Affiliate Marketing Articles home : Affiliate Marketers

Affiliate Marketers: You will be pulling slivers out of your butt!

by Troy Breitmeyer

...from working in the buff, and you will get so lazy from being waited on and served by your outsourced servants that you can now afford since you joined the top affiliate program, just yesterday. Which, by the way, you only have to work for for ten minutes a day.

There are million of them out there, and some of the claims are just outrageous, and go on and on. Of course, you don't have to get naked to work in the morning, if you don't want.

Before you say to yourself "I know where this guy is going with this.", I'm not. I am not going to try to convince you to join my affiliate program, but I will tell you what I think makes an affiliate program stand out above the rest. You are free to check out the ones that I belong to by visiting the sites in my sig.

1)Affiliate Programs that Pay Well!. It is always a great incentive when you are making decent money from your hard earned work. The majority of affiliate programs pay anywhere from 5 to 50%, and some of them pay you even more.

2)Affiliate programs that are two tiered. When other people join under you, by visiting your website and signing up, they are inserted into your tier. When they make a sale, you also get paid a percent of their earnings. As you can see, affiliate programs that have a two tiered structure can be very lucrative, and can compound over time to a very serious income. This is something that you should consider when joining an affiliate program.

3)Affiliate programs that provide quality tracking. I think that this is one of the more important thing to decide when you are choosing an affiliate program to join. I prefer to affiliate with companies that provide third party tracking rather than companies that provide the tracking themselves. Not that all self contained programs are bad, but a third party tracking leaves me with a more secure feeling that I am getting paid.

Here is how third party tracking works... You place links on your website that are provided by, or linked into your affiliate site by the third party service. When someone visits your website, and clicks on your affiliate link, they are redirected to the company's site that you are affiliated with, but not before making a record of the fact that this visitor came from your website. If this visitor makes a purchase, the third party tracking service also records this transaction, and you get credit for the sale.

The tracking that your new affiliate program provides you with should be able to tell you all of the following things, so that you know how well the links are performing. This will help you to decide and make adjustments to maximize your sales. 1)Click Throughs This is the total amount of people leaving your website to visit your affiliates website. It is usually divided up between text links and banner links so that you are able to tell which campaigns are working the best. 2)Click through ratio. This is the percentage of the people who potentially saw the affiliate link after visiting your site, and clicked on the affiliate link. These are sometimes measured by a 1 by 1 pixel picture embedded in your affiliate link and the number of times that it is exposed is added into the equation. Knowing this helps you to figure out where you should place the affiliate links for maximum clicks and sales.

Their are many other tracking features to consider such as earnings, tier earnings and the likes. Many affiliate programs are now allowing you to build sub Is which help you to identify exactly which links, or which advertising campaigns are working the best, by individually identifying each link, and providing separate tracking for each link.

4)Affiliate programs that provide tools and resources. The more resources that you have to work with, the better. These resources may include: Banners and textlinks that you can use a your website. The more they give you to work with, the more chance at success. The better affiliate programs also provide you with pre-made articles that you can use at your website and in your newsletters, but some even provide flash presentations, audio and video presentations, and even newsletters that you can pass along to your opt-in list. Now many are also providing pre made websites that you can advertise in pay per click search engines, and the likes.

And last , but not least, affiliate programs that provide training and support for their affiliates. Many programs out there on the net provide full training courses, and live support for their affiliates. When an affiliate program goes this far to make sure that their affiliates are successful, then chances are, they have a successful affiliate program. Something else to consider is the length of time that an affiliate program has been around. A program that has been around for a while is a program that has a track record of success, or they still wouldn't be around.

About the Author

Troy Breitmeyer has been an affiliate marketer and web designer since 1997, and has been interviewed on Chris Malta and Robin Cowie's eBiz Radio Show. Troy has also taught many others how to earn money online through affiliate marketing. Some of Troy's sites are: http://dropshippers-directory.com - Product Sourcing Tools for eBay Sellers. Affiliate Program Available

Affiliate Avalanche

Affiliate Buzz

Affiliate Templates

Insider Secrets

Adsense Secrets

Affiliate Masters Course

Affiliate Newsletter

Affiliate Marketing Primer

bookmark this site