This article is mainly for the newer affiliate marketer and will focus on some promotional techniques, free and otherwise, to sell affiliate products. In case you’re completely new to this, affiliate marketing is selling someone else’s products for which you get a commission on every sale you make. It is most often done in percentages than dollar amounts which can vary all the way up to 75% per sale. Some examples of companies than offer affiliate programs are Clickbank, Commission Junction, and Amazon. You can sign up to be an affiliate at any one of those sites to get started, but most I expect, already have an account at those or different affiliate sites.

The techniques to sell in affiliate marketing are very similar to running you own online business as a whole, with some noteworthy differences. The first major difference is the price difference of starting up compared to running a website yourself. It helps to have your own website to promote multiple products at once, but that can be even side stepped. An affiliate marketer has no inventory. You just sell. The business you’re selling for has to handle that aspect. In turn, you have no shipping because the main company also handles that part. You just sell the product without worry of taking any orders as that as well is taken care of a step over your head. Overall, it’s much cheaper and the headaches are less when you’re just generating the lead for the sale and not dealing with all the paperwork and cost of running the entire operation. Get good enough and it’s entirely possible to do it full time.

Now, onto what this article is aimed for.

One effective means of selling a product is creating a landing page for the product on your own site. At the end of it is your referral link, sending the prospective customer to the main site to seal the deal. The site itself should have proper SEO(Search Engine Optimization) on it so it can also be indexed in search engines. Taking care of this at the start will lower advertising costs because it will direct more organic hits to your site. This may be slow going depending on how often the search engine spiders come by and look at your page. This next way helps this out, as well as be a technique all it’s own.

Join any Pay-Per-Click program and create ads for your affiliate landing page. Google and Yahoo are probably the most popular and well known though many others exist. This can be very expensive if you do not know how to make such programs work for you. By creating an ad directed to the needs of your buyers you can sell very profitably. The idea is to created targetted traffic. Volumes of books are available on how to beat the Pay Per Click systems to earn more than you spend so I’m only going to touch on it.The idea is simple though. If you pay 20 cents for a click, and manage a sale every 100 clicks, selling a product with a commission of $25, you’ve made $5. The more you test your ads the better your clicks will convert into sales. To do this without a site simply put your affiliate link in as the landing page. Some PPC companies don’t allow this, so be sure to check their Terms of Service first. Success using Pay Per Click with your landing page depends on many factors from the effectiveness of the ad to the effectiveness of the landing page.

In another direction you can use Web Blogs to sell affiliate products. By posting reviews and articles related to what you’re selling you’ll help your blog get listed in search egines as well as help visitors decide to buy or not. Blogs are about as close to your own site you can get without buying a domain and because they’re easy to update are used quite often in affiliate marketing. After posting something new to your blog you should ping it using a website like Ping-O-Matic.

If you’re using a website or blog you want to have some combination of words for what you’re selling in your domain name. To use the "bike riding" example from an earlier article you would want something like http://bike-riding-basics.blogsite.com or http://www.bike-riding-basics.com. This is for SEO to give your site more relevance and placement in search engines. It’s recommended you put your site in a separate folder if your own domain isn’t well set for your product: http://www.yoursite.com/bike-riding-basics/

The aim is to always bring targetted traffic to your affiliate site or ad. The more targetted it is the more likely they are to buy so the higher chance you have of getting a commission. It is possible to sell just about anything in affiliate marketing so find a product you like and know something about to start up with. I personally use and recommend Clickbank for affiliate sales and suggest signing up with more than one affiliate program to give you the most options on things to sell.

Affiliate marketing has to be the easy answer for those people who wish to start their own business.

What many people do not realise is the massive potential. The Internet is still in it’s infancy with online companies growing at a fantastic rate. Many users are only now realising the massive business opportunity at their fingertips. Still more do not know just what is possible.

Join now and ride the wave.

So what is affiliate marketing?

Simply put you promote products online which can be paid for and delivered electronically. You are the affiliate, marketing your principals’ (merchants’) products and/or services.

What’s in it for you?

Every sale made as a result of your referral earns you a commission based on a percentage of the value of the sale. Typically 40-60% of the sales value.

Please firmly fix in your mind we are NOT talking get rich quick. We are serious business people who work hard at building our online businesses just as anyone building an off line business would do for success.

Persistence is a necessity coupled with some marketing ability and a desire to succeed.

Steer well away from the ‘gurus who are out to hard sell you their latest ’secrets’ to online success. We give you a link which will take you to a page where you will be able to download a Free e-book which gives the detailed low down on affiliate marketing.

Resource Box:

Article by Michael Harrison, Author, Publisher and Business Consultant. Learn from an expert: Go to: http://www.be-your-own-business-expert.com/Affiliate.html

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Affiliate Programs are an ideal way for a small or home business to enter the expanding world of loose tea. There are many elements to consider when becoming an affiliate relationship however.

Affiliate programs offer a high return on capital but many affiliate programs are over hyped and a waste of time and money.

One need only make a quick Google search to note the abundance of affiliate marketing programs on the internet. Most are worthless and, unless certain standards and criteria are met, represent a waste of affiliate energy and resources:

1.) A viable product with clear demand in the marketplace. Product pricing must allow for substantial commissions for the affiliate.

2.) A commission and feature rich e-commerce site that encourages easy and accurate ordering.

3.) Marketing support in the form of quality articles and banner advertising.

4.) Accurate and real time reporting of activity and accrual of commissions.

5.) Payment of commissions on time and as agreed.

Loose tea meets all of the product criteria:

• Loose Tea is a growing business with substantial and growing demand.

• Loose Tea is priced right in the market in order to generate substantial commissions.

• Repeat orders are the norm and repeat orders establish a steady flow of commissions.

• There are very few Tea companies with robust affiliate programs.

Affiliate programs are more than an agreement.

There are numerous examples of affiliate programs that fail because of lack of support, training and integrity in payment of commissions.

Align yourself with a tea company that is truly dedicated to an affiliate program as part of their core business. A successful core business affiliate program offers:

Leveraging of website traffic into real dollars.

Earning and receipt of monthly commissions with volume advantages.

Review sales reports 24 hours, 7 days a week.

Advanced reporting.

Monitoring of referred traffic versus actual sales.

Quick and easy enrollment.

If a small or home business wants to leverage its website traffic into revenue and commission dollars, it should align with a tea supplier that offers only quality, good margin products and treats affiliates as true partners.

Jon M. Stout is Chairman of the Board of Golden Moon Tea a division of Element H2O. Golden Moon Tea is a supplier of high quality loose tea and high quality tea ware. Golden Moon Tea’s website is found at http://www.Goldenmoontea.com

It never fails. Everytime that I show my site to someone and tell them how much money I have made off of it over the years, they always say "You gotta show me how to do this!". Well, I’m tired of wasting my breath on this subject so I’m going to write down everything that’s needed and just point people to this article from now on.

First off, a little history may be in order. I created my site about seven years ago after a friend told me of someone he knew that was making something like $60k a year from his own website. I checked out the website and saw that it was an affiliate site. An affiliate site is a site where there are special links to online stores and if someone clicks on one of those links and then buys something from that store, the site owner gets paid a percentage of the sale. It seemed easy enough to do and I knew enough about html to do it, so I decided to give it a try.

I couldn’t afford to risk much in trying to create a new business as I didn’t have a lot of money. The only site I had created up until then was just a free site on Geocities, so I didn’t really have any knowledge about what it took to set up a "real" website. After doing a little research, I found out that you really didn’t need a lot of money to set up a site and to get your own domain name. Basically if you have $150 (a year) to spare and some free time, you can create your own online business site to make extra money with.

How much money? I can’t say that I have been able to quit my day job (yet), but I have made significant amounts of money from my site. How significant? Some months I have made nothing. Some months I have made thousands. 2005 was my best year ever- I made over $25,000 from my site! How much you make really all depends on the fickle nature of the search engine gods and on how much work that you want to put into your site. Some people have made fortunes from affiliate sites, but I assume that the ones who do have made it their life’s work and spend most of their time working on their site, studying the search engines, and how to beat them. I put very little work into my site (and it shows), but it has still provided me with a good deal of extra income.

Still want to know how to do it yourself? Here’s how:

Step 1 - Learn HTML
Most of the friends that I have showed my site to already knew how to make webpages with HTML. If you don’t know anything about HTML, don’t worry; HTML is easy to learn and you don’t need to know much to get started. If you can make a simple webpage with links on it, that’s all you really need to know to begin building your site. If you need help with this, I suggest reading a book like HTML in Easy Steps. I’ve had good luck with the other books in the Easy Step series. They’re small books that give you just enough info to get started without confusing you with theory and they’re cheap- only $10.

You don’t need to spend any money for a tool to create web pages in. You can use any text editor, even Notepad works. If you do a search on Google for "free html editor", you’ll find lots of free tools that you can try.

Step 2 - Set Up Your Website
Ok, now that you know how to create a webpage, its time to start setting up your website. To run your website you will need a webhost. That’s a company that hosts websites on their servers. You can get a lot of webhosting bang for your buck if you know what to look for.

The main things that you will need to think about as you choose a webhost are: price, language support, and database support. If you only know HTML, all you have to worry about is price. If you need support for ASP, PHP, MYSQL, etc., you will need to do a bit more research before you make your choice.

What’s a good price for webhosting? You can pay hundreds of dollars a month for dedicated hosting, but your site will work just as well with a webhost that costs less than $10 per month. Another thing you need to consider when comparing the prices of the different webhosts is how much they charge to register domain names for you. This can range from free (yay!) upwards of $20 per year.

Getting set up with on your chosen webhost should be an easy task. It usually requires no more than filling in some personal info and your credit card number. The only hard part is picking a domain name to use for your website. Unfortunately, most good, short names are already taken. Either make up a new word altogether or combine two or more words into a name. That’s how I ended up with Bargainstrike as a name.

Some sites chain words together with hypens in order to gain an advantage from search engines. An example of this would be: www.buy-cars-online-cheap.com. While this may help your search ranking on some search engines, I would advoid naming your site like this. It’s a practice that’s likely to be penalized by Google and others someday. Fixing a problem with a domain name problem like would not be easy to fix.

Step 3 - Register with Affiliate Companies
Affiliate companies are the middlemen between online stores and you. They provide you with the links to different stores, record the amount of traffic and sales that your links send to those stores, and they send you your payment for this. You really can’t run an affiliate site without registering with at least one Affiliate company as very few major stores run their own independant affiliate program. There are lots of different ones that you can sign up with, but there are only three major ones that you really need to registered with. They are Linkshare, Commission Junction, and Performics. And of these three, Linkshare is by far the most important one to belong to. At least 90% of my money comes from Linkshare links as more major stores with affiliate programs use Linkshare than any other affiliate company.

After you have registered with an Affiliate company, you will need to sign up with the companies that you would like to affiliate with. This can be tricky expecially when you are just getting started. Some companies check out each applicant by hand to make sure that your site meets their standards. Since your website isn’t even built yet, you will get rejected by these companies. The good news is that there are a lot of companies who automatically accept all applicants without checking anything. These are the ones that you are looking for at this point in the game. Later, when your site is actually running and getting some traffic, come back and try registering for the ones who declined your application before.

After you get accepted into a company’s affiliate program you can then get the links that point to that company’s products and promotions. These links contain the affiliate tracking codes that are necessary for giving you credit for sending them a sale. Take care that when you copy them to your site that you get the entire code for the link.

Step 4 - Build Your Site
Ok, this is where it all comes together. If you haven’t built a website before, it can be an intimidating task. What should it look like? What colors should everything be? What fonts should I use? The best advice I can give about the look and feel of your site is to look around the internet, find some sites that you like, and try to copy the look in your design.

A thing to remember is that since you only get money for sending people to another website, your website is not a final destination. It is a conduit. It should be functional and fast. The best way to achieve this is to keep your design simple and keep graphics to a minimum. When in doubt, look at how Google or Yahoo designs their pages.

Your home page should contain links to all the rest of the pages on your site. Its main function is to allow search engines to easily spider your entire site. It should also be easy for users to find what they are looking for, but don’t be fooled- most people will never see your homepage. If you build your other pages correctly, users will go to them much more often than your homepage.

All of the other pages on your site are where you make the money. Build a separate page for each companies affiliate program that you belong to. Put the name of the company along with what ever search term that you want to key on in the TITLE element of the page. The title of the page is by far the most important thing that search engines will rank your pages on. Now get some links to their site from the affiliate site that this company uses and put them in the page. Add some text describing the company that you are linking to and perhaps their banner image. Do this for each of the stores that you want to link to and your basic site is done.

Once you have your site done, ftp all of it to your webhost. There are some free programs to do this with, but I usually just use the one that built into Internet Explorer.

One final thing, don’t use pop-ups, pop-unders, or any other devious tricks on your visitors. Don’t spam people with emails. People who do these things are assholes. Don’t be an asshole.

Step 5 - Promote your Website
Now that you have a working affiliate site on the web, the money is just going to start pouring in, right? Not exactly. First off, nobody will find your site until you get listed by the search engines. To get started, use a free automated URL submission service like Sitesearchsubmit. Fill in your website’s URL and email address and Sitesearchsubmit will submit your site’s address to many of the top search engines automatically. Next, you will need to manually submit the address of your page to the search engines that don’t allow for automated submission like MSN and Yahoo.

Now be patient. Some search engines can take 3-4 months to list your site. Some will have your site indexed within a month. Just do a search for your site’s name once a week on each search engine to see if has been listed yet.

Once your site has been listed you can start testing to see how you are being ranked for the keywords that you are using. If you would like to find out what keywords are important to ranked high for, do a search here for suggestions. Do some research on how to optimize your pages for search engines. I won’t go into that here as search engines are constantly changing how they rank pages and such info is quickly outdated. Make some changes to your site and wait until they re-indexed (Google will usually index your site every month) and see whether or not your changes made a difference. Keep doing this until you have the ranking you want or until you give up in frustration.

Search engines are fickle beasts. Be patient as it will probably take at least a year before you see your first check. Also, don’t give up when the search engines leave your site high and dry sometimes. I’ve had an entire year before where my traffic almost dropped to nothing and then the next year it went through the roof- all without me making any changes to the site at all. Stay in it for the long run and you will make money.

by

Mike Hensley http://www.bargainstrike.com

The best way to start this article is to highlight its purpose with a relevant quote - and of one of my personal favourites: "By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail" - Benjamin Franklin. We don’t always pay enough attention to the wisdom of those who have come before us. This idea rings as true today as it did back then especially in business issues. Realistically nobody is going to deliberately set out on a new business venture planning to fail almost entirely. That, however, is exactly what many new online entrepreneurs actually do. They’re totally and utterly unprepared for what lies ahead of them and 95% of them will never achieve anything above a few dollars per month income. So what exact steps do you need to take to fail at making money online?

Do not attempt to research your market under any circumstances. Don’t even dream of checking how competitive or profitable a market might be. Simply pick the first idea that pops into your head and design a product or website around it and then hope that the money comes pouring it. Market and keyword research is for suckers right?

Now you need a webhost for your new "creation". Never research the forums and messageboards for feedback on great webhosting. No just go ahead and find the cheapest, most unreliable, most akward, free web hosting package on the ‘net and upload your work to that. Who cares if it’s covered with annoying banner ads, shuts itself down for hours at a time and the tech support guys never get back to you? A webhost is a webhost and your potential customers and visitors won’t care will they?

Do not focus on a single niche market. Build a website that has information on everything in the universe and that is purely random in nature. While you’re at it sign up for as many flashing, rotating banner programs as you can and just paste them all over the place. It doesn’t matter if they’re for dating, viagra or lasik eye surgery - your visitors are sure to just keep clicking on them so you can get paid.

Forget about mailing lists. All the guru types are full of crap when they say "the money is in the list". Never set up a sequential autoresponder series on your website. Basically do everything you can to avoid collecting customer and visitor information. Oh and never offer any kind of incentive for them to give you this data.

Search engines? Smearch engines! You’ve spent at least an hour designing your website and you have it stuffed full of the right words. That’s what search engines love don’t they? I mean your website is such a work of art that Google, Yahoo and MSN will be beating a path to your door to send visitors to you. Title tags, Meta Description tags? Pointless! Building incoming links? Why bother! Somebody said that SEO was all hocus pocus anyways…. so they’re probably right aren’t they?

Do everything yourself. Spend weeks learning html, php and graphic design. Create all your own templates, write every single word of content yourself and never, ever stop. Never invest in any tool which might make your life even a little bit easier or make you more productive. Nobody can do it any better than you right? Why outsource your work and pay somebody else when you’ll get it all done… eventually… one way or the other.

Never finish any project you start - no matter what. Once you get 50% of the way through any online project just stop and leave it there. Start on the next project because you’re bored with the last one. Your ideas are so utterly brilliant that they’ll generate money regardless of whether or not you finish them.

Never try anything different. Don’t create a new line of products or even dream of becoming involved in a different market. Do not create a mixture of Adsense and affiliate sites. Create an information product to sell online? Why would you even try? Don’t attempt to learn anything new and do not, under any circumstances, find a mentor that you can learn from. You know best after all.

Does the above seem overly sarcastic and cynical? I’d agree - it is. The shocking part is that I’ve personally made all of the above mistakes to some extent over the years - as have the vast majority of online business people. Use this article to help you avoid making the same mistakes. Now that you know where all the pitfalls are you can just sidestep them on your way to success.

This article was provided by BizzIdea.com where you can read more about the definitive affiliate marketing guide Clickin It Rich by Michael Campbell.

In affiliate marketing, there are numerous ways in which you can increase your earnings and maintain the account that you have worked so hard for. One of the more important and effective ways of increasing affiliate marketing bottom line is the use of product recommendations. Experienced Internet Marketers are already familiar with this approach.

Before you delve headlong into product recommendations, here are important pointers to consider.

Credibility matters

When you have earned the trust of those who have bought from you in the past or and prospective buyers, then they will definitely trust your recommendations. Be very careful in using this approach, though. Do not start promoting everything by recommendation, or else your credibility will wear thin especially when recommendations are seemingly exaggerated and without merit.

Spend time to do product research result. Do not push a lemon.

State the advantages and disadvantages of the product you are recommending.

Do not just list the advantages of the product or service you are recommending. Avoid being overly biased about it. There is no perfect product in the market. Every product has limitations.

If there are things you do not like about a given product or service, does not be afraid to mention them. This will make your recommendation more realistic and increase your credibility.

Furthermore, if your prospective buyers are interested in what you are offering, they will be more than delighted to learn of the advantages and disadvantages about the product. It gives them a realistic expectation of the product or service.

Listing advantages and disadvantages of the product you are promoting will work effectively for your advantage.

Sound like the leading expert in your field.

If your visitors perceive you are an expert in your field, they would be more inclined to making that purchase even if the price is higher. If you do not exude confidence and self-assurance in endorsing your products, you will lose prospective buyers very quickly though your pricing may be rock bottom. People may think they going to get a raw deal.

Keep in mind this simple relation: When trust increases price resistance decreases.

By offering unique solutions prospective buyers would not get anywhere else, you establish an aura of expertise. Provide proof that the product you are promoting delivers as promised. Use testimonials, and endorsements from respected and known personalities related to your field. They lend weight to your product recommendations.

Avoid marketing hype

Be confident and self-assured. There is no need to scream and kick up a fuss. Prospects are not brain dead. They may already be well informed about certain products. Back your claim with hard facts and data. Pay attention to your presentation. Remember, prospects can easily source for the products you are promoting elsewhere.

Avoid marketing hype at all costs.

Offer promotional freebies

When recommending a product, it is also important that you give out promotional freebies. Offering freebie to promote your product is a common practice. But few marketers do this to promote affiliate products. Offer freebies that promote or contain information about affiliate products or services you are marketing.

Tried and tested

Before you recommend a product or service, test it. Do not overlook product after sales support. Until you are fully persuaded by a product’s usefulness, you cannot effectively promote a product.

Also recommending a lemon of a product or service will diminish your credibility and trust among your prospective buyers.

Just think how long it took you to build credibility and trust among your visitors. All it takes is to recommend a lemon, and customers’ confidence in you is reduced to zero.

There you are, the important pointers of product recommendations. Increase your affiliate program profits using product recommendations and be among those who have proven its worth.

Gerrick W provides information and tools that you need to effectively promote your online business. Discover how you can start and profit from your own website immediately. Download your FREE Ultimate Website Video Package. Visit ==> http://www.1stinternetmarketingsolution.com/ultimate-website-videos.htm

An affiliate income refers to a check you can receive from a company each month that represents a percentage of the amount of money customers spend in purchasing that company’s product or service. This is based on the customers that you refer to the company’s website that actually do make a purchase. In order to get started in this type of online business, your first step is to find a product that you can write about and join a free affiliate marketing program for that product.

Once you find a product and a program that pays well, then you can get started in setting up a website related to it. There are many ways to look at the type of product that you get started with. Some affiliate marketing programs pay well, but you have to think of how many people will actually buy these products. You can look at products you know that people will buy and then do a search for affiliate programs related to these. Some examples of affiliate programs that will give you a second income are travel, fitness, books and home improvement products. There are also online education programs that pay well when it comes to an affiliate income.

With the world becoming a global village because of the cheap airfares being offered all over the world, travel destinations is one of the most commonly searched term on the Internet. Select a place that you can write about and join an affiliate marketing program such as Travelocity. Each time a customer purchases hotel, car or airline reservations as a direct referral from your site, you get paid. In the case of Travelocity, this is $5.00 for each purchase, so you would only need 20 people buying from your site to make $100. All you have to do is have a domain name and a website to get started. You can make money 24 hours a day while you are sleeping, partying or playing golf.

Interested in Online Business? Do you have articles to distribute about Online Business? We provide in depth Free Online Business resources. Free website content

When I talk to potential clients about starting an affiliate program for them I have a core set of criteria I look at before proceeding. These are the keys to success I find over and over again. Without them affiliate programs start slowly or fail altogether. So, I have created this list as a primer for any site or person that thinks they want to start an affiliate program. I have also divided this into 2 parts. The first being the core set of numbers you will need to know about your website before proceeding and the second is the evaluation of the numbers and the competition that leads to pulling the trigger to get started.

The Numbers

1. Know the number of visitors that come to your website. I know this seems like a no-brainer, but without this information you can’t make even the most basic determination as to how your affiliate program will succeed.

2. You need to know the source (origin) of all of your site traffic. Do the visits come from Google, Yahoo and other natural search sources? Are you buying Pay-Per-Click (PPC) traffic from Google, Yahoo!, MSN or Looksmart? Do you get referral links from your product distributors? If not, you need to have some simple tracking tools added to your site before proceeding further and then give it a couple of months to better know your site metrics before proceeding.

3. You must know how many visitors to your site convert into buyers. This conversion rate will tell you many things about your current online marketing efforts as well as to the efficiency of your shopping cart. This is the #1 piece of information affiliates want.

4. You must know the average sale amount for your site. If your sales are much lower that $60 a sale, getting affiliates interested is hard. If lower than $60 what can you do to package your product more effectively to drive up the average price. This is good for you as well as for the affiliate.

5. You must determine your site’s Customer Acquisition Cost. The easiest area to determine this is from a PPC campaign. Run a campaign for a period of time, track the sales (and conversion rate) and then divide the number of sales into your marketing costs. If you did 100 sales and it cost you $3,500 in PPC campaign buys, then you now have a basic Customer Acquisition Cost of $35 per customer. Are you able to make money at this cost or whatever your cost came out to be? Don’t look at affiliate programs to be any less expensive than other means of online marketing.

6. You must know what the Lifetime Value of the Customer. Does your product only sell once? Does your product have upsell possibilities? Knowing this is key in setting the affiliate payouts. If your product line leads to additional sales through email marketing past the original sale, then you may be able to payout a higher amount to affiliate (which they really like to see) in order to get the client. I have one client who as been clipping away for almost 6 years with an affiliate program I manage. They get 200-300 new clients a month from our affiliate efforts, and they have been doing that for 6 years… what a list! They do an incredible job with their email program which far exceeds the affiliate income they receive. As a result of knowing this they continue to have a very high affiliate payout and everyone is very happy with the program.

The Evaluation

7. You must know what your competitors are doing. Like Homer Simpson says: “Doh”. There is competition in every category and every affiliate software application. Don’t ignore it, learn from it. Find out what the other guys are doing. Have someone sign up for their affiliate programs and check it out.

8. You must know which of your competitors have affiliate programs. Find out what they are paying out, how long the program has been running. Check the message boards to see if they have any problems or if they are well thought of. And if none of them have affiliate programs… don’t run out and think you’ve found the promised land… maybe there is a reason they don’t have an affiliate program.

9. Know what competitors are paying out to their affiliates. Simple research can tell you what they are paying out. Most affiliate programs have marketing information readily available, do the research and know what you are up against.

10. You must know what you are willing to pay for someone (an affiliate) to sell your product. The competition is telling you something, your own numbers are telling something, now you must decide what your affiliate program payout should be. Or maybe the numbers and evaluation is telling you that you aren’t quite ready to start. Either way you now have enough information to decide whether to proceed now or in the future.

So how did you do? Do you still have a lot to learn? Do you still have some things to fix? Most of these are fixable… so fix them. If it can’t be fixed then you may want to get a second opinion or look for alternative ways to drive traffic to your site. If you came through this article feeling good about how you are positioned then you can do well with an affiliate program if you execute it right.

Durk Price is a professional affiliate manager. He has managed large retailers like LimitedToo, Beauty Trends, WeShipBabyGifts.com and others. He has launched affiliate programs and had affiliate sales account for 27% of total online sales within 90 days of launch. His primary focus is managing affiliate programs for retail companies. To learn more about his services of putting top level affiliates together with top quality merchants visit http://www.affgoo.com or email him at stick@affgoo.com.

OK, You have entered into JV’s with many marketers for your new smashing product. And you are expectantly gazing at the emails for those welcome order notifications to roll in! But to your disappointment, the JV sales are nowhere near your expectations. Sounds familiar?

Yes! It’s true that only 5% of your affiliates does some sales for you. But how can you make these 5% to give their best shot to your product?

Here is my experience as a JV partner where I went out of my way to zealously promote other’s product with a vigor and sizzle that left me surprised at the end of it!

Why did I promote someone else’s product when I myself don’t find the time to set up sales pages for the 100’s of resale rights products that I own?

I am a JV partner with many online marketers like John Delavera, Carlos Garcia, Anik Singal, Rob Benwell, Paul Kleinmenulman, James Jackson …and many others.

…And there are three things that made me work for all of them!

#1: The Willingness To Give A Review Copy

This is a deadly JV strategy! When you receive great products for free, something, somewhere inside you prompts you to give back something to the JV proponent.

And you end up committing yourself to the product and what you are expected to do as a JV partner.

#2: Quality Products That’s A Pleasure To Promote

To be frank, the products that I got were real sizzlers! I had no hesitation in promoting any of the products from my JV proponents for the simple reason they were all excellent.

And incidentally, the refunds on all these products were virtually nil — speaks volumes about the quality.

#3: High Commissions Offered

The minimum commission offered was 50% — some as high as 60%!

Enough to motivate you to work upon a product and release the creative juices hiding inside you to go all out! Does something struck in your brain about these three points? Hope it does.

In a nut shell: Before you dart out your JV proposals, remember these simple things and you have built a sales team that will go all out to sell your product.

Good luck to your future JV’s!

S. Kumar is the webmaster and owner of Learnhomebusiness.com, the site he started from a remote village in India and took it to one of the top ranked sites in the world. Subscribe to his free $1000 gift series by simply visiting here.

As a long time affiliate program manager, I have been faced with the good, the bad and the ugly. In order to manage the customer’s expectations, I’ve come up with 10 benchmarks they must first meet before I take them on. While I’d like to be a miracle worker and help everyone that approaches me, some situations just can’t be helped without some fundamental changes in their business model.

If your business meets these criteria you will be able to attract and sign up affiliates.

1. You are able to sell the product nationally or internationally. Localized products do not sell well in affiliate programs. Affiliates come from everywhere. Limiting the affiliate to a local market does not work. This means many kinds of retail product distribution models limited by territories do not work.

2. You are able to sell a unique product. This goes to the competition. When I hear the phrase: “Well… there’s really nothing quite like it on the Internet”, I know the prospective client has not done any online research. There is competition in virtually every segment of every product type on the web. Get used to it. There is competition for every dollar out there regardless of how unique you may think your retail product is.

3. You have a brand name or sell brand name products. Having brand names does make it easier to sell online. Having a branded category name is even easier. Does that mean you have to have a brand name to be successful… no.

4. You will be able to offer an aggressive affiliate payout. Brand names many times prescribe low payouts to affiliates. This makes getting affiliate buy-in difficult. I launched a national brand company with a really low payout after suggesting a much more aggressive customer acquisition number. The program started out well and then fell off dramatically after 60 days as affiliates tested the program and didn’t make enough money to justify their ad spends. They were gone. I was able to keep them by raising the commission, but almost lost them entirely because the program was not priced right coming out of the gate.

5. You know the retailers customer acquisition number when I launch an affiliate program. Hard to imagine, but many retail merchants have no idea what they could or should be paying to acquire customers. If they don’t know and seem to think the number I quote them is too high, I go looking for other opportunities.

6. You will be able to offer a competitively priced retail product. You don’t have to be the cheapest for sure. But if your competition is less expensive and you don’t have a value proposition to support your pricing model, you will have trouble getting affiliate sign ups.

7. You know the average price per sale on the site. Low priced items are not affiliate favorites as they have to drive lots of traffic to earn any money. A retailer with at least a $60 average sale is a bare minimum. Many times it may be a packaging issue, but if the retailer hasn’t figured it out by the time I show up… it can be really heavy lifting to get them to package their products correctly.

8. You know the conversion rate of the visitors to buyers on the site. Depending on the conversion rate and the average sale price I can give the retailer a pretty good idea if he is going to be successful in attracting affiliates. A 1% conversion rate can be good depending on what you sell, and I have some customers that run at 4% as well.

9. You know and understand what kind of ecommerce solution the retailer uses. If your conversion rates are abnormally low for the category you are in, I may pass because this may mean your ecommerce solution or customer service is not up to par.

10. You have a website that is attractive and compelling. So often overlooked as a determining factor, in many ways it is a major factor in the affiliate’s decision on whether to add your site links to his site. While he wants to make money, if he sees poor quality design work he is unlikely to add you. He knows if its ugly to him, it will be ugly to the people he refers to the site.

So how did you do? If you met at least 9 of the 10 you are in good shape. What happens if you are lower than 8? Most of these are fixable so fix them. If it can’t be fixed then you may want to get a second opinion or look for alternative ways to drive free traffic to your site. If you scored a perfect 10 you can do well with an affiliate program if you execute it right.

Durk Price is a professional affiliate manager. He has managed large retailers like LimitedToo, Beauty Trends and others. He has launched affiliate programs and had affiliate sales account for 27% of total online sales within 90 days of launch. His primary focus is managing affiliate programs for retail companies. To learn more about his services of putting top level affiliates together with top quality merchants visit http://www.affgoo.com or email him at stick@affgoo.com.