How To Find The Best Affiliate Programs
The best way to try to explain this to you is to give you some
of my personal experiences when looking for an affiliation
program.
When I first started searching for and implementing affiliations
with various companies; it was one of the largest parts of time
wasted during my day when it came to managing my website. I
spent a disgusting amount of hours searching for suitable
affiliate programs, implementing the links and then keeping
track of what they did.
If you are hoping that marketing a website affiliation is going
to get you rich quickly, forget about it. You will have to spend
a lot of time in your project if you want to make it work for
you. Then again, all money making ventures do. An amazing 95% of
affiliates only make modest amounts of commissions in varying
degrees because they spread their efforts too thin on dozens of
programs.
Of course, the income that was generated from each program was
actually pretty low at that time because at that time the number
of visitors to my site was not high either. With this in mind,
it was not particularly uncommon for companies to disappear on
me without warning me about it and since most affiliate programs
only pay out at around the $25 mark, I would lose a lot of
revenue in the end.
The other part of affiliation that I was not happy with was the
idea of another companies banner's being plastered all over my
site, if you place too many of them on any given page it only
serves to confuse and irritate your visitors. think about it;
how do you like it when you visit a site.
Any more than one animated element on a web page can be very
distracting which leaves you with nothing gained at all, and
many affiliate programs insist upon this type of bargain when
signing on. By now, you must realize that I learned a lot just
by trial and error.
Affiliate tracking can also a problem. After you have
successfully applied to become an affiliate for a company, they
will usually supply you with some personalized code or link. It
is very important that this code is implemented correctly into
your page; because otherwise you may be sending the company
visitors without being reimbursed.
Most snippets of code contain a unique user id; which is used by
the company to distinguish which site sent traffic. Even if you
do implement this code in the right way, it has been my
experience on occasion for it not to function correctly.
Having heard of my experiences, you can see why I would not
really recommend that you hunt around and sign up without much
research and thought first when finding a good affiliate
program. Your time is too valuable and could be better spent
creating content and updating your site. But there are some
excellent individual companies offering affiliate programs out
there.
What I have discovered to be very successful is to take
advantage of companies like Offers Quest or Google for text link
advertising. Text links are a great resource as they are
bandwidth friendly, and when they are implemented properly add
valuable content to your site which can also assist in search
engine rankings.
When it comes to website affiliation, you will also need to know
how to conduct a market study because this is how you will find
your target audience. Without a targeted audience, your
marketing campaign will not be effective. Below I have begun to
give you an outline of what you should include in your market
study.
It is best to write it down; especially if you are hoping to
entice someone else into investing in your marketing venture.
That and it is a good way to keep track of your objective and
provides a good guideline of what needs to be done.