Choosing The Best Affiliate Products Part 2 Of 2

In part 1 of this series, we discussed some of the most important criteria in selecting an affiliate program that is right for you (and your customers).

To review, an affiliate program allows you to sell someone else’s product on the Internet. The product is supplied by the merchant. You register as an affiliate of the merchant. There is usually no charge to register. Your only job is to refer people to the merchant’s website. Each time one of your referrals buys a product from the merchant, you collect a commission. The merchant is responsible for developing the product, negotiating the sale (through their website), handling the payment collection, sending out the product, and handling any problems. Your commission varies between 30% and 75% of the sale price. You do not need a merchant account, nor do you need to have any sort of checkout procedure or shopping cart. Your only responsibility is to send people to the merchant’s website, they take care of the rest.

There are tens of thousands of affiliate products available. You can start your search by going to ClickBank, they have one of the largest affiliate retailing programs. You can further narrow your search by using the 6 steps listed below:
1) Try to contact the merchant. Many of them will reply quite quickly, others are less attentive. If you ask them a question and never get a response to your inquiry, drop them from consideration. If they won’t respond to your email before the sale, heaven help you if you need to contact them after a sale.
2) Be thorough in your search for affiliate products to promote. Don’t recommend a lousy product to the people on your list just because it has a high payout percentage. This is a recipe for disaster and is one of the surest ways to turn your list of subscribers into a list of unsubscribers. Never recommend a product based solely on how much it pays you. Make sure you offer only the finest products to your customers.
3) Make sure that there is a demand for the product. Visit Wordtracker to determine the number of searches for a particular item. Check the Alexa Ranking and Google Pagerank of the sales page. You want to make sure that the product that you are promoting is selling well.
4) Do they offer a money back guarantee? A good guarantee will boost sales. If they do not offer a guarantee, it could indicate that the product does not deliver everything that is hyped in the sales page. Be cautious before you recommend a product that does not come with a guarantee.
5) Make sure the affiliate program offers real-time statistics showing hits as well as sales. That way, you will be able to see how many visits are required to generate sales. You can use these numbers to calculate conversion ratios and compare it to your other affiliate programs. With this information, it is a relatively easy matter to determine which affiliate programs to stay with and which to get rid of.

6) Visit forums and ask about the product. Check to see how many people are familiar with it. If few people have experience with it, it may not be a big seller. Ask those familiar with it to give you their honest opinion. Tell them that you are considering buying it and ask if they would recommend it. If you get a number of negative responses, find another product to promote.

Do you want to know how I make money? Get all the details in my free ebook entitled, Make Money Every Day!