What to look for before joining an Affiliate Program
Affiliate programs
(also frequently called referral or associate programs) have grown today to become one of
the most popular ways for you to earn an income from your web site's traffic. Most
affiliate programs are designed to allow you to simply set up and begin earning
commissions on visitors and sales you refer. However, the quality of the programs, and the
results you will see, vary greatly from program to program, making it important to choose
wisely which are best for you and your site. It is the purpose of this article to help
sort through many of the programs, and offer assistance in determining what to look for.
My personal experience
with affiliate programs goes back over a year and a half, pretty long in Internet terms,
when I started a program for my current employer (which is not one of the programs
discussed below, or listed anywhere on my web site). Over this period, I researched many
of the affiliate programs available on the Internet, experimented with my company's own,
and tried to best determine what works best not only for us, but also for the webmasters
who partner with us. From my experiences, here are several of the top factors you should
take into consideration:
1- Stability of the company and
program
What I found to be the one of highest priorities for most webmasters is the stability of
the affiliate program, and the company. This should be one of your top considerations when
evaluating programs. Is the company stable and financially sound? Do they offer assistance
with promoting the opportunity? And, do they pay in a timely fashion? Often, webmasters have
been lured in by offers of high commissions, only to find out they will never see a paycheck,
despite referring hundreds, or even thousands, of visitors.
An
example of this is CyberThrill
casinos. They have, and continue to, woo webmasters with promises
of $0.20 per click-through, well above industry standards. Many
who have partnered with CyberThrill referred hundreds of dollars
worth of visitors, but never saw a single paycheck. Most had their
accounts 'frozen' for using 'illegal methods to increase click-throughs'
and their subsequent complaints and pleas of innocence were ignored.
So, first and foremost, be sure you can trust the merchant who
runs the affiliate program. If it looks like they threw their
web site up in a few days, they probably did, and be aware that
they might take it down just as quick.
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