiliate program that targets your public and you will be able to use a very targeted program which will likely make you more money.
Is the merchant a stable merchant ?
I have experienced that there’s one thing that affiliates really hate and it’s called reduction of commission. Some merchants have the intention to reduce your commission drastically after a while.
Sometimes merchants have to cut in their budget and of course affiliate funds are the first victims.
In some cases a reduction of commission is understandable as long as the new commission is acceptable for an affiliate.
People sent me several complaints that certain merchants show no respect for their affiliates and think they are the important ones as they pay you…WRONG ! A merchant without any affiliates is worthless ! In fact a merchant should be greatful that you want to promote his product or service. Of course you get paid but trust me, they still profit from your efforts. More and more I encounter such merchants.
Let me tell you a story of one of them , just to illustrate how rude a merchant can be : I myself put a free offer on my site that would pay me 25 cents per free subscription.
In the beginning I made some dollars out of it, nothing much though, but nevertheless I made some leads. Suddenly this stopped, no more leads…I didn’t know what could be the reason and I waited a couple of days. A bit later I got an e-mail from this merchant that they reduced their commission to 0.001 dollar (no there really are 3 zeros here ). First I thought this was a joke but hey, that was strange, after the commission reduction I suddenly started making new leads. I even made 0.02 dollar a day which are twenty qualified leads ! ) It’s clear that this offer didn’t last another week on my site and I honestly hope that every affiliate dropped this program as this is a disgrace to affiliate marketing.
Of course not every merchant is this dishonest : Recently Jackpot.com lowered their commissions from 1 dollar to 65 cents. Although this is a reduction of 35 % this offer is still interesting enough to promote and the merchant hasn’t got the intention to abuse his affiliates…
User Friendlyness
A very important aspect of an affiliate program is the user friendlyness of a merchant program. Although commission is an important thing, even with a high commission and a low sign-up ratio you won’t get real money out of the program. A merchant should make it as easy as possible for a client to buy his products or subscribe to whatever they want. If your merchant link is linked to a sign up page you will generate much more money than a link that goes to the merchants main page.
Commission
The commission is often considered as the single most important thing to choose an affiliate program for. In opinion a commission rate isn’t the ideal criterium to use if you want to rate an affiliate program. I won’t go into details now but if you want to read more on the importance you can read one of my previous articles which is entirely devoted on the analysis of affiliate commission rates…
If you still have any questions at all on affiliate marketing don’t hesitate to contact me and I will gladly try to help you. You can use the contact form on 4allsites.com to post your questions,remarks or suggestions.
Written by Bruno Delepierre - Discover more information,tips and resources on affiliate marketing,webdesign and webpromotion on http://www.4allsites.com. You can also subscribe to our newsletter on http://www.4allsites.com/ourezine.html for regular inside information and webmaster resources.
| DISCLAIMER: The content provided in this article is not warranted or guaranteed by Developer Shed, Inc. The content provided is intended for entertainment and/or educational purposes in order to introduce to the reader key ideas, concepts, and/or product reviews. As such it is incumbent upon the reader to employ real-world tactics for security and implementation of best practices. We are not liable for any negative consequences that may result from implementing any information covered in our articles or tutorials. If this is a hardware review, it is not recommended to open and/or modify your hardware. |
More Affiliate Promotion Articles
More By Developer Shed
 developerWorks - FREE Tools!
|
As organizations integrate software into every aspect of business, they are constantly pressured to deliver faster, better, and cheaper results. Unfortunately, a “dis-integrated” software delivery approach reduces returns while increasing costs. This IBM Rational White Paper shows how Integrated Requirements Management aligns organizations around maximizing value and keeping pace with change.
FREE! Go There Now!
|
|
|
|
This whitepaper provides areas to consider when evaluating any software configuration management solution. It addresses how the IBM solutions (Rational ClearCase and Rational ClearQuest) meet the needs and requirements of both project leaders and developers to provide successful Software Change and Configuration Management.
FREE! Go There Now!
|
|
|
|
As organizations have grown increasingly dependent on online software, the risk of malicious attacks has also become far more serious. Fortunately, well-governed organizations can protect their Web applications by injecting vulnerability assessments and ethical hacks into their software development and delivery processes. This paper describes 12 of the most common hacker attacks and provides basic rules that you can follow to help create more hack-resistant Web applications.
FREE! Go There Now!
|
|
|
|
Visit IBM developerWorks to try the IBM SOA Sandbox for people. The SOA Sandbox for people provides a trial environment with the necessary tooling and components required to enable consistent human and process interaction and collaboration, showing how you can improve user experience and business productivity.
FREE! Go There Now!
|
|
|
|
The unprecedented scope of a service-oriented architecture (SOA) initiative brings to the forefront a number of management and governance issues that were sidestepped in the past. The key to a successful SOA implementation is managing and governing activities throughout the entire SOA delivery lifecycle by ensuring that services conform to the needs of all of the business’s stakeholders. Learn how service lifecycle management allows the business to ensure that the process by which services are defined, created, tested, deployed, optimized and retired is manageable, repeatable and auditable.
FREE! Go There Now!
|
|
|
|
The Eclipse community is constantly working to extend Eclipse's functionality. In this webcast, learn about some of the most important and feature-rich projects under development. From multi-language support to plug-in development, tune in to see what Eclipse is capable of now.
FREE! Go There Now!
|
|
|
|
Attend this launch webcast with Scott Hebner, Vice President of IBM Rational Marketing and Strategy, for an overview of Rational’s new software offerings and resources to help modernize and accelerate software innovation on i on Power Systems – while ensuring past application investments are protected and continue to grow. Learn how these solutions are helping customers extend their core i5/OS solutions toward modern architectures such as SOA and web technologies to deliver business improvements that stand the test of time.
FREE! Go There Now!
|
|
|
|
Asset Reuse is a key strategy for companies looking to create innovative solutions to solve complex software development problems. Searching for, identifying, updating, using and deploying software assets can be a difficult challenge. Listen to this webcast, to learn about strategies and tools that you can leverage for a successful project, including Rational Asset Manager, Rational Software Architect and WebSphere Service Registry and Repository.
FREE! Go There Now!
|
|
|
|
Hear how IBM Rational Project and Portfolio Management integrated solutions help teams put the right tools and processes in place to maximize the effectiveness and efficiency of project teams and ensure that the business vision is being executed correctly. Learn how to automate and integrate requirements prioritization, top-down project planning, communications and controls, and methodology deployment to keep your scope, costs, and schedules under control. Tackle with an end-to-end approach the management of scope and scope changes, usage of methodology to control and empower project teams, and optimization of resources to align activity costs with the overall project plan.
FREE! Go There Now!
|
|
|
|
Join this Rational Talks to You teleconference, to hear how Enterprise Generation Language (EGL) eliminates the need for tedious and error-prone low level coding, so developers can focus on business requirements. EGL extends the Rational software development platform with a simplified programming language that enables developers who have little or no experience with Java, Web technologies or Service Oriented Architecture, to create enterprise-class applications and services quickly and easily. It also allows developers who may have little or no mainframe programming experience to quickly create traditional mainframe components.
FREE! Go There Now!
|
|
|
|
All FREE IBM® developerWorks Tools!
|
