Beginners Guide to Affiliate Programs

Aim for residual income

Some merchants who charge their customers monthly or yearly fees pay affiliates residual commissions.

I earn residual income from AWeber Follow Up Autoresponder System because it's an excellent service which charges a monthly fee.

You can find dozens of residual income and lifetime commission programs reviewed at LifetimeCommissions.com. Remember that name.


When will you be paid?

Some companies pay you only after you have accumulated $50 or $100 in commission. If you have a very busy site, that's OK. For a small site without much traffic, it could take a long, long time ...

There's even the odd company which won't pay you at all unless you generate a certain level of business. Read the affiliate agreement before you sign up.


Rule number 1: Go for quality

The most important consideration when assessing affiliate programs is to examine the product or service offered. The better the product or service, the more enthusiastic you will be about recommending it - and you'll have a better chance that people will want to buy.

For example, Ken Evoy's Make Your Site SELL! and Make Your Knowledge SELL! Ken is a strong believer in OVER-delivering - giving the customer far better value for money than expected.

Beware of anyone who raves on about the money you can make and forgets to tell you about the product or service. The sales blurb can be tempting, but make sure you don't promote something which will harm your reputation.


Earn good commissions

Remember, those links and banners are helping persuade people to leave your site - away from the products or services you're promoting. So look for programs which reward you generously. The MarketingTips Internet marketing course, for example, pays me a very generous $65 commission. Of dozens of programs I've tried, it was my top-earning one for many months. My commissions fluctuate but are usually about $1,000 a month.

Of course, high commissions alone are useless if people don't buy when they reach the site. As well as using products and services which match the theme of your site, it makes sense to experiment and see what interests your visitors.


Seek sites that SELL!

It's no use having a good product and a high commission unless you also have good salesmanship. That's why I'm really keen on Marlon Sanders' The Amazing Formula. Marlon, who has a double major in journalism and psychology, knows which buttons to push. He offers real-time stats, a 60% commission, and a site which is very definitely designed to sell.

It really DOES sell like crazy - and that's the test.

Perhaps even better designed for selling is Ken Evoy's Make Your Site SELL! which pays lifetime commissions. When I announced that site in my newsletter, an astounding 9.5% of the people I sent there bought Ken's book. (In comparison, about 1% of the people I send to MarketingTips buy their marketing manual. Of course, with their high commissions, 1% still gives you $65 for every 100 people you send - an excellent result.)

I highly recommend Make Your Site SELL!


Seek good tracking

When you experiment with your promotional efforts you want to know straight away how effective your work has been, so you need immediate, or real-time, tracking.

You want to be able to see quickly which of your promotions work and which ones don't. Then you can increase your sales and commissions by concentrating on the things that work.


Look for LIFETIME commissions

Imagine you set up a bookshop as an associate of Amazon. Someone visits your site and - hey! you're in luck - buys a book. You earn 5% or 15% from Amazon. Next time, however, that customer will probably just go straight to Amazon, and might buy $100 worth of books. You won't receive a cent on that purchase.

(Amazon has a fairly good program but there's a weasel clause in its contract. If you send people to buy a particular book at Amazon and they click around and then buy something else, you will earn only 5% instead of 15%. Also, if they click around, delay a decision, and return next week and buy, you won't earn anything from that purchase. That's unfair.)

A few affiliates programs DO pay you for the second and third and fourth etc purchase by the customer. The best one I know of is Ken Evoy's SiteSell program (you'll find I mention it a lot), whose products include:

Make Your Site SELL!
the BIBLE of site-selling

Make Your Knowledge SELL!
The BIBLE of selling what you know on the Net

Site Build It!
A site-building, site-marketing, web hosting suite of tools.

I strongly recommend Ken's 5 Pillar Program. Click here and join now.

You can also earn lifetime commissions from:

Rob Marlbrough, my friendly, helpful web host. My LifetimeCommissions.com site is hosted by Rob. No matter how many questions I toss at Rob, he always has a helpful, useful reply. His offers very good quality web hosting, too.
Yanik Silver, co-author of 33 Days to Online Profits and several other fast-selling books.

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