Choosing the Best Affiliate Program

There are literally thousands of different affiliate programs on the Web. Some will pay a few cents to a few dollars for each visitor you send their way; some may pay thousands of dollars on the sale of a high value product or service. Faced with such an extreme variety of programs, how can you choose the most suitable affiliate programs for your situation?

Before signing up for an affiliate program, take a good look at the product or service. Because that's how most visitors to your site are likely to view your review, link or banner advertisement: an indication that you believe the product or service is good enough to put in front of them (and indirectly, to get paid for doing so.)

Resist the temptation to promote a product or service that you don't believe in. Naturally, you don't have to buy a product to endorse it, but if you could not conceive of buying it under any circumstances, how can you expect to "pitch" it successfully to your visitors? If your site's visitors feel that you are recommending a particular product or supplier because you genuinely believe it is good, you will be more likely to close sales and therefore get rewarded for your efforts. If you're running a site about fishing, you should somehow look for affiliate programs related to fishing. Do not look for one that is irrelevant to your site’s topic as this may make an end user to click or close his browser. No matter what niche your site occupies, there are almost always dozens and sometimes hundreds of affiliate programs covering that niche.

Sometimes your biggest paycheck will come from being able to identify products and services that your site's audience will relate to, but which lie somewhat outside your narrow niche. Always be on the lookout for ways to cross-sell your audience in this way. Up selling can also prove to be a lucrative way of tapping latent revenue from your traffic. A classic example is "free-vs.-fee", where site offering information about free services may be able to up sell a percentage of its audience on paid versions of the same services. Ultimately, it may be a far more rewarding proposition to collect several dollars from the small percentage of people willing to pay for a higher-level service than to accept a few cents per free signup.

There is more to an affiliate program than the % commission it pays. Some programs bend over backwards to help you set up your site easily and attractively, business2grab is one of them. Most of them provide you with banners, buttons and other graphics, search engine forms, audio or video clips, cover art and more. Other affiliate programs leave everything up to you: can you afford to invest the extra time to develop a professional-looking site?
Look for affiliate programs that match your site's audience, and look at all aspects of the affiliate program, not just the $$$ it promises.