How to Select a Profitable Affiliate Program

super affiliates handbook

Affiliate marketing has been and still is a profitable business model. Whether you’re pursuing affiliate marketing as a business or are looking to add a few affiliate products to your current business model, there are some secrets to selecting a profitable affiliate program.

1. Check out their reputation in the industry. There are literally thousands of companies around the world with affiliate programs and chances are you’ll have plenty to choose from in your business niche. However, not all of them are created equal and it pays to be selective.

One key way to make sure you’re signing on with a profitable affiliate program is to research their reputation in the industry. Do they have a reputation for quality products? Do they have a reputation for good customer service? Are they respected? Is the company growing or is it on a downward turn?

2. Are payment terms acceptable? Does the company pay you whenever you make a sale or only when you reach a certain level of sales? This is important because if you have to wait until you make ten sales or reach $500, this affects your cash flow. Cash flow is important not only in staying afloat as a business owner but also in staying profitable. Make sure the payment terms of your chosen affiliate program meet your cash flow needs.

3. How are their sales pages? If you’re being paid per sale, rather than pay per view, there’s no profit in sending 1000 customers to an affiliate sales page if the sales page doesn’t convert visitors into customers. Make sure the sales pages of your affiliate product or service convert traffic into sales. Also make sure there are no leaks, such as AdSense, or other types of advertising.

4. What materials do they provide you to promote? Some affiliate programs give you an affiliate link and send you on your way. Other affiliate programs offer you a wealth of content, advertisements, promotional materials, buttons, and more to promote their products. The more materials a company provides, assuming its quality marketing material, the easier it will be for you to make money.

5. How do they treat their affiliates?
This is important. When issues arise or when you need to speak to an affiliate manager about anything, is there someone available to help you? Look for companies that have a good reputation for treating their affiliates like the valuable assets they are. If you have questions about whether an affiliate program is the right choice for you, contact them.

6. Do you feel good about their products or services? Instincts and intuition are important, and so is your ability to sell or promote products and services. If you’re unable to promote them with enthusiasm then you’re probably not going to make much money from them.

7. Does the program compliment your other affiliate offers?
This may seem obvious; however, the best way to make an affiliate program profitable is to make sure it fits into the needs of your audience and that it compliments your other affiliate programs. If you’re seeking your first affiliate program, then make sure it fits your business vision.

Finally, ask around if you have questions about an affiliate program’s potential profitability. If you cannot find anyone who represents the products, which you should be able to do with a quick search online, then contact the program manager and ask for a few references or the contact information of a few affiliates. Talking to these affiliates will likely answer any questions you may have.

If you want to learn more about making money with affiliate programs, check out Rosalind Gardner’s Super Affiliate Handbook. If you’d like to see how it benefited others, read this excellent Super Affiliate Handbook Review by none other than Lynn Terry.

Free Niche Research: Weight Lifting

free niche research

Happy New Year Everyone! Have you made any Resolutions for 2009? Even if you didn’t,  millions of people did, or are doing it right now. And many of those people will decide to start exercising, eating better, get in shape, etc.

Today’s niche, Weight Lifting, will address the needs of some of these people. Give them what they need to succeed in their New Year goal, and you have a win-win on your hands.

Top 10 Highest Paying Keywords(from the Google keyword tool)

weight lifting systems $2.19

weight lifting fitness $2.13

weight lifting equipment $1.95

weight lifting gear $1.92

weight lifting benches $1.86

weight lifting belts $1.84

weight lifting machines $1.79

weight lifting supplements $1.74

weight lifting gym $1.73

weight lifting exercise $1.65

Top 10 Most Searched Keywords(all phrases are exact matches in Google)

weight lifting 60,500

lifting weights 14,800

weight lifting gloves 14,800

weight lifting routine 12,100

weight lifting equipment 9,900

weight lifting belts 8,100

weight lifting exercises 8,100

weight lifting belt 5,400

weight lifting supplements 5,400

weight lifting workouts 5,400

Resources

Probably one of the best resources for this niche are industry magazines. Here are just a couple: Maximum Fitness, Muscle & Fitness. Of course, if you are weight lifting yourself, this will be a breeze.

Possible Affiliate Programs
Amazon.com has many weight lifting books, weight benches, weight sets, weighted vests and more….

CJ.com has several merchants offering weight lifting props, like Bodybuilding.com, and BigFitness.net.

Monetization Suggestions

You can create an authority site: there is a lot of information for this niche. Or, you can specialize in sub-niches, like the ones you see in the top searched for phrases above.

Here are some domains available now for this niche:

PinkWeightLiftingGloves.com, .net, .org & .info are all available, and the phrase gets 720 exact searches/month: awesome, very specific niche you can rank for easily

WeightLiftingBelts. net & .info with 14,800 exact searches monthly: WOW!

WeightLiftingForWomen.net, .org,  & .info with 1,900 exact searches monthly.

WeightLiftingChains.net  & .org with 1,000 exact searches each month.

WeightLiftingHooks.net & .info with 1,000 exact searches each month.

WeightliftingBars.net & .info with 880 exact searches each month.

Lots of great opportunities for building niche sites!

Update Your Copyright Notice Easily

copyright notice

It’s important to keep your site updated and looking fresh. One of the ways to do this is to have your copyright notice updated, and not showing last year’s date.

With a WordPress site this is a very easy task that can be automated. I LOVE  automation, as it gives me more time to do other things that need my personal attention.

Here is how to set up your WP site to do an automatic copyright update:

– Log into your WP dashboard
– Go to Appearance –> Editor –> Footer.php
– Scroll down to your current copyright and replace it with this:

Copyright &copy; <?php echo date(”Y”) ?>

The above will look on your site like this: Copyright © 2009

Copyright &copy; <?php echo date(”Y”) ?> <a href=”<?php echo get_settings(‘home’); ?>/”><?php bloginfo(‘name’); ?></a>

The above will look like this for my blog here: Copyright © 2009 My Online Business Journey – Internet Marketing Blog

Now, if your site is not a WP site, it will be harder to do, but still possible to simplify for future years. This year, when you change your copyright, make sure you use a sever side include. Of course, you’ll need to ask your ISP to set your web server up to recognize includes.

Create a file on your computer named copyright.html, where you enter your copyright statement, and then include that page on all your pages, wherever you want your copyright to show. Then, next year, you only need to change that one file instead of having to go thr0ough all the pages.

Here is the code you’ll need to include on your pages:

<!–#include virtual=”copyright.html”–>

Hope that helps you. Have a very Happy and Prosperous New Year!


Cloaking or Redirecting Affiliate Links?

Yesterday, Paul asked:  Can you tell us how to cloak an affiliate link using no cost ways?

That’s a great question, and timely one, as we approach the New Year, and many of us are looking for ways to streamline and improve our websites for a better 2010.

Let’s first see what the definition of cloaking is, from dictionary.com:

cloaking definition

As you see, cloaking is hiding something. Cloaking links, or to be correct, pages, is a black hat method you don’t want to use on your site.

Cloaking a link/page, means showing the search engines a page, and the visitor a different page. This is done by framing, and is SPAM.

On the other hand, affiliate link redirection is something you should be doing. Let’s see why:

Makes it Easy to Change Links Across Your Site

Let’s say over the years, as I write on my blog, I suggest Lynn’s Elite Forum, and end up with hundreds of links to her site. If my links look like this: http://www.selfstartersweeklytips.com/156.html and Lynn decides to change her affiliate program for some reason, I’ll have hundreds of pages to look up and change the code individually. But not if I did a link redirect.

Makes it Easier to Track

If you redirect your affilaite links, you can track how many clicked on your links without having to rely on the merchant. Some merchants do a very good job, and others couldn’t care less if you can track or not. With a redirected link, you can always see how many times that link was accessed through your stats program.

Shortens Long, Unreadable Links

Those long links with all kinds of letters and numbers may scare some people away from clicking on a link, thinking it may be a virus or malware. But if the link is short and has a name they can read, will ease their fears.

OK, now that we know why we should be redirecting links, let’s see how we can do it. There are a few different ways to do it, depending on what you are comfortable with.

.htaccess Redirecting – WARNING! You can mess up your site is you don’t understand your .htaccess file, so be careful!

This is very easy to do, if you are comfortable with your cPanel. Log into your cPanel, and open your .htaccess. At the end of it, add this code:

redirect 301 /oldpage.htm http://www.you.com/newpage.htm

My favorite way to redirect my links is redirecting from the server side with php, like this:

– create a page with the name of your product.php
– include this code: <?php header(‘Location: http://www.affiliatesitelink.com&#8217;); ?>

– make sure you don’t add any spaces, or your code won’t work.

– now go check the page you created and make sure it redirects to the page you intended it to: you have no idea how many people don’t check and lose a lot of money.

One more thing about redirecting affiliate links: put all you affiliate links in a folder, and create a blank index page in that folder. This way, not everyone can see all the programs you are promoting.

Also  this makes it easy to go in periodically and click on all your links to make sure the merchants didn’t change the landing page.

Go work on your redirects now, and start 2010 with a better, easier to maintain affiliate business.

Do you have any questions? Ask below.

2009 Report Card – How Did I Do?

This morning I posted about my 2010 goals, but Bob the teacher inspired me to post my accomplishments for 2009 as well. So here are some of the things I did…

• Started this blog on October 27 2009 and already had 1567 unique visitors.

• Built several mini-sites

• Submitted over 125 articles  to EZA

• Sold a few sites I wasn’t interested in anymore, and gave away some, just to free up brain space

• Learned how to do redirects and started implementing that on my blog, so now I can easily change my offers if I need to

• Participated in forums more than ever before, especially at Lynn’s elite forum

Outsourced a lot of my article marketing, and a few other things

• Spent 3 weeks in Romania with the entire family, showing the kids places I enjoyed when I was their age

• Bought a fixer upper house with lots of land, where we’ll be building my dream home in 2010 (I would say this is the biggest/best happening of 2009, and we got it on our 22nd anniversary too)

I am sure tere are many more things I accomplished and  don’t remember now. But I am happy wit my progress this year and I am excited for the upcoming year, when I’ll be a lot more organized and will definitely have more/better results.

I’d like to challenge you to take a look at what your achievements were in 2009, and make a plan to better those in 2010. Here is to a successful 2010 for all my readers!

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