Making Money with Affiliate Programs ? Part II ECommerce Articles | May 24 Cheap Jerseys China , 2004 In this holiday season online shopping is hotter than ever! ... to US Commerce ... online sales continue to grow with a robust 25-27 percent this year over 1992. Online holiday shopping a
In this holiday season online shopping is hotter than ever! According to US Commerce Department online sales continue to grow with a robust 25-27 percent this year over 1992. Online holiday shopping at a rate of 10 percent is also considerably outpacing the 5.7 percent growth of overall retail sales. Goldman Sachs predicts 23 percent of all gift-buying this holiday season will take place online!
So, if you don?t have a product of your own to sell online, how can you profit from this exciting trend?
One of the finest ways of making money online is to promote other people?s products or services by becoming their affiliates. Affiliate is a term used for a website that drives traffic to another website in exchange for a predetermined commission.
Thanks to the success of several affiliate programs in the early days of online business, most merchant websites, today Cheap Jerseys , use some kind of affiliate programs to promote their sites and generate sales.
Considering the sheer numbers of affiliate programs available on the Internet, you may feel overwhelmed. However, if you set some basic criteria, it would be lot easier to find a good program that suits your need.
Free sign up
The affiliate program that you are planning to join must be absolutely free. There are way too many good programs available for free, why should you pay for one? Moreover Wholesale Baseball Jerseys , the programs that require payments to join are mostly multi Level Marketing (MLM) programs. Although, there may be many good MLM programs existing on the Internet, I don?t think it?s a viable option for an average person.
Good commission
You deserve handsome compensation for all your hard work! No matter, how you look into it, in most of the cases Wholesale MLB Jerseys , promoting a product or service is not an easy job. Since you are doing the uphill struggle of bringing the client to the merchant?s door, your commission should be real good one. What is an acceptable commission anyway? If you are promoting an information product, don?t go for less than 50 percent. For more tangible products and services your bare minimum commission should be 15 percent of the sale. If you are promoting monthly subscription, choose a program that pays a portion of subscription fee as recurring commission to you as long as the client referred by you stays subscribed.
Tow-tier affiliate program
An affiliate program which pays certain percent as a commission from the sale for bringing in a client and another if that client brings in other clients. Two-tier affiliate programs are more preferable since once a client base is built, it becomes a great source of residual income.
Quality affiliate tracking system
The merchant should have a very good and well-organized affiliate sales tracking management software system. You have to be absolutely comfortable with the statistics generated by the affiliate program. The program should show such important aspects as repurchase Wholesale Jerseys From China , if any, by the client referred by you, your second tier affiliates, activities by your second tier clients, etc.If you do not feel comfortable with the tracking system provided by a merchant Wholesale Jerseys China , better stick to the merchants, who use third party affiliate managing system. At least, you will know that a dishonest merchant won?t be able to defraud you.
Efficient customer support
You should feel satisfied with the service and support you get from your affiliate program owner. A good program highly values its affiliates and gives priority to its customer support system. As the clients that you are sending to the merchant are primarily your site?s visitors, you should be extremely picky about the quality of customer service the program renders. After all, your own site?s reputation is also at stake here!
Promotional materials
If you are planning to promote an affiliate program Wholesale Jerseys , you will need more materials then mere banners. Unfortunately, even many high-end affiliate programs do not carry enough promotional materials to satisfy the need of the affiliates. Promotional material should include: contents to build mini-sites, various ad articles, different kind of text links, product brochures or presentation Cheap MLB Baseball Jerseys , etc.
Commission payment policy
The affiliate program should have a sort of minimum payment policy, where you can receive commissions if even you have made just one or two sales. A reasonable amount is US $25. Less than that is not viable due to processing costs. Commission should be paid each month. If you are located outside of US, see if the merchant makes payment through Paypal or other similar services or not. For most of the countries checks issued in other countries are not a good option.
If an affiliate program meets all these above mentioned criteria, you can consider joining in this program. However, to get best result from your efforts Cheap Baseball Jerseys , before signing up, you should also consider the following rules: