How To Choose An Affiliate Program To Sell Your Products

A lot of Internet marketers use affiliate marketing as their business model. Most of them sign up to these programs without actually understanding what it’s all about. All they know is that they will get paid if somebody buys the product that they are marketing as affiliates.

The reason why affiliate marketing is so attractive to the Internet marketer is that he will not have to have a product or service to sell. This makes it easy. In the offline world many people sell products produced by others, for instance, we sell sodas at our restaurant and all of them are not been manufactured by us, the brand it is very known, if you said "Coca-Cola", then you are clairvoyant, cause it is very true. This is the same principle but online.

It does mean that the affiliate is able to get going right away. There is no big time required to make a product or to design a service that is marketable online. Of course it may be understood that selling your own product could be more profitable, since you keep all the profit.

For the Internet marketer that developed a business with his own products, using affiliate marketing to promote their product is a very viable business solution.  Many Internet marketers offer affiliate options right from their site. The bigger online merchants are able to handle their own affiliate programs.

To assist the smaller merchants an entire secondary tier of service providers has mushroomed up. There are now Affiliate Management Agencies, Super-Affiliates and Specialized Third Parties vendors all playing around in this space.

Internet marketers who have produced an eBook which they feel is worth selling will be more inclined to submit their product to an online service such as Clickbank rather than trying to set up their own backend solution.

It is really only worthwhile for the big merchants to go it alone when it comes to handling all the elements of the affiliate business model. For the internet marketer with one product for sale, having to get involved in handling a network of affiliates could require too much technical knowledge.

Many affiliate marketers work on a multi-tier program. This is also called MLM which stands for multi level marketing. That means that affiliates get rewarded for signing on other affiliates. In a way this is similar to the offline world of Amway for instance.

The danger here is that if an MLM business offers higher rewards for new members rather than for the product sales, then it could be considered a pyramid or Ponzi scheme.

It requires a huge amount of work to keep this kind of business model running smoothly. It is quite difficult to keep the downline growing and to keep the participants motivated and selling. This does not imply that these schemes does not work, there are many successful MLM marketers such as Mike T Glaspie.

There are some two tier affiliate programs available as well, but in most cases the affiliate business model seems to prefer a one tier approach, maybe because it represents more profit for you, since you don´t have to do any more splitting  of your profits. That is you have a one on one relationship with the affiliate merchant.

Therefore, choosing which system you might want to use as an affiliate marketer hoping to sell your own products will depend on the type of product and the resources and skills available to you. For most entry level Internet marketers the straight forward one tier affiliate program will in all probability be the best option and the less complicate, you make a sale, you rip your commission, can not be easier than this.

How huge are you as a Marketer? Did you qualified to have your own affiliate system to market your products?

To Your Success,

Luis Torres

www.marketing-business-review.com

You´ll Love These Ones Too:

44 thoughts on “How To Choose An Affiliate Program To Sell Your Products

  1. Hi Luis… I already saw a simillar comment like the above one with the same name… it looks like a spam to me… at least it was shown in my spam folder. I’m sorry if I mistook him with a spammer… Anyway great advices, I purchased the clickbank code and it additional videos and ebook products. It was expensive but quite worthy. I got all the knowledge I needed to really start my making money online venture as a new dot-com mogul.
    .-= Benjamin Cip´s last blog ..Get Your Copy Of “Adsense Secret 4″ For Free =-.

    1. Hi Benjamin,

      You didn´t mistaken, you were right as hubtonomy also said it is a spam comment, its just that it appears on my pending comment folder and not in my spam folder, that´s why I approve it, but doing a search at Google, this exact comment its all over the place.

      I saw you finally cancelled the Ninja plugin and bought a lot of other products, but I see at my clickbank panel some sort of negative amounts, did you cancelled all of your purchases? Or Clickbank made something funny on me?

      1. I didn’t cancel all of my purchased, I asked for support from the team because I can’t see some video with my macintosh. I use two clickbank ID one for the purchase and the other one who promoting products. I will try to use your product to make my sales less expensive. I don’t want to pay europeans taxes…
        .-= Benjamin Cip´s last blog ..Change Your Mindset About Making Money Online =-.

        1. Hi Benjamin,

          Ok, so there is no problem with my clickbank account. I actually have not read those ebooks, but I also think I know enough to make money online, what I need is to automate the process so I can be able to do more, like writing posts, commenting in other fellow´s blogs like your for instance and of course socialize, like been at Twitter or FriendFeed or any other network.

        2. Hi Benjamin,

          Its good to be online again. My modem got broke since Monday and the technicians came until today just about 1 hour ago they left. What a great ISP in in it? lol. I just had 678 emails to check I finally done it.

          I have not use Squidoo, but it is a real good way to have links to your site, I knew there were some changes but don´t know how it affects us.

  2. With all the thousands of programs there are, it can be very confusing when it comes to choosing an affiliate program. It is best to do as much research as possible before joining any program. I agree with you about the newbie affiliate marketers staying with one tier programs in the beginning.

    Good article Luis!
    .-= Robert´s last blog ..Ways To Drive Traffic To Your Affiliate Program =-.

    1. Hi Robert,

      Welcome back. one tier programs are less confusing and it allows beginners to focus and they will have more time to learn and not just worrying about all those percentages from multi-tier programs.

  3. Hi Luis

    Many marketers have difficulty finding the right affiliate products. You always have to spare a thought for the customer who is looking out for good and useful products. So in a nutshell a good product is one that provides the best value for your customers or prospects seeking out solutions to their difficulty.

    While providing good value to your customers is important, you should also pay attention to the amount of commission you can make when you make an affiliate sale. Always weigh the cost of promoting this product including the money you have to use to promote it. So to use an example if you spend $20 to get your first affiliate sale which gives you a commission of only $5, you may want to re-think what is wrong or decide not to promote this product.

    BTW thanks for subscribing to Angela’s backlink building. I know you won’t regret it. I replied your comment on my blog.

    Peter
    .-= home business blog´s last blog ..Link Building: Taking Backlink Building To A Higher Level =-.

    1. Hi Peter,

      Yes I read your answer, seems I will do it by foot, lol. But this could be a really good option to develop a software that can automate this process, it seems like the next step to be taken on that good program.

      Btw, I could download July as well and not only August, so I assume that anyone that joins after those months will still have access to every previous months. Am I right?

        1. Hi Peter,

          Thanks to answer my question. If you did not told me so, I may even leave all those July links untouched just to regret it when they are gone. I just downloaded 1 file from July, but now I had downloaded everything, thanks to you.

  4. Affiliate marketing can be a minefield. The problem is compounded if you are looking for a specific niche for a particular country as it can be so hard to find.

    What would be great would be a database of all the available programs, then again that would require competitors to work together.
    .-= Hubtonomy´s last blog ..How To Determine If A Niche Is Profitable =-.

    1. Hi Hubtonomy,

      Welcome to my blog.

      You are right the problem it is not so easy to overcome and it also depends on your personal needs and technical background as well as how newbie you are.

  5. Thanks Luis. Very relevant as most people do not fully realize the potential of affiliate programs. Although, I’m not sure you have to be a big marketer to have your own affiliate program per se. There are lots of opportunities for turnkey systems selling products that include a simple multi tier affiliate program. Driving traffic is the key. With enough traffic you can have great success and not be a ‘huge’ marketer.

    1. Hi eBooks Resell Rights,

      Welcome to my blog. Actually you don´t ned to be a huge marketer, but when you are small it is best to use some others programs like selling your products using Clickbank, they will save you a lot of time in managing all the process.

    1. Hi Kitchen,

      Did you have your won product to sell?

      If you need a self hosted blog you may start using a Free Hosting like “Free Web Hosting” I use them to host this blog when I started, now it is hosted with Hostgator and it is a paid hosting.

  6. Hi Luis,

    I see your inspired by your offline (restaurant) and online business (affiliate marketing). It’s great you can earn great lessons linking the two. 🙂 In my case, before I enter into an affiliate company, I do first my research on the internet for reliable reviews and testimonials from the persons who really use the affiliate program.

    1. HI Vic,

      That´s what all need to do before joining any program. But also if you will sell your own products you need to choose carefully which program will you use to help sell your stuffs.

  7. That is truth, the affiliate program cannot be chosen without proper knowledge of the product promotion and selling. There are many companies that try to do it right, and there also those which are doing it right. This is just another business decision that will give benefits or loses, there is nothing mysterious about it. If someone is not an expert in affiliate marketing programs, the least he should do is to read some advices like yours, or some ebooks maybe. But I trust free informations the most.
    .-= Tipsy´s last blog ..Pazurki od Eweliny =-.

Leave a Reply to Hubtonomy Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *