Affiliate Program Research

CHAPTER FOUR

Affiliate Program Research

Just Looking…

I labeled this chapter “research” because we don’t actually need to DO anything other than check stuff out related to affiliate programs right now. It may influence our decision to enter a niche or not.

Technically, you don’t need this step right now. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again and again, any website with traffic can be monetized. For newbies, not even thinking about how to make money from your website at this point means you can focus on more important things like choosing an appropriate topic

for yourself.

Do you pick out a job before you go to college? Nope. But you trust that there’s going to be a job out there if you get a good education, right? Same story here.

Build a website that gets traffic and there will be some way to make money from it. I don’t make many guarantees, but I do guarantee that.

That being said, if you have a few niche ideas and want to know which one is the best to go with, checking out the affiliate programs can definitely help you make a final decision. So, even though you don’t need this chapter right now, some people will find it useful. Also, I do want to show everyone the basics of how we plan to make money from our website so you don’t have to wait to chapter 13 to finally get it.

To find affiliate programs is very simple. Go to Google and type “my niche” + “affiliate program”. You can also do the same with related products and services, like “product + affiliate program”.

You don’t have to sign up anything for the time being, so just save the URLs of any programs you think sound interesting. We’re just browsing right now because we don’t have a website yet, and most programs require that you have at least a website to sign up. Oh, and FYI, the vast majority of affiliate programs should be free to join.

Now that you found some, how do you know which ones are good? In this chapter I’m going to cover some of the main things I consider when choosing an affiliate program to monetize my website with.

Commissions + Cookies This one is pretty simple. High commissions = more money for you. Physical products may start in the 3%-5% range, but go up as high as 20% in some cases.

Digital downloads like ebooks or membership sites may pay up to 75%. Some recurring fee websites will even pay you 100% of the first month membership, but of course you don’t get paid any recurring commissions.

Recurring commissions are something to really snoop around for. Memberships, or recurring orders that pay you every time the customer pays are sahweet.

I would take a 1% lifetime recurring commission over a 10% one-time commission any day. That’s just me though. Some folks prefer big payouts and they just focus on making more of those.

Along with commissions is something called “cookie length”. That’s how long your affiliate cookie lasts. The “cookie” is the code generated by your affiliate link that tracks how many sales you are making. It stays in the person’s browser even after they click your link, leave your website, and go to the vendors website.

Cookie length varies from 24 hours to lifetime! There just can’t be a wider difference than that. Standard is about 30 to 90 days, and longer is better. That means if someone clicks you link and goes to the vendor website, then leaves, you can still get credit for anything they buy in the next 30 days, as long as they don’t click someone else’s link in the meantime.

A lifetime cookie means that the person who clicked your link can come back and buy something from that website at any time (no limit), and you still get credit.

High Ticket Items

This is basically marketing slang for expensive stuff. Ten percent of $1000 is $100 per sale and those types of commissions can add up pretty quickly.

If you make a hundred bucks per sale and just one sale each day, that’s $36,500 per year in income – wowzers! You’ll see a lot of buzz from the gurus about this, and a lot of the time that’s how they con newbies into reselling their expensive private coaching courses.

“Joe made $2000 in his first twenty four hours online!”

What they don’t tell you is that Joe sold a $5,000 marketing package to a granny who spent her entire retirement on a promise that she was almost guaranteed to make money.

Still, I can’t deny that selling one item for $500 is easier than selling five hundred items for $1. I sold a homebrew sculpture for a couple grand one time and made a few hundred dollars from that one sale. I was pretty happy with myself that day.

There are high ticket items in every niche if you just look. They might not be immediately obvious, but if you can draw lines between things, you can get creative.

If your niche is beginners cooking tips, there’s no reason you can’t review some high end knives. If you are doing something about arts & crafts for kids, including some promos for stuff like backyard swing sets or club houses would be alright as long as you draw connection that the kids will be helping with this this “big art project”.

If you the swing set you promote costs a grand, and you make a five percent commission, you only have to convince one person each day (out of six billion people in the world) that they need a swing set for their kids, and you can make an extra $1500 per month.

Active Affiliate Managers

When comparing affiliate programs, you can even see if an affiliate manager is included. For a newbie, this might be a bit daunting – to actually have someone there watching your site or checking up on how you’re doing, but it’s not a big deal.

In the beginning, I was super stressed to have an affiliate manager because i thought they would hate my site and kick me out of the program! (Just so you know, that’s not going to happen)

Actually, the managers I’ve met so far are all pretty cool. Some will check up on your site from time to time if you are generating a lot of traffic and sales, but if you have got a bare bones website they’ll pretty much leave you alone unless you ask for help.

This is great if you have questions about how to use their link tracking system or want to know about the products you are promoting. Eventually, if you start doing well you can even negotiate deals for higher payments.

Having an affiliate manager you can reach out to is awesome compared to sending questions to an empty inbox, which happens a lot.

Shoot them an email with some basic questions just to see if anyone’s alive over there. If you don’t want to do that, just check out their affiliate signup page.

Are there broken images and dead links? Is there no information about commission percentages or clear instructions on how to sign up? This might be a B-Level program you’re looking at. Double check – send them an email to make sure the affiliate program is still active, because sometimes they discontinue them for whatever reason.

If they offer training, bonuses, or even stats on what their top affiliates are earning it means that they are probably actively involved and interested in seeing you perform well.

In addition to seeing what your future affiliate manager is up to, you can also see if they offer other things like banners, tracking links, and other marketing material. I have seen some programs that actually provide a list of high traffic keywords to their affiliates, and specialized (or customizable) landing pages.

Product Research

Product + Website Quality

Don’t forget to check out the website and the stuff they are selling. 50% commissions on some trashy RC-cars with bad reviews on Amazon should not be a priority. Compared to 15% on a similar product with good reviews, a nicely designed site, and other perks for the customer like free shipping? I’d pick the latter any day.

Different products will have different ways of being sold. Some physical products may be listed with images, info, and customer reviews. Digital products may have a single sales page. Visualize what the purchase process will be like people you send to this website.

Get inside your potential customer’s head. Remember, you can have

an awesome website, but you still have to send them to the vendor! Sometimes, even if you have poorly designed site and mediocre content, just getting people to click over to a fantastic sales page is all you need to do to close the deal.

After all, you are not selling yourself or your business. You are selling stuff from other people, and that’s ultimately what’s going to matter most to the people spending money.

Find Related Products

Take some time to browse around for related products in related niches. Don’t bite off more than you can chew by broadening your niche too much, but it’s nice to see what’s out there.

For example, if you choose Hawaiian honeymoons as your niche, you can also look into things like diamond ring affiliate programs, hotel referral programs, plane travel affiliate programs, or even stuff related to wedding gift ideas.

I mean, if you knew your friend was getting married and going to Hawaii for his honeymoon, couldn’t you get him and his wife something related to that?

Silverware sucks. How about sky diving lessons off a volcano?!!

General Product Research 

It’s actually pretty simple – just find products that you personally like, or that you think are selling well. You can look at other websites’ Top 10 lists, or on Amazon Top Sellers. Check the news for hot items, and see which ones might be able to fit in your niche.

Once you find a product you are interested in promoting, search for an affiliate program that will allow you to promote it. Some products will only be sold by one vendor, and it’s either “Yes” or “No” whether they have an available affiliate program. Other products will be sold by multiple vendors, and then you just have to choose which website/company you want to work with.

It’s OK to sign up to more than one affiliate program and promote competing companies side by side. You can compare prices, shipping rates, and customer service ratings if you want.

Personally, I find it easier to start off promoting just a few core products and focusing on that versus trying to re-create an ecommerce style website where everything is available on your site. However, I’ve seen people succeed with the second method too, just pumping out reviews of tons of items related to their niche.

Chapter 4 Summary + Tasks The main action we needed to take for this chapter was to conduct some research and takes some notes. We are just looking to see what’s out there to help us make a better decision on which niche to choose.

If you didn’t find anything, don’t get discouraged! I would rather see you choose a topic you are interested in than something just because you think it can make more money. To be honest, if you are a newbie, you might not be a very good judge of which niche has potential and which doesn’t!

If you are still thinking, “I don’t care what the niche is as long as it makes money”, then you can spend more time researching affiliate programs and find one that looks attractive to you. If you do that, keep my advice from before in mind: A product is not a niche. I will also add that a brand is not a niche either. If you do choose a niche based on the affiliate program, re-read chapter 3 and make sure you have a group of people in mind you want to target.

We will discuss more about how to monetize your website in Chapter 13.

Tasks For This Chapter

1. Find 3 potential affiliate programs based on your niche

2. Find how how much they pay, and what the cookie length is

3. Write down this information in a text file on your computer or phone, along with some initial impressions about their program, website, and products

4. Think about whether or not these observations affects your choice

of niche