How to Choose an Affiliate Program

Choosing an Affiliate Program

There are so many affiliate programs out there it can be overwhelming to know where to start or what to promote. First of all you need to know where to look.

ClickBank, CJ and Plimus all provide a basic place to start. Each offers a range of products or services to choose from that are broken down into different niches.

ClickBank and Plimus both focus more on digital products, while CJ offers more services or companies selling physical products.

One big advantage of ClickBank and Plimus is that they process the payment on behalf of the product owner, and then pay you directly. This means you can be sure of getting paid.

Because it is such a competitive marketplace many product owners offer higher commissions to get potential affiliates to promote. It is not uncommon so see commissions as high as 75% on these sites.

On the down side though, they are notorious for low grade products (though far from all). Worse for you they can also suffer from high refund rates.

Some products suffer from refund rates as high as 40-70%. This is obviously not good as you will not get paid on refunded sales.

However they remain good places to start searching for products to promote. You can visit this list for a more extensive list of alternative places outside the three marketplaces listed.

Many product owners choose to provide their own affiliate program. For these just look for the link that says either “affiliates” or “partners” at the bottom of a site that has products you wish to promote.

You can then apply to become an affiliate. Usually this is an almost instant process.
There are however…

9 Questions to Ask Yourself BEFORE Promoting...

It can be overwhelming deciding which affiliate product to promote. Generally speaking there are either physical or information (digital) products. In our experience it is easier to sell (and earn more money from) digital products.

This is because information products are easier to build content around. It’s easier to create a follow-up newsletter series that prospects will sign up to.

And therefore it is easy to recommend many cross-related products. Mark has found that the same customers will buy up to five products from him in a year.

Before committing to an affiliate product check through these 9 questions we’ve compiled to help you…

Is the product and the product owner reputable? If not you may want to avoid it. Remember it takes a long time to build your reputation and only seconds for someone else to destroy it.

Does the product convert well? If not you can send a ton of traffic to it, but make almost no money.

Is the product evergreen? Some products are designed to only be available for a short time. These can be great if you are mailing to a list, but for most other methods you are going to want the product to keep selling to make your efforts worthwhile.

Is there any backend, and if so will you get commissions? Many products will upsell clients to higher ticket items. This can be an added bonus for you –if the product owner pays commissions on these additional products.

Does the product pay a fair commission? While many affiliate programs offer 50-75% don’t expect this percentage from all of them. If a product is physical, or has a lot of other costs involved in delivering the product or service (such as hosting or mailing services) then 10-30% is a much fairer percentage.

Are there recurring commissions? It is always a bonus if you can promote a product that will continually deliver a pay-out each and every month. Just be aware that for many “membership” sites customers only stay an average of three months—reoccurring is not “forever”.

Does the product provide any “free giveaways” for you to offer prospects? If they do then this can make your job much easier. People like to receive something before they are sold something.

Is the affiliate tracking system the product owner uses reliable? These programs (Amazon, eBay, ClickBank, Plimus or products hosted on platforms such as FusionHQ) all have tried and tested tracking.

However some small product owners try to shortcut and use cheap scripts that don’t track properly. This means you could lose many of the commissions that should have been rightfully yours.

Does the product owner provide good tools or training to help you? Some do, some don’t. Depending on your strategy and level of experience you may not even need these. However for many they can help a lot.

Chances are you won’t find any product that matches every single one of these criteria. However the product you choose to promote should tick as many boxes as possible.