A really good affiliate program will offer Life-time cookies. This means that for you as the referring affiliate, your unique identification number is stored and you will get paid for referring a customer who makes a purchase through your affiliate link even if they buy at any point in the future.
When looking for a good program, try to keep your eye on the cookies that they provide. You really want to ensure that they offer a minimum of 12 months and ideally life time cookies would even be better. Remember sometimes it takes customers months before actually making a purchase.
A good affiliate program will always provide training tools and many resources for their affiliates and will keep them regularly updated. Ideally, they should have a member’s area where you can log in and grab promotional materials, your links and check your stats and commissions, whenever you like.
Good communication is obviously paramount when selecting affiliate programs. If you email an affiliate program with a question and you don’t hear back from them or you finally hear back after weeks of waiting, consider what it may be like if you ever have an issue with payments or any other important questions? A good affiliate program will respond to your questions in a timely manner. By the same token, a good affiliate will ensure they read all the provided materials in the affiliate programs member area before contacting the program.
Before you decide to promote a specific product or program, take a really good look at their sales page. Does it look like it will convert into sales? If a sales page is poorly written, sloppy on the eye, has grammar and spelling mistakes, or just looks unprofessional, you may not make too many sales – no matter how good the product is.
Now that you know some of the things you should look out for when searching for reputable affiliate programs, here are a few things you should be careful of.
Steer clear of affiliate programs that utilise advertising and Google Adsense on their sales pages. As an affiliate you work very hard in your efforts to build and drive traffic to that sales page and it just isn’t fair that your traffic will be used to make someone else money through ads, without paying you anything in return. Don’t waste your hard earned traffic, choose your programs wisely.
Watch out for programs that have a high sales minimum and that ask you to sell a certain amount before being paid. For example if your commission on the sale of a $30 eBook is 10% (that’s $3 per sale) and they ask you to accumulate a minimum of $300 dollars in commissions before they send you payment, that’s a whole lot of books you need to sell before you get paid.
Some affiliate programs actually set this payment scheme up deliberately working on the basis that most affiliates won’t usually sell the required amount needed to receive a payment, therefore they never have to pay. This is a very unfortunate situation for you as an affiliate but it is one that does happen so be sure to read all of the terms and conditions before you decide to promote an affiliate program.
By following the points outlined finding reputable affiliate programs should now be that much easier.
