Affiliate Programs - What You Need To Know |
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In this part of the affiliate program guide, we're going to discuss affiliate programs that concentrate on selling actual products, as opposed to programs that mainly involve getting people to sign up under you in order to collect commissions. Product based affiliate programs are very popular with people who like to sell. The problem is, not everybody is a salesman or a good marketer. That's why these programs try to make it very attractive to affiliates to sell their products. Companies do this in two ways... The first way is where a company will set the price and commission structure themselves. An example of this is a company like Implix that has a few products and sets the prices and the commission percentages themselves. Other companies like Clickbank, rely on the vendors to create the products and set the prices and commission percentages. They try to encourage these vendors to set the commissions high enough so that people will want to sell them. They suggest setting commissions at 50-75%. Product based affiliate programs are very attractive but still require you to be a good sales person, unless the company also has an affiliate program where you get a portion of sales that your affiliates make. Clickbank only offers this if you're a vendor and not just an affiliate yourself. The products themselves range from internet marketing to health and fitness to just about anything else that you can think of. It's all sold through these affiliate programs. Most of the products are sold in the form of ebooks, but there are some companies out there that actually sell things like vitamins and protein bars. The choice of things to promote as an affiliate is virtually endless. When choosing a product based affiliate program, the first thing you want to do is pick one that's free to join. Nobody should charge you to sell their products. If they do, click away as fast as you can because they are not legit. The next thing you want to do is pick something that you're interested in. Why? Because these things aren't going to sell themselves. You're going to have to write ads and do other marketing for these items. So it's much better if you are marketing products that you know something about and believe in. The next thing you want to do is look for a company that has been around for a while and has a good reputation. Why? Because selling products for a new company can be very risky for many reasons. First of all, you don't know how good the products are because most likely there are no reviews on them. Second, if you do sell a new company's products and they turn out to be bad, this can seriously damage your credibility down the road. Third, if they haven't been around long they might go under and you'll never get paid for your efforts. So you want to make sure the products have good reviews on them. This is simple enough to do. Just go to your favorite search engine, type in the product or company name in quotes plus "review" and read as many reviews on it as you can. Of course, they won't all be good but you want most of them to be good reviews before you join the affiliate program. More on affiliate programs in part 4 of this guide... Home Page |