Why I Love Affiliate Programs
What is an affiliate program? If you have to ask that question you’re missing out on huge potential for making money online.
Basically being an affiliate is to promote another company’s products, and each time someone you refer makes a purchase you get a percentage of the revenue. This protects the company who you’re selling products for since if nothing is sold they don’t have to pay. I’ve found that the payout is generally much better than what you’d get if you were getting paid per click on an ad. The last time I calculated this I found that on all my sites combined my affiliate payouts were 4x higher than the per-click advertising. This isn’t the normal ratio I’m sure, but other people I’ve talked to also claimed that their affiliate payouts were much higher than ads.
Some people think affiliate programs are a scam. Some people don’t even understand what an affiliate program is. I would also guess that 75%+ of the people on the Internet don’t even realize affiliate programs exist.
This is sad, because I truely believe that affiliate programs are the easiest way to make money online, and here’s why:
Why Affiliate Programs are Great:
- Little to no start-up cost. Most programs are free to join and require little more than filling out a form on a web site. If you already have a web site related to what you want to sell and it is getting traffic then setting it up could be as simple as adding a banner ad to your page.
- Realtime Stats. Most of the good programs out there have web stats you can login to and it will show you all of your sales for a specific time period. This is very important because it allows you to see the effects of your advertising campaigns without waiting. I use one affiliate program that has no stats and instead sends out a report every week. It kills me to wait for this information every week.
- Direct Deposit. Many of the big affiliate programs out there are offering direct deposit, or sometimes even paypal instead of mailing you a check once a month. I take advantage of this whenever possible because anything that saves me a trip to the bank is well worth it.
- No shipping of products or dealing with customers. This is the best part about being an affiliate for another company. You don’t have to ship anything, worry about billing, customer support, or any of that stuff. You just say “hey potential customer, click here” and if they go on to purchase something, you get a percentage of the money.
- You get back what you put in. Assuming you have chosen good products to promote, you should see a direct correlation between the amount of promotion and effort you put into an affiliate site and the revenue generated. Unfortunately if you pick a bad company or product to promote, you are pretty much sending your visitors into a black hole and wasting your traffic.
- Easy to Promote: Most programs provide banners, example text links, and other promotion tools to make it easier to get visitors to their site.
Downsides to Affiliate Sites:
- Little to No Original Content. If you create a site specifically to be an affiliate store and you follow the store setup procedures or recommendations from your affiliate company, your site will probably have very little to no original content on it. This is bad for search engines because they like lots of content.
- Usually Not Recurring or Passive. Unfortunately most affiliate programs out there don’t pay recurring. Often you’ll find that a customer will buy something through your site once, but then they realize that they actually purchased it from XYZ Corp and the next time they want to place an order they go directly to that site instead of yours. Some programs actually use some permanent tracking mechanism to say that a specific customer is always yours, whether they come from your site or not. Another problem is that these types of sites aren’t usually generating passive income. You have to keep the site going, and keep visitors coming in to keep the revenue coming. Some companies offer multi-tier commissions, which means if you sign people up under you and they sell something, you get a percentage of their sales. Some even go further, and pay you a small amount (1% or less generally) of the sales by webmasters signed up under people that you referred. This is kind of a pyramid scheme obviously, but imagine the power of having potentially dozens or even hundreds of webmasters in your sales army, each giving you a small slice of their sales. The best part is that it doesn’t take any money away from them to do this, it comes out of the company’s profits.
- Chargebacks and Returns: This is one of the reasons you want to pick a good company to promote (see below). If someone returns a product or cancells an order you will lose that commission. Because of this it is actually possible (however unlikely) that you will owe the company money at the end of the month instead of getting a check. This could be caused by a large commission that is taken away the next month, which leaves you with a negative balance. Obviously having commissions cancelled is not what you want.
Picking an Affilite Program:
So, with all these things in mind you should have a pretty good start on what affiliate programs are and how to get started.
- Good Products/Site/Company: This is the most important. Visit the web site for the product(s) you will be promoting. Would you buy something there? If not, would you expect your visitors to? Sending your traffic to an ugly web site is a big waste of time and effort. Make sure their site is easy to use and makes you feel good about making a purchase there. Unfortunately you can’t just do a Google Search for reviews of these programs because every web site is trying to promote the programs they use in order to sign you up. I do it, and so do thousands of other webmasters. Just make sure you take their reviews with a grain of salt, unless you see one that says mostly negative things about a program but doesn’t offer a better alternative. Many times you can find the horror stories of people that didn’t get their paycheck, or even worse, people whose accounts were terminated for unknown reasons after being owed several months worth of commission.
- Commission Payout Methods: Unfortunately there are a lot of companies out there that still mail out regular checks every month and offer no other payment methods. I still use a few of these companies, and it is a bit of a hassle. Fortunately a lot of companies now offer direct deposit, wire transfer, or paypal as methods of payment.
- Good Tracking: Realtime stats is important to me, and I’d have a hard time convincing myself to sign up for a new affiliate program that didn’t offer it. You should also make sure of the details on how they track users from your site. Most programs use a cookie that lasts a certain amount of time. This can be anywhere from 24 hours to forever. Without this cookie you don’t get paid.
- Sub-Affiliate Commission: You may or may not see this as important depending on your intentions. If you are running a store you probably don’t care as much if another webmaster signs up as your sub-affiliate (but you probably should, see recurring section above). If however you’re running a site similar to this one, which is not directly selling products, that multi-tier part of any program is going to be crucial.
Good Luck!
~Wealthy Webmaster
P.S. If you want to promote adult products that sell themselves, I highly recommend Mallcom!