With affiliate marketing becoming the most efficient way of enlarging the e-revenues, hundreds of merchants seem to launch affiliate programs every week and it is becoming increasingly difficult for the affiliates to strike on the right affiliate program.
When you have finally zeroed in on a particular affiliate program, never forget to watch out for certain important points.
At first look, they may appear as unimportant, but it is these apparently minor factors that can deprive you of hundreds of valuable affiliate dollars in the ultimate stage.
So never forget to consider these basic points when you have decided to join a particular affiliate program:
- Look for the contact details on the website of the company. In case there is no contact information like email, phone number, or office address, you will not be able to contact them in case of any trouble.
- You will come across the affiliate programs that offer less than 2 % commission to the affiliates.
Do you think it is worthwhile to join the programs that offer such a meager commission for all your hard work?
Even if you are new in this business, never join a program that offers you a commission less than 10%.
However, use your research capabilities and find out whether the product sells well. In that case, you can consider promoting the product, but never for a commission less than 8%.
- Find out the cookie length allowed by the program from the terms of services or information pages.
Cookie length determines the stretch of time for which a customer is considered a referral from your website.
Most of the affiliate programs provide for 30 days Cookie period. That means you will earn a commission only when the visitor redirected from your site to that of the advertisers who make a purchase within 30 days.
There is no meaning in promoting a program that offers less than a 30-day cookie length.
- Be careful that the merchant’s Site does not suffer from traffic leaks.
Traffic leaks occur when the third-party links in the forms of banner ads, Google AdSense ads, popups, popunders, text links, etc appear in the affiliate program site.
In these cases, the probable customers click on these third party links and taken to other company’s sites. And both the affiliate and the merchant lose business.
Because the customers may buy products from the other company’s site and for that, the affiliate does not earn any commission. These things are particularly common with newly launched affiliate programs.
- In many cases, the customers are referred to the merchants’ site from that of the affiliates only to place orders over the telephone and the affiliate loses on his commission.
So make sure that the program has a system to track phone orders for affiliates by putting the affiliates ID number next to the phone number.
Customers are asked for that number at the time of placing the order and are manually credited for the sale.
