Pushing Weight: Choosing the Right Products
Out of the thousands of affiliate programs on the web how do you wade through and find the real gems? Diamonds in the rough do exist but I’d rather not spend any time polishing them up for the merchant myself.
Here are some quick check points you’ll definitely want to run through to ensure you don’t throw precious advertising and marketing money down the drain when choosing an affiliate program. Here we go!
DEMAND:
Flat out this is probably the most crucial factor in launching a successful marketing campaign. You can have fancy ad copy and an affiliate site that would make John Reese green with envy (LOL) but if there’s no viable demand for the product you’re toast. Do your research. Find out if you’re target audience is interested in the product and whether or not you can easily push that product.
THE SALES PAGE:
Would you buy it? Don’t just glance over the sales page if you’re going to promote a product. Read ALL of the ad copy and then look for leaks in the page (i.e. off site links, other ads, too many pictures and not enough whitespace, too many steps to complete transaction, etc.) If you don’t trust your own critique of the landing page get a second opinion. Send it to a friend and just say, "Hey, check this out."
PROFIT:
What’s my bottom line going to be? Will I make enough money promoting the product to spend my time and up front advertising and marketing costs on? If it’s a digital product you can expect a fairly high commission. In most cases you’ll make at least 50% of the sale, sometimes even up to 75%. However, if you’re pushing physical products you’ll generally earn between 5- 10%. That number may seem low but if you’re promoting high ticket items like tanning beds that 10% can go a long way.
QUALITY:
Granted, we can’t always buy the product we want to promote (i.e. tanning beds). However, if the product passes the check points up until this point I’ll usually try to get my hands on it. You need to feel confident in the product in order to effectively sell that product. How can you really sell a product to a potential customer if you don’t know how it performs?
AFFILIATE TRACKING:
How does the merchant track sales, impressions, click through rates, etc.? Are they using a major affiliate network, front line affiliate tracking software such as DirectTrack, MYAP, iDevAffiliate, or proprietary in-house software? I don’t get to caught up on this if the rest of the check points add up because there are plenty of tools out there to track your visitors, click throughs, etc. A few that come to mind are the KaizenTrack Optimization System, Offermatica, and SiteSpect.
Select the affiliate programs you’re interested in promoting wisely. Take the proper time and research required to launch a successful initial and long term marketing campaign. There’s no need to try and promote every program on the net so relax, put your Adwords campaigns on pause and take a second look at what you’re promoting.
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[tags]affiliate programs, affiliate program, advertising and marketing, marketing campaign, ad copy, landing page, high ticket items, digital products, physical products, click through rates, affiliate tracking, adwords campaigns[/tags]