Affiliate Marketing is slowly becoming the mainstream of making money online.
Why Is That So?
With more and more people becoming savvy with the Internet and constantly looking for information (how to lose weight, how to make money online, how to date a girl, etc) through this media, as long as you have the necessary expertise and information, you can sell these information, physical product or services for a nice profit.
Enters Affiliate Marketing
What best way to make a quicker buck than to offer an Affiliate Program for your product! If you still have not full grasp the meaning of the terms, Affiliate Marketing and Affiliate Program. Basically, if you have a product ready, you can create an affiliate program and in return, affiliates (people who are willing to promote your product) will sign up in exchange of a percentage of the sale.
And to make sure your products are sustainable and profitable in the online market, you will need to entice Super Affiliates (people who bring in at least 80% of your profits) to join your affiliate program. Though most of these Super Affiliates are independent in nature (they promote using their own marketing materials and techniques), you will still need to know how to create an affiliate marketing program to attract your affiliates and also to compete with other similar affiliate programs offering near to your product range.
The General 4.5 Criterias of A Good Affiliate Marketing Program
1. Payment of Commission and Accounting
This is the number #1 concern for affiliates when it comes to choosing the right affiliate program. Though there are numerous accounting software that will help you to keep track of your affiliates' sales and even to credit their commissions, many still failed because some sales are not tracked properly and even went to other affiliates account. Talk about a waste of marketing efforts.
That is why, there are affiliate networks like ClickBank.com and Commission Junction (CJ.com) that exist to help to make sure that commissions are credited properly and on time and there is proper accounting (like click-thru stats, conversion rate, and more). All these in exchange of a small fee to these networks.
If you have an affiliate program, do make sure that the payment mode and structure are clearly stated out to help ensure a smooth transaction for your affiliates.
Likewise, as an affiliate, you want to be sure that you are properly credited for the sales you bring in.
2. Comfortable Commission Rate
Super and Normal Affiliates are in for the money so make sure that the commission rates are comfortable enough to be justified.
As most affiliates are using marketing techniques like Pay-Per-Click (e.g. Google Adwords) and Autoresponder (e.g. Aweber) to help bring in the sales (from organic searches and/or mailing list), these methods are basically costs to the affiliates, therefore the amount of commission they ought to be paid must be justified and be more than enough.
If you are a Super Affiliate, you may wish to look for an affiliate program that pays out even better commissions for the huge amount of sales you bring in. This will serve as a special recognition for you.
3. Affiliates Support and Training
Many affiliates started out with minimum knowledge and slowly become Super Affiliates through numerous training and strong support from their affiliate programs.
If you plan to stay long in the affiliate marketing industry with your products, you will need to offer strong support and even affiliate training.
One such successful and supportive Internet Marketer, that I know, is Russell Brunson and his The Second Tier affiliate program (www.thesecondtier.com). He offers weekly training calls and scheduled affiliate trainings to help his affiliates understand and sell his range of products and services more effectively.
To offer even better service to affiliates, you may wish to have a "live" person behind your affiliate program in terms of giving either affiliate or customer support. What we mean as a "live" person, is that the contact provided is taken care by a real person and not so automated replies.
4. Marketing Tools
Affiliate Marketing is like a race where Affiliates will compete to be the early bird to catch in on sales, especially it's a soon-to-be-released item. To cut the learning curve down to a minimum, affiliates will need effective marketing tools like Banners, Sample Emails, Sample Pay-Per-Click Ads, Sample Product Review and Sample Email Follow-Ups.
If you are an owner of an affiliate program, do make sure that you have these provided for your affiliates.
4.5 Unique Affiliate Link
As an Affiliate and with many people understanding the nature of affiliate marketing, some purchases are intended to be made not through your affiliate link but rather their own. There are also times whereby your affiliate link is replaced by others, resulting in the loss of your marketing efforts and having others being credited. Therefore you need to be assured that your affiliate program does provide you with some form of special and unique affiliate link (though not highly used as yet).
In conclusion, these are some of the criterias that affiliates should look out for in an affiliate program to make sure that they are well-rewarded for their marketing efforts and also to ensure that there's a good owner-affiliate relationship being built over the course of business transactions.