Affiliate Marketing - What Quality Affiliates & Publishers Want From Affiliate Programs

If you're thinking of starting up an affiliate program for your company, or perhaps you're just getting into affiliate marketing as a publisher; the points for consideration below may be of value to you.

In most affiliate programs, the top few percent of affiliates generate the vast majority of sales; so you want as many qualities, for more details visit to www.money-secret-exposed.com or "super" affiliates participating in your program as possible.

So what do these super affiliates want? The following are some of the features that quality affiliates look for when deciding on programs to participate in.

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Solid product and merchant site

Before you contemplate implementing an affiliate program, ensure that your product is rock solid and your site is presentable. Affiliates (aka publishers) don't want to send valuable traffic to pages that won't convert or to products that don't work. Learn more about creating effective landing pages.
Trustworthy company

Take the position of the affiliate for a moment and visit your site's company profile pages. Do these pages provide enough information to instill confidence in a potential affiliate that your company is trustworthy?

Good affiliates really check over a company before joining a program; especially if they are going to be giving you broad coverage on their site, for more details visit to www.affiliate-manager-pro.com which is what you'll want. Particularly in regards to your affiliate program, put a face to the name of whomever will be managing it. Many of the principles of reassuring customers apply to reassuring affiliates.

Communication

It's a good idea to have a dedicated point of contact for your affiliate program and that person is prompt in responding to affiliate inquiries. Affiliates shouldn't be viewed as annoying, they are important partners in your business.

If you should strike problems in your program, be up front about it rather than defensive. Most quality publishers are quite forgiving when it comes to glitches as long as you're honest about it and resolve the issue.

A regular newsletter can help remind affiliates of your existence - many affiliates sign up to programs and then get side-tracked; never actually getting around to publishing up promo material. A newsletter also helps instill more confidence in your affiliate network that you're proactive and the program is evolving. If you decide to offer an affiliate newsletter, flaunt this on your program details page.

High one-time payouts can be a good way of attracting attention, but if you can; offer a residual commission option too; i.e. a percentage of the customers payments paid to the affiliate on an ongoing basis.

Avoid the MLM stigma

2nd tier commissions, i.e. commissions paid on sales made by an affiliate who was referred by another publisher, are a great option to include in your program; but offering 3rd tier and beyond commission levels may give the impression that your program is MLM (multi-level marketing); aka network marketing. In essence, it would be. There have been so many scam MLM schemes both on and off the web in recent years that these types of commission structures can really scare off potential affiliates.

Some affiliate program directories refuse to list programs with commission levels beyond the second tier and if you're using PayPal to pay commissions, you may find they close your account. PayPal is particularly sensitive to merchants who run multiple level commission programs due to the MLM stigma. Learn more about MLM.
Promotional material

Quality affiliates are very busy people - the more brain strain you can take out of the development of promotional material, the better. Further to banners and links, many affiliates find promo page content such as as paragraphs or full articles very useful. Often, they'll edit the text to suit their own purposes, but by providing these materials to them greatly decreases the amount of time they spend in developing pages.

Top affiliates know that most purchases don't occur on the first click. In fact, many people purchase products days, weeks or even months later after being exposed to them. For this reason, if you're using cookies for tracking referrals, the cookie should be set to expire in a minimum of 90 days. If you set cookies to expire within a week, I can guarantee you'll miss out on recruiting top performing affiliates.
Payment thresholds

Most affiliate marketers are able to receive payments via PayPal these days - especially those based in Western countries such as the UK, USA, Australia and Canada. If you intend on using PayPal, make arrangements to upload commissions in a batch file and fund your account via eCheck. This will minimize the amount the affiliate needs to pay in PayPal fees when transferring the funds to their own bank accounts. I love using PayPal, but the slice they can take out of commissions paid via normal means can be rather huge.