Making Money with Affiliate Programs

Tips to Remember

Here are a few tips to remember when selecting an affiliate program:

• Avoid competitive niches: Try to avoid competitive niches until you have gained some experience. You may find that although an extremely competitive niche, such as ‘loan consolidation’, has a huge potential customer base, it also will have a great deal of competition. As a result, to succeed in such a niche will require considerable time, expense, and expertise. However, less competitive niches, although having a less sizable customer base, will also have less competition, making successful advertising campaigns considerably more attainable.
• Most decent affiliate programs will provide you with sample text ads, banner graphics, full-page graphics, and other promotional resources that are ready for you to copy and use. Some will also supply email auto-responder series that you can send to your email opt-in subscribers. Some will also provide you with keyword lists, and practical advice with respect to methods you can use to promote their product.
• Visit sites such as Commission Junction, LinkShare, ClickBank, Affiliate Scout, Affiliatebot, AffiliateGuide, AffiliatePrograms, and others. You’ll get ideas on a wide variety of affiliate programs, many of which you may never have even known existed.
• Read reviews and opinions on the programs you are considering: You can gain valuable expertise and insight from both customers and other marketers. Just do a web search for the name of the product, service, or program. You may find that some products are not of very good quality, while others are getting rave reviews and are enjoying high customer satisfaction. Knowing your niche is a great way to discern the gems from the duds.

The Importance of Research

Even if you consider a niche to be potentially lucrative while not being unduly competitive, some basic research may suggest otherwise. For example, several years ago I started promoting a service providers remote connectivity to other computers. I hadn’t heard of the service before so I was sure that it was new and wouldn’t be very competitive. After eagerly promoting the program via a popular pay-per-click search engine and spending several hundred dollars in doing so, and noting that I hadn’t made a single sale, I decided that I had better spend some time researching the matter and figure out what was going on. After doing some detailed research on the keywords I had been bidding on, I found that the so-called uncompetitive niche was far more competitive than I thought. First off, the top bids on the main keywords I was using were over $1.00 per click. My account had been initially set to put my ads in the top five, so I was paying big money for the traffic I was getting. Immediately I put a cap of about $0.15 on each keyword I was using. This resulted in my ads being displayed in a very low position compared to my competitors. Because my ads were buried in such low positions, I progressively raised my bids so as to bring them to where I hoped they would get some good clicks without spending too much for them. I don’t remember now how high I went, but by the time my ads got onto the second page I was paying so much that I couldn’t possibly have had a positive return on investment given the number of well-established, popular competitors I was running my ads against. After researching my keyword more carefully, I found a large number of less obvious keywords that were much less expensive than the high-profile keywords I had been using. After dropping the high-profile keywords and bidding on a larger number of less obvious keywords that I would never have thought of on my own, I started to see a positive ROI. However, when I considered how much time I was spending doing keyword research, ad tweaking, split testing, and so on, it simply wasn’t worth it so continue promoting the product, at least not via pay-per-click. Later, after I gained more experience, I started promoting the same product using two search-engine-optimized (SEO) websites, and did much better with the program. To conclude, some detailed research on the state of the market I was considering would have revealed the relative level of market saturation. It also would have revealed which promotion strategies would be most effective and which would simply be a waste of time. I’ve reviewed a number of products in the Research section that can greatly facilitate the process of discovering which niches are most likely to succeed, and how to best go about promoting them.