Also as part of Phase Three, I’ll continue to run guest posts to give other people’s writing exposure. Here’s a post with great advice from Daniel Kane on choosing affiliate programs.
There are essential elements required to become a successful online affiliate marketer. The first is the ability to attract a reasonable number of visitors to your website(s). The second is making the correct choices about which affiliate program(s) you choose to promote.
The first question you have to address is demographics. Who visits your website(s)? Men, women, or both? How old are they? What are their interests, needs, and consumer habits?
These questions, and the answers to them, are nothing less than critical. You’ll need to spend a lot of time thinking about which products and services are most likely to be attractive to your audience. Even more important than determining what they buy is identifying what they are willing to buy online. And, be prepared to make changes in what you offer them if your initial attempts are unsuccessful. A bit of trial and error can often be effective.
When considering affiliate programs, you might also want to give extra consideration to those that pay you for leads rather than actual sales. Some programs pay more than $70 for a qualified sales lead. Mortgage companies, banks, schools, colleges, and insurers are only a few of the kinds of organizations always looking for more leads.
Because these and other organizations want to grow their mailing lists, you can also earn a commission when one of your website visitors signs up for a coupon, a free restaurant meal , free business cards, introductory offers of various kinds, or other freebies.
Of course, you should try to choose affiliate programs which pay high commissions, but commissions by themselves won’t determine your earnings. Try to find those which will pay you for attracting other affiliates. Those with two, three or more tiers offer even greater potential.
You should probably limit yourself to affiliate programs which:
1. offer you daily online tracking and meaningful statistics so you can determine how you are doing and make necessary changes quickly.
2. attractive, tested banners and/or text ads that get results.
3. respond to your inquiries quickly, provide you with good suggestions and advice, and pay you on time.
4. offer your website visitors a good product at a reasonable price.
Lastly, here’s the best business advice I was ever given… track and carefully analyze everything possible to identify trends and areas in which you can make adjustments to increase performance.
Daniel Kane creates and maintains websites (supported by affiliate advertising) on scholarships, career schools, career colleges, college admission, online degrees, and online colleges.
I myself have not had much success with using clickbank as a affiliate program.
I am talking in terms of selling one of my software programs on
clickbank.
I have have more success selling my software program on my website then using clickbank to sell it as a affiliate program.
[quote comment=””]I myself have not had much success with using clickbank as a affiliate program. I am talking in terms of selling one of my software programs on clickbank.[/quote]
That’s interesting. The main advantage of selling on clickbank would seem to be the huge number of affiliates already there. But there are so many products, it’s probably tough to attract any of those affiliates unless you have one of the typical big release IM products.
Clickbank has good products.Finding the starving crowd for the kind of solution you are offering is the most important task.
Clickbank has good products.Finding the starving crowd for the kind of solution you are offering is the most important task .
Thanks for the post. Yes I agree that Clickbank is a good place to start affiliate marketing campaign. I think Commission junction is also worth a try for the newbies who are in the starting phase.