Six Tips To Finding Well Paying Affiliate Programs

Affiliate Marketing programs online are a dime a dozen. And a simple search for ‘affiliate programs’ besides getting you to sites such as Click Bank, Commission Junction, Amazon, PayDotCom, and JV Zoo among others, will also yield hundreds of other offers.
The principle is that there are thousands of people launching new products online every day. People who create their own products set up affiliate programs too. They are looking for people to help them sell those products. Therefore the affiliate marketer will never lack a product and/or service to promote.
However, in the very magnitude of the options is the problem. There is a fine mix of good affiliate programs and really lousy affiliate programs out there. These six tips will help you sift some of the chaff out of the wheat.

1.    Does The Affiliate Program Offer Reasonable Commission Rates?

A paying affiliate program will offer anything between 25%-30% commission per sale. If it is lower than that, you need to look more critically at the turn-over potential of what you will be selling. Turnover means, if you are selling 10 products of $10 each per day, you make a lot more money than selling one product of $5 each per day. So if the product has the potential of getting tens of sales in a day, the lower commission levels make up for it.

Quick mention: do not take regional sales figures and assume they are the same for Kenya. There are things that simply do not sell in Kenya no matter how well packaged. 

2.    How ‘With It’ is the Vendor?

There is a catch in this one; you can mitigate the ignorance of the vendor if you know what you are doing. However, assess the vendor site thoroughly and do some background checks on other user experiences. There is sometimes great value in selling a superior product that no one else is promoting. However, if the vendor seems clueless about quality and working with affiliates, chances are you will also get very poor support as an affiliate and risk reselling a horrible product. The challenge is buyers know you not the seller so you mess your reputation and your business by extension. 

3.    Is there an Automated Tracking System?

Automated affiliate programs have software driven tracking systems. These automatically monitor where the reader came from and record their activity in a database. This system tracks visitors by using cookies and ensure that you get credit for the visitor being on that page. The longer the affiliate program cookies last, the better for your sales. Often, many people will not buy immediately, but will come back to the page after some days of sometimes even months. Will the site ‘remember’ you sent the buyer?
A slight diversion for our market. Cookies work with the natural assumption that the buyer will be at the exact same machine when they buy. Clearly, for a nation that is heavily cyber driven, the incidence of that happening is almost nil. I therefore, deliberately, and knowingly prefer to use email marketing as the strategy of choice for our market. If a promo link is in an email, whether or not the client is in cyber A or N is irrelevant, they are on THEIR EMAIL account.
Want to know how to do that even for affiliate marketing? Read more about this Affiliate and Blogging Income Coaching Program
Another diversion and specifically for coders in this market. We do not have (okay, I do not know of) any local affiliate tracking software locally that is Mpesa based for inde-bloggers and web owners. Clearly, coders, you are missing a HUGE market right there. And when you get it out there, please charge per transaction and not an up-front fee. It’s business people! A recurring charge makes you good dollars.

4.    Is the Payment Process Automated or Manual & Therefore Risky?

If you are going to join an affiliate program selling a product internationally, be sure that they have auto-payments. That means, as soon as you generate a sale, you can see the transaction reflect in your back office.
In some programs, the sale has to be approved by admin. Although most of the times the admins of such programs are tend to be honest, there is just that risk that you can land in a fraudulent program.
Again, in our local scenario, you will not get an automated system on most programs. Look closely at the credibility of the company and/or seller to make your decisions. More on this in a later article.
While on pay and automation, read the terms well. Different programs have various payment times and varied minimum balance against which you can get pay. Some pay weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, and some quarterly. In fact, for most programs, the payment is such that the pay for this month comes the following month and you have to hit a minimum balance before you get paid. 

5.    Scrutinize the Affiliate Support Platform 

Does the program have links, banners, articles, a blog, a complaint/support system? If they do not, you are going to have a hard time re-selling the product since you have to invest in making the banners yourself. If you have the know-how, go for it.
Support and feedback is critical. If a program has no way of getting back to the seller, you are merely a statistic. If you sell, good for you, if you do not, too bad. Now, is that the kind of place you want to do business? 

6.    Does the Program Have Single or Multi-Tier Compensation?

I know some people who know me better will say, there she goes again with that MLM promotion stuff. Well, really! If its good it is good! Do not throw out the baby with the bath water. Multi-tier compensation is a business module borrowed from multi-level marketing, but it makes very good money sense for you as an affiliate.
Single tier programs are the traditional sales payment structures. You make a sale, you are paid for that one sale only. Multi-tier means, if that client you brought also refers another client, you also get paid a portion of that second sale. Beyond that, if that person also chooses to become an affiliate with the same program, you also get paid a percentage commission for their sales.
Most affiliate programs that are not bona-fide MLM will only have two-tier commissions. It goes without much argument, that you make better income on a two-tier program. You can then include in your affiliate income strategy the work of inviting other affiliates to join the program. If they sell more, then the higher your sales grow. I still cannot understand why Kenyans think that describes a pyramid.
Finding an attractive affiliate program takes some research work. Make Google your friend and you will find a good program. Beyond that, get friends to refer you to good programs. The blogger on this site will give you some pretty good tips. Also, if you have a  program that works for you, tell me about it, and who knows, I may just put a post for you on this blog. To tell me about it, email me here