Not every affiliate program is the same. While one affiliate program may be a good fit for a site, the same affiliate program may not work as well for another site. Depending on the nature of your site and the niche it is from, results and the money you can make off each affiliate program can vary from site to site.

I have list down some basic tips below to guide those of you who are interested in selecting the right affiliate program for your site.

Commission Structure
My rule of thumb is for digital products, the commission needs to be at least 50% of the price. For physical products, anything from 10% to 30% will be good. Also take note of affiliate programs that has a 2 tier commission structure or even offer recurring commissions.

Customer Support
Test out the customer service before promoting the program, otherwise you will run the risk of alienating your loyal customers. Always go for affiliate program that offers at least a decent level of customer support.

Payment
Choose affiliate programs that pay out commission at least once a month. Also take note of the minimum payout amount, ideally minimum should be as low as possible, probably less than $100 will be good. Another important point to take note is the payment mode (such as paypal); make sure you are able to receive your commission.

Pricing of Products & Services
When promoting an affiliate program, please take note of the affiliate program pricing. If your site primary audience is made up of visitors with low buying power, it makes no sense to promote affiliate program with high price products and services that are out of reach for your targeted traffic.

Reputable Merchants
There are many affiliate programs that have merchants with shoddy products and services. That is why if you are able to afford it, try out the products and services first before recommending to your site’s visitors. If not you can always do some research on forums and blogs before deciding whether to promote a particular affiliate program or not.

Tracking
If an affiliate program does not offer you decent tracking tools, you can forget about it. Without decent tracking tools, there is no way you can tweak and test your results to maximize your affiliate commission.

I hope these tips on choosing an affiliate program will get you started on the right track to making healthy commissions off affiliate marketing. As you become more experience in promoting affiliate programs, finding the right affiliate programs to promote is going to be a breeze to you.

1) Choose a market that you have an interest in
While it is not necessary to have a vested interest in the market you are targeting, it does helps a lot if you do. There are many benefits to having an interest in the market you are targeting such as when times are tough going initially, your interest and passion in the targeted market will see you through the tough times.

2) Understand Your Audience
Take your time to understand and know your market well especially if you are new to that particular market. Provide solutions rather than offer any products and services that are on the market. Your visitors will be able to feel the difference between someone who really knows what he is talking about and someone who is just faking it.

3) Show your integrity
It is important to show that you are not biased in your reviews and promotions of products and services. Recommend a bad product one time too many and you’ll find yourself losing the trust and confidence of your visitors. Especially important is not to make your site too spammy that it turns away repeated visitors.

4) Write detailed reviews
Don’t just throw affiliate links at your visitors. The best way to get people to buy products and services through your affiliate links to write great reviews and content for your visitors.

5) Be transparent with your affiliate links
Be upfront if you are promoting any affiliate links. This will go a long way towards building and maintaining goodwill between you and visitors, especially loyal and repeated visitors.

6) Select products or services carefully
It is important to only recommend good products and services to your visitors. While the urge to promote everything that you come across as a newbie, I have learnt through the hard way that these does not necessary pay off. Selectively promote good products and services that you think will be highly beneficial to your visitors and you will stand to gain more.

7) Try different programs
Not all affiliate programs are the same and the same rule also applies to affiliate networks. If you have a hard time trying to make money off a particular affiliate program, ditch it and go for the next one. You need to test and track which programs or networks best fit your market and your visitors and only through testing and tracking can you really weed out the bad ones.

8 ) Write good content
Content is king and the key to attracting visitors to your site is good and original content. Write content that is highly relevant, helpful and useful to your market. Keep pumping out great content and you will see your affiliate income increase by the day.

9) Patience is the key
Being patience is one virtue that many people seem to lack. While the urge to make fast money online is there, as a newbie, you must learn to be patient in your quest for affiliate marketing successes. Building up a sizable affiliate income takes time. It is important to note that some programs offers lifetime recurring revenue and this is one area that you should look into seriously.

10) Continuous Education
Affiliate marketing is an ever changing industry. It is important for you to keep upgrading yourself in terms of knowledge and skills in the area of affiliate marketing to maintain and increase your affiliate income.

I hope the 10 affiliate marketing tips above will help you in your quest for affiliate successes. If you have some good tips to share, feel free to comment below.

Commission Junction, found in 1998 is one of the leading affiliate networks for both advertisers and web publishers. Commission Junction has a wider range of products for you to promote as an affiliate. Besides digital products, you also get to promote physical products and subscription services. As with physical products, the commission per sale is quite low compared to digital products but it more or less make up for in sales volume. It is good for those who are not keen to promote solely digital products.

Found in 1998, Clickbank is one of the largest online marketplaces for digital products. With over 10,000 digital products in various categories for affiliate marketers to promote, you can be sure that there is no shortage of income opportunities for you. The affiliate commission range from 50% to as high as 75% for their products. The signing up process for Clickbank is very easy. You do not even need any website to sign up in the first place. For internet marketers who intend to sell their own digital products in the future, there is an activation fee of $49.95 for each product.

Paydotcom is one of the fastest growing affiliate networks that have both digital and physical products under its belt. Being found by an internet marketer, it offers a wide range of features that would appeal to internet marketers. As with other affiliate networks listed here, PayDotCom is free to sign up. PayDotCom is ideal for both beginners and experienced marketers alike, especially for internet marketers who intend to sell their own products or services in the future. PayDotCom only have a one- time activation before you can sell unlimited number of products whereas Clickbank has an activation fee of $49.95 for each and every product that you put up for sale.

The three affiliate networks listed above will be the best if not the most ideal for most marketers to begin with. When you began to gain more experience in affiliate marketing, you can start looking for other alternatives. Until then, you only need to take action to make some money.

Amazon is the first big online merchant to popularize the affiliate marketing concept with its own “associates” program back in 1996. Since then, a lot of online merchants have followed and started to integrate affiliate marketing programs into their online business strategies. Recent data has shown that affiliate marketing plays a significant part for any online businesses’ strategies.

Affiliate marketing is a win-win concept for both the online merchant and its affiliates.

The online merchant has no overheads to pay other than the initial costs in setting up an affiliate program as the affiliates are all working under commissions basics. The online merchant only needs to render commissions to its affiliates when they refer a customer who either purchase something or fill up a form. The online merchant will also stand to gain in the form of free advertising and more exposure for it products and services through the offer of an affiliate program. With the bulk of marketing and advertising left to affiliates, the online merchant can focus on other core marketing and business strategies to grow and expand the business.

As for the affiliates, affiliate marketing remains one of the best ways monetize their websites. With no inventory and other overheads to worry about, an affiliate is leave with the task of just referring customers or leads to the online merchant for a commission.

As affiliate marketing starts to gain in popularity and acknowledgement as an essential online marketing strategy, a lot of companies started to develop their own affiliate programs. And as online merchants rush to develop their own affiliate programs, a new type of service websites sprung up that is devoted to managing these affiliate programs – Affiliate Networks. Most online merchants lack the necessary resources and knowledge to manage an affiliate program of their own and this creates a window of opportunity for “Affiliate Networks” to tap into.

Within the space of a few years, affiliate marketing has become the driving element of how commerce works on the internet. And it should stays that way until someone came up with a better method of conducting commerce on the internet.

While, affiliate marketing may seem easy at first glance, there are many factors involved. Nowadays, more and more offline businesses are turning to the internet to market their businesses and this in turn creates more opportunities affiliates to make serious money from affiliate programs.

Some affiliate programs do have multi tier compensation plans of up to 2 or 3 tiers when you recommend other people as affiliates to these affiliate programs; however please do not confuse them to multi-level marketing although the similarities are quite uncanny similar. As most legitimate affiliate programs only reach up to the 2^nd or 3^rd tier, this is in a way similar to what direct selling companies are offering their salespeople. Likewise, insurance agents and property agents work under this compensation system too, whereby the managers or those who manage the teams of agents under them will get overriding commissions on the sales of these agents.

As for multi-level marketing, if you are familiar with MLM as it is known, it involves more than 3 tiers sometimes even unlimited. MLM is mostly based on referring people into the programs and have very little focus of the products or services they are offering. Legitimate MLMs or those companies which are more ethical in nature although I not sure whether they are any in existence and they focus more on products and services instead of recruitment.

As you can see, there is a big world of difference between affiliate marketing and MLM although people still mistakenly refer affiliate marketing to MLM and especially so from those who are new to online money making opportunities. That is why if you are new to making money online or just happen to come across affiliate marketing, please do not jump to conclusion so soon. Instead take time to understand what affiliate marketing and internet marketing is all about and you will never regret it. Even if you do not want to get involve, please refrain from disparaging Internet Marketing and those who are involved in it. Instead once you understand what Internet Marketing is all about, you will look at it in a different light. Internet Marketing is all about marketing online and in fact, just like in conventional businesses, all the basic business fundamentals, knowledge and mindset is required to succeed online.

Affiliate marketing started back in late 1994 when many e-commerce sites started to use the affiliate marketing model to bring in more business. The end results are fantastic and this why affiliate marketing is one of the most used advertising strategies used nowadays.

Now let’s go through the various affiliate marketing methods that online merchants used for their affiliate programs.

Pay per click

Basically, whenever a visitor to your site clicks on the adverts of a particular merchant, you will get paid for it. The more visitors that click s on these ads, the more money you made. Please note that this is different from the pay per click model using Google Adsense.

Pay Per Lead

Whenever a visitor is directed from your site to the merchant’s site and sign up for more information, you will be paid. Depending on the type of information given, you can get paid from a dollar to even tens of dollars per lead. It can be very lucrative especially in financial niches.

I have yet to explore pay per lead but from my past experiences within the financial niche in which I experiment using Google Adsense, I received up to a few dollars for every click. Please note that this is not the same as the pay per click above, this is a form of creating sites filled with Google Adsense ads to lure visitors to click on these ads. To read more on this, check out this post.

Pay Per Sale

Very simply, you make money whenever a visitor whom you refer to the merchant’s site buys something. As you know most, most people do not buy immediately, rather they will take their own sweet time to go through the products or services offered and make a decision later on. Now you may think if that is the case, won’t my efforts be wasted?

Don’t worry, this is normally what happens. The merchants will store a cookie in the visitor’s computer which will be valid from a day to up to a year, and some even claim lifetime although I find it hard to believe. Now, some time later when the visitor finally make the buying decision and if your cookie is still stored in his or her computer, you will be given a commission for the sale made. Now isn’t it wonderful! 

The methods above are some of the ways in which merchants employ in their affiliate program. In some cases, some merchants will offer a mixture of the methods above or should I say a hybrid of various methods. There are probably some other methods that merchants used for their affiliate programs and these methods are normally spin offs or hybrids of the three methods above but basically these three are still the most basic and commonly used methods.

For good resources on affiliate marketing, please check out my “Recommended Resources” section.

Basically, affiliate marketing is beneficial to both the online merchants and the affiliates. There is minimum risks involve as the merchant stand to gain from more sales and traffic from the affiliates promoting them. On the other hand, affiliates have nothing to lose as they do not bear the risks of selling their own products and what they need to do is just to promote the merchants’ products and services and they will get paid for every sale made.

For the merchants, affiliate marketing presents the best of both worlds, minimum advertising costs couple with branding and awareness generated as a results of their affiliates’ efforts leaving the merchants with more time and money to focus on other parts of their businesses. This is not to say the affiliate program is not important. In fact an affiliate program is one of the most important elements for any online merchants who want to succeed. Rather, by having a good affiliate program in place and this can be set up to run on auto pilot or with minimum work, a merchant can have more time on other equally important aspects of his or her business such as the quality of the products or services, customer services and more.

As you can see, if an affiliate program is set up well, both the merchants and their affiliates will stand to gain. And best of all, this is a win-win situation which is mutually beneficial to all parties involved, the merchant, the affiliate and the customer.

For good resources on affiliate marketing, please check out my “Recommended Resources” section.

Affiliate marketing is just like any other business, be it conventional or on the internet. You need to approach it just the way real business should be done. Although affiliate marketing is essentially the easiest online money making models for anyone who wants to start making money online, it does not mean that you can earn easy money just by putting up a site and do nothing else. Check out my previous post on “Money Making Models: Affiliate Marketing” which will give you a better understanding on affiliate marketing.

Here are some tips to ensure that your affiliate marketing business is off to a good start:

The most important thing to take note of when starting out is to identify a niche. Check out the demand for products in that particular niche. There’s no point for you promote something that nobody wants or the demand is low. You’ll end up wasting all your time and effort in promoting that product. Stay away from trendy products. One moment these products are selling like hot cakes, the next moment you’ll be giving them away. Promote products that have a long shelf life and demand is hot.

Instead of just promoting one product, offer a variety of products in the same niche. In a way when the demand for one product falls, it will not affect your overall income that much. Sometimes, when demand is low or the product has been on the market for quite some time, the owner may slash prices resulting in drastic drop in your income. Also, try not to promote a variety of products that are not related or not in the same niche as it give customers a feeling that your site is not focus and lack a distinct theme.

Brand your business and set it apart from others. There are thousands of people promoting the same products as you are and how are you going to compete with them. You need to offer something different from the rest, whether is it better offers or superior customer services. Think about your business unique selling point and what makes your business so special that customers will come back to you again and again.

Be tactful and vary when asked to comment on your competition. Do not talk down your competitors’ products and services, instead promote your products benefits and advantages and leave it to that.

Another important point is customer service and support. Ensure that your service and support to customers is fast and efficient. Sometimes, when things happen that is beyond your control, explain to customers the reasons. Sincerely apologize for any glitches rather than trying to brush it away. Most customers are very forgiving if you are sincere about the issues at stake. Offer them a discount if possible. Remember, a happy customer is a repeat customer. The happier your customers are, the more likely they will come back and purchase from you and the more likely they will refer other people to purchase from you. Think long term.

I hope the tips above will ensure that you‘ll have a good start in your affiliate marketing business. However, as in other businesses, there are no short cuts to success, you need to constantly take actions and work towards your goals. Also remember continuous education is important. That’s why you need to constantly read up and study new information that give you a better advantage over your competition. Just make sure you come back often for more materials.

For a list of good affiliate marketing resources, check out my “Recommended Resources” section.