How to rate an affiliate program?

By Bruno Delepierre
Posted Monday, August 9, 2004

Affiliate marketing has become a very popular method for merchants to increase sales. By giving affiliates a piece of the cake merchants make sure that a lot of people promote their service or product and they’ll see a boost in sales, leads or clicks. Nowadays you can find literally thousands of affiliate programs. You will have to think very hard before you will find something where you won’t have an affiliate program for.

I often receive e-mails from websites who would like me to tell them which programs they should use on their website. You can understand that this is pretty hard for us as we don’t know a lot on that specific site. However I can point out some basic points that you could use to " rate " a merchant for your site.

Learn from your traffic
I don’t have to tell you that visitors are the single most important thing for a webmaster. You can have a wonderful website but without others to see it, it’s useless. In order to find a suiting merchant you will have to analyse your traffic. First step of course is getting a tracker for your site. If you are really interested in making money with affiliate programs, add a genuine tracker ( not a counter ! ) to your site. There are some very good free trackers around there that allow you to have decent statistics on your traffic. Get to know your visitors and learn from your knowledge. Add an affiliate program that targets your public and you will be able to use a very targeted program which will likely make you more money.

Is the merchant a stable merchant ?
I have experienced that there’s one thing that affiliates really hate and it’s called reduction of commission. Some merchants have the intention to reduce your commission drastically after a while.

Sometimes merchants have to cut in their budget and of course affiliate funds are the first victims.

In some cases a reduction of commission is understandable as long as the new commission is acceptable for an affiliate.

People sent me several complaints that certain merchants show no respect for their affiliates and think they are the important ones as they pay you…WRONG ! A merchant without any affiliates is worthless ! In fact a merchant should be greatful that you want to promote his product or service. Of course you get paid but trust me, they still profit from your efforts. More and more I encounter such merchants.

Let me tell you a story of one of them , just to illustrate how rude a merchant can be : I myself put a free offer on my site that would pay me 25 cents per free subscription.

In the beginning I made some dollars out of it, nothing much though, but nevertheless I made some leads. Suddenly this stopped, no more leads…I didn’t know what could be the reason and I waited a couple of days. A bit later I got an e-mail from this merchant that they reduced their commission to 0.001 dollar (no there really are 3 zeros here ). First I thought this was a joke but hey, that was strange, after the commission reduction I suddenly started making new leads. I even made 0.02 dollar a day which are twenty qualified leads ! ) It’s clear that this offer didn’t last another week on my site and I honestly hope that every affiliate dropped this program as this is a disgrace to affiliate marketing.

Of course not every merchant is this dishonest : Recently Jackpot.com lowered their commissions from 1 dollar to 65 cents. Although this is a reduction of 35 % this offer is still interesting enough to promote and the merchant hasn’t got the intention to abuse his affiliates…

User Friendlyness
A very important aspect of an affiliate program is the user friendlyness of a merchant program. Although commission is an important thing, even with a high commission and a low sign-up ratio you won’t get real money out of the program. A merchant should make it as easy as possible for a client to buy his products or subscribe to whatever they want. If your merchant link is linked to a sign up page you will generate much more money than a link that goes to the merchants main page.

Commission
The commission is often considered as the single most important thing to choose an affiliate program for. In opinion a commission rate isn’t the ideal criterium to use if you want to rate an affiliate program. I won’t go into details now but if you want to read more on the importance you can read one of my previous articles which is entirely devoted on the analysis of affiliate commission rates…

If you still have any questions at all on affiliate marketing don’t hesitate to contact me and I will gladly try to help you. You can use the contact form on 4allsites.com to post your questions,remarks or suggestions.

About the Author
Written by Bruno Delepierre - Discover more information,tips and resources on affiliate marketing,webdesign and webpromotion on (http://www.4allsites.com). You can also subscribe to our newsletter on (http://www.4allsites.com/ourezine.html) for regular inside information and webmaster resources.