How to Pick an Affiliate Program - AffiliateToGo Knowledge Base

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The following aspects of a company and its affiliate program should be examined before you decide to sign up:

Reputability

company should have a privacy policy and some sort of certification especially concerning credit card acceptance.

company should already have a sizeable pool of pre-existing affiliates.

check to see how long the affiliate program has been in operation - avoid companies which have just started an affiliate program unless it is administered by a third party network.

if you are not sure about the integrity of the company and would like to know if you are going to get paid and have your sales tracked then check to see if that company is associated with a third party network such as Linkshare or BeFree. These companies handle both commission tracking and payment and can be trusted by both the affiliate and the merchant.

if the company is not tracked by a trusted third party and you want to know if they are reputable you can ask other existing affiliates. Go to Infoseek or AltaVista and see which web sites link to the company by typing link:company url in the search engine. Most of the resulting search results will be affiliate web sites and will have banners of the company displayed on their sites.

Site that sells

company should offer a great product/service

it should have a good looking web site which offers great information and is easy to navigate

Payment and tracking

company should offer high profit margins

the commission offered should be a percentage of the product price and not net profits

there should be a higher commission structure for profitable affiliates

a two-tier commission structure should be offered in case you have the potential to generate new affiliate applications

affiliates should be able to earn commissions on all products in the site and not just the ones that they link to directly

affiliate should be able to earn commissions if the visitor they send to the merchant site leaves and returns and purchases at a later date - aim for a period of at least a month since visitors will usually not buy until the third or fourth visit

even though the program should use cookies to track return visitors it should also use some other method to track first time visitors since only 80% of browsers accept cookies or have cookies turned on

companies which really care about whether their afffiliates are compensated for return visitors use databases. When visitors are referred and purchase for the first time the affiliates id is stored along with other information in the customer profile. Hence whenever a subsequent sale is made by the same customer it is simply credited to the affiliate. Most affiliate companies have the capacity to do this with their existing customer databases but don't

checks should be issued monthly and minimum balances shouldn't exceed $25

if the company charges its customers monthly or quarterly or yearly then the affiliate should be able to receive residual income based on these periodic charges - web hosting companies and telephone service companies usually bill their customers this way

there should be mechanisms in place to track sales by fax, snail mail, and 1-800 numbers

Reporting

affiliates should have access to online sales and commissions reports

at a bare minimum they should be able to view the traffic they send and the sales they generate

advanced features include the ability to see which products they are sellling the most and which banners or other forms of promotion are more successful than others

affiliates should be able to see click through's and commissions in real time

any residual commissions should be shown in the stats

commissions reports should be emailed and an email sent after each and every sale is made

two-tier commissions should be shown and affiliates should have the ability to view the list of all the sub affiliates under them

Linking

affiliates should be given a wide variety of linking options including banner links and text links

affiliates should be able to link to different products and different subject areas in the site where applicable

affiliates should have the ability to co-brand the store on the merchant site and there should be a link back to their web site

Support

affiliates should be able to edit/update their personal information online

the affiliate manager should help affiliates by giving them marketing materials and proven techniques to increase sales

there should be some kind of communication including a newsletter and a place where affiliates can exchange their views with each other

there should be a full time affiliate program staff ready to answer technical and marketing questions and also a detailed FAQ sheet

Restrictions

there should be no cost to join the program

affiliates should be able to buy from their own links whenever they choose and receive commissions

circumstances where the agreement between the affiliate and the merchant can be terminated should be clearly outlined in the contract

affiliates should avoid programs with exclusivity clauses

By AffiliateForum