Choosing Good Affiliate Programs

When you first start out trying to make money online with affiliate
programs, you quickly find there are thousands of programs to choose from.
And figuring out the best ones to sign up for can sometimes take a bit of
time and effort. In some cases... you may even find yourself going through a
bit of trial and error in the beginning too.

Thankfully though, there are many things you can look for before signing up
with an affiliate program, and these will help you to know whether it's a
good match for you or not.

1. What are the affiliate program's terms of service? This can be a make or
break deal, because if an affiliate program does not allow you to use Google
AdWords for marketing for instance - and this is the method you've chosen to
earn money - then signing up with them will do you no good. So read through
their terms of service first.

A word of warning here: Steer clear of any affiliate programs which do not
publically post their terms of service.

2. What are their payment specifics? This is important as well, because you
need to know both how much money you can earn, plus how often that money
will come in. If an affiliate program pays 10% of all sales, that means when
you sell something worth $100, you'll get $10 in commissions. This isn't bad
if the product is good and the market is large enough, but if the affiliate
program only pays you when you've earned $1000 in commissions, you'll need
to make a lot of sales before you'll see any of that money in your own bank
account.

If on the other hand, the affiliate program only sends your earnings to you
every three months, it won't matter if you've generated $1000 every day in
commissions... you're still going to wait quite a long time before you can
actually spend the money you've earned.

3. What does their website look like? This doesn't always occur to affiliate
marketers, but the way your affiliate program's website looks plays a very
big part in how well you can earn money promoting their products or
services.

If you visit the merchant website and see Google Adsense ads all over it for
instance, you'd probably be better off not promoting that program. Why?
Because you could send 1000 visitors to the site, and have 500 of them click
on the merchant's Adsense ads instead of buying. That earns money for the
merchant but it does NOT earn money for you.

Affiliates usually only earn money if a product is directly sold. So you
don't want to promote a page or site that has other earning streams in place
for the advertiser, that you as the affiliate would not earn anything from.

A similar problem is when the merchant website has their own affiliate links
to other merchants. You are sending your traffic to them, expecting to make
sales that will earn you money through thier affiliate program. If they in
fact are promoting other merchants as an affiliate themselves, then your
traffic could end up clicking one of their affiliate links to another
merchant. Again this would earn them money but not you.

So there are three starter tips to helping you choose good affiliate
programs. I'll have more articles covering this topic for you in the near
future.

&copy; 2006, Kathy Burns-Millyard. Want to learn more about <A
HREF="http://www.easysidemoney.com/affiliate-project-x.html">affiliate
marketing</A> now? Check out these excellent affiliate marketing resources
at <A HREF="http://www.easysidemoney.com">EasySideMoney.com</A>