Most Important Things to Look Out for in an Affiliate Program

Online marketers have various experiences about affiliate marketing programs. Some of these experiences are pleasant while some are not too pleasant. Many marketers also have the sad experience of becoming victims of outright scams all in the name of affiliate marketing. Some have been lured into promoting products that actually turned out to be phantom products. Such marketers have indeed had the survival of their businesses threatened anytime the customers they marketed phantom products to got to find out and then desert the businesses. 

If you want your own affiliate marketing business to succeed, make sure the business is not in any way associated with any illegal online business. Take pains to ensure your business is clean, legitimate, credible, and has high quality products/services that will satisfy your customers and entice them to buy more from you. The following guidelines can help you to choose an affiliate program that will be worth your time, efforts and resources.

Choose Products in a Growth Market

The best affiliate products to join and market are affiliate products that are growing in demand. A reputable affiliate program like Strong Future International, SFI has some in-house features that highlight such products. If you go for any of these products in your chosen niche, they will ensure you get more referrals and make more sales. Aside getting hints from the platforms of reputable affiliate programs, you can spy on the competition in your niche to know what works for them. You can also be checking on your reliable feedback and looking at the sales stats of the product you are promoting.

Join Reputable Affiliate Programs

You can join for FREE reputable affiliate marketing programs like Strong Future International, SFI that will provide you free training, free online marketing tools, handle customer care services for you and pay your commissions as earned and due. On the homepage they provide you, you can do your marketing effectively from there. Right there, you have access to your sales performance statistics, your earnings, hits you receive on your ads as well as how your down-line is growing. SFI is the right kind of affiliate program to join because it allows you to check your current sales performance online anytime, real-time, anywhere.

Choose High Quality Products

This is a given. The quality of a product usually has a direct bearing on the demand for the product. Aside making sure the products are in your niche, you must deliberately search for affiliate programs and merchants who sell tried and tested products with good command of the market. You can glean the right info by reading customer feedback in forums and comment sections anywhere customers vote or rate such products online. High quality products are usually not short of genuine ratings and praises from satisfied customers. Just do a bit of research here and there on forums and marketing groups on social media and you’ll get the right information you need. Through some of these forums and marketing groups, you can directly check the credibility of the affiliate product you are marketing or the affiliate program you have signed-up on to work with.

Market Products of Your Interest

The best products to promote are products you like, are passionate about and have probably used yourself. These are products that directly fall within the boundaries of your interest. You may not be a confirmed expert on such products but it is OK if you personally care about them. This is important because, it is usually very difficult for marketers to stay motivated if they are not selling products that really interest them. So, if you are interested in a specific product, then chances are, you are not alone. Out there online, there could be very many others who also like this product and are rooting for it.

Settle for a Good Compensation Plan

The main income from affiliate marketing is by way of commissions. This commission payment varies from affiliate program to affiliate program and among products as well. In SFI, it ranges from 10-50% of commission volume depending on the sales rank you are. Even if the commission volume is 10%, when computed on a large volume of sales, it becomes substantial. As a marketer, the rule of thumb in matters of commissions earning is to make sure the amount of money you earn as commission, more than compensates your efforts. That is when you know you’re doing great in the business.
 
Always Read the Fine Prints Thoroughly

Before you join an affiliate program, be sure to read the terms and conditions very well. Be sure you understand them and you are willing to abide by them before you sign up. Some reputable affiliate programs like SFI are very strict on this. You can easily lose your affiliate status if you consistently breach the rules. You may come across some affiliate programs that advertise unbelievable sales commissions. If you read their terms and conditions well enough, you’ll be able to judge if you want to go along with them or not. In Strong Future International, SFI, you are required to sign-up FREE and get a sales rank which is determined by a sales quota you must meet monthly to retain the rank. You can only advance in rank if you exceed the sales quota. The higher the rank you attain, from rank 1-20, the more perks and commissions you earn. Before you sign up for any affiliate program therefore, read the fine prints and check the prerequisites/requirements very well. Ask yourself if you have the capacity and experience to meet these quotas or even if the quotas are attainable in the first place within the allowed period of time. It is only then you can make a well-informed decision whether to join up or not.

How to Understand, Promote and Use Affiliate Links

If you are marketing online, you must no doubt be aware that affiliate links are specific URLs that contain the unique IDs or usernames of affiliates. They’re useful for tracking the traffic sent from an affiliate’s website to the product merchant’s website. Through affiliate links, merchants are able to correctly attribute sales to affiliates no matter how numerous the affiliates are. These links are uniquely responsible for helping affiliates generate income online. Even with variations in affiliate marketing programs, affiliate links remain central for income generation in all the variants. 

How to Promote Affiliate Links

Affiliate links are not effective unless vigorously promoted. They are very crucial for your affiliate marketing success if you use them to promote the right affiliate products. But so is choosing the right promotional strategies as well. If you blog on your website and wants to monetize the website with affiliate links, here’s what you can do to make the links effective.

•    Use affiliate links in your newsletters and emails
•    Embed affiliate links into your video content
•    Promote affiliate links on social media and forums
•    Leave affiliate links on your guest blog content
•    Insert affiliate links in your product reviews and tutorials
•    Place affiliate banners on your website
•    Link to your affiliate offers directly
•    Include affiliate links to your own products
•    Add affiliate links to your resources page
•    Include affiliate links in your Bio on articles

Affiliate links are also effective when used strategically.

When choosing affiliate products that match your audience, you must pay attention to the following strategic factors if you want good results.

•    Product-Audience fit
•    Market Demand
•    Commission type and Rate
•    Sales Cycle Duration
•    Additional Incentives
•    Your Competition
•    Product Price

Summary

Most people go into affiliate marketing to make money online. The people who get to make this money are those who really know what affiliate links are, how to use and promote them for good results. The foregoing tips and strategies do help this process a great deal to enable people make money online with affiliate marketing.

Earning Potentials of Sundry Affiliate Marketing Programs

Like marketing experts like to say, everyone is in affiliate marketing business to make money online. Depending on your experience, skills and expertise, how much people make in the business varies from person to person. Some merely earn a second paycheck from it while others earn full-time income from it. What is involved is simply to help product merchants sell their products/services and the affiliate marketer earns a commission for his efforts. That is why selling products or different kinds of services with the use of affiliate marketing programs helps to provide real opportunity for marketers to earn income. Many not only get momentary profits in form of commissions/bonuses for each new customer they sign up, but also constant payments and even residual incomes for their efforts. Some publishers in the mold of webmasters, social media influencers, bloggers and other online entrepreneurs can make some affiliate sales today which may become a constant source of income for them for over quite some time in the future. 


 
As affiliate marketers, everyone’s earnings directly depend on how efficiently they convert potential customers into buyers. The more paying customers they have, the more the commissions they earn. That is exactly where the money really is. What assures the steady flow of commissions/bonuses is that you must be ready to fine tune and hone your marketing/promotion skills on daily basis.  That way, you can learn to understand and master the main needs of your customers/buyers by constantly analyzing your inbound traffic flow and adjusting your ads to get more and more inbound traffic. Your main duty as an affiliate marketer is to promote products like hell to attract customers and consequently more bonuses/commissions. The icing on the cake is that you can do all the required promotional activities from the comfort of your home or from anywhere in the world provided there is internet service. Above all, you have the opportunity to work at your own pace, run your business at your own time and as you deem fit while remaining your own Boss.

Even though there is a very high level of competition in affiliate marketing business, there is room for everyone to make some money depending on their marketing skills and capacity. Any seriously ambitious person with the right drive can achieve some measure of success in the business.

Because of commissions/bonuses paying differentials from one affiliate program to the other, what marketers earn also varies along same lines. A huge percentage of online marketers don’t get to make substantial money at all. Of that percentage, only about 5% gets to make good money in substantial sums but for everyone in it, the potentials are always there to make money and they are very enticing. Don’t get carried away when you hear some affiliate marketers say they make up to $10,000 per day. Even though this is a possibility, it is not very common. Only very few and indeed a very small minority of affiliate marketers get to make money in that range.

Generally, the higher the income sums, the lower the percentage of affiliate marketers who earn income in that range. Here is a general overview.

$0-$1,000/month

$1,000-$5,000/month

$5,000-$25,000/month

$25,000-$50,000/month

$50,000-$100,000/month

Above $100,000/month

From various affiliate programs, affiliate marketers who get to earn from $0-$5,000/month are well over 60% while those who earn above $100,000/month are well below 1%, which is mainly due to the huge competition out there. Internet marketing skills and experience tend to make a whole lot of difference in what every marketer gets to earn in affiliate marketing.

How to Understand Affiliate Marketing Programs

For most marketers, affiliate marketing simply involves referrals and commissions payments. It significantly involves referrals where bloggers, influencers and publishers get paid when a buyer takes action based on their recommendation. What that signifies to all participants in affiliate marketing programs is essentially that when a blogger, influencer or an affiliate promotes a certain product/service, he receives a commission when someone signs up or makes a purchase as a direct result of such promotion. That relationship works smoothly when merchants provide gateway links to access their products which publishers promote in their own websites or blogs. A click on that link takes online visitors to the product/service being promoted. This model of affiliate marketing works well when a popular and well-trafficked website/blog embeds an affiliate link into a post on its website/blog. This is with a view to guiding website visitors to take a certain action. If per chance such action leads to purchase of the product or to a sign up for a certain subscription or on-going service, the publisher earns a commission based on prior agreed percentage of the sale. In some variants of affiliate marketing, even a click is enough to earn a commission irrespective of whether a purchase was made or not.

Businesses seeking to advertise through affiliate marketing channels must first find influencers or affiliates operating in the same or similar niches to their own. With the advantage of similar audiences to their own, it becomes fairly easy to quickly and effectively promote a merchant’s products/services to enhance its desired growth of sales and leads. This is quite a very simple and mutually beneficial relationship for all the parties involved in the business if you ask me.


 
For an affiliate marketing program to work well, it requires the participation of the following three parties:

The Merchant

A merchant is the entity that takes ownership of the product/service to be promoted. For that reason, it is the merchant’s responsibility to pay the affiliate a commission for promoting its product/service on their own website, social media service or blog. A merchant may be a company that directly owns the product/service or has the mandate to sell product/service.

The Affiliate

An affiliate is the entity that has responsibility to promote the product/service on behalf of the merchant and earns a commission from its promotional efforts by way of affiliate agreements and understanding with the merchant. Most affiliates use their own websites/blogs as well as their social media sites where the referral link to the product/service is posted. With large following and good website traffic, they are able to expose the referral link to a wide and diverse audience comprising of potential buyers/customers.

The Buyer

A buyer is the entity that responds to the referral link posted by affiliates and takes action to buy the product. The affiliate is effective when many more buyers are able to see and respond to the affiliate link embedded into its website/blog posts. It is this link a buyer follows to become a customer by making a purchase or taking some kind of desired action.

For all three parties, it is a win-win partnership. The merchant site benefits from targeted exposure. The affiliate site makes passive income for promoting the referral link. The consumer gets the value of a personalized and trusted recommendation and in some cases even a discount, a coupon or some other valuable incentive. This is essentially how affiliate marketing programs work for all parties involved in the business.