AFFILIATE SCHEMES AND MARKETING PROGRAMMES

Affiliate schemes and marketing programmes, choosing the best products and affiliate schemes will determine how profitable your website becomes.

The value and nature of the products you are promoting will also have an effect on your earnings as an affiliate. You might decide, for example, to promote a merchant who sells high end expensive plasma TVs. People don't replace their TVs on a daily or weekly basis, so the volume of sales might not be very high. But, when you do get a sale, a commission of say 10% could see you earning £300 from one affiliate transaction.

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Personally, I prefer to go for low value, high volume products instead. An example might be batteries. Because they are cheap, you will only earn a few pounds per sale. However, because batteries are consumable items, you are likely to make a lot more sales and so could end up bringing in £30 to £40 per day if you do things right.

Related to this last point, there is the question of pay-per-lead versus pay-per-sale affiliate programmes. The examples we have looked at so far are all pay-per-sale situations where you only earn your affiliate commission once a purchase has actually been made. The advantage of this is that, as with the TV example, you could earn several hundred pounds in commission just from one click on an affiliate banner hosted on your website.

The alternative is pay-per-lead where you get paid just for someone filling in their contact details on the merchant's site. This approach tends to be used for products and services where the customer needs to talk to someone or meet with them prior to purchasing - for example, mortgages, conservatories, bank accounts, removals, financial advice, etc. It is much easier to earn commissions for leads rather than sales because the customer only has to complete a form and does not have to part with any money before you earn your affiliate commission. But the flip side is that the commission will be lower.

So, let's summarise what we've covered so far.

In essence, becoming an affiliate is the online equivalent of becoming a sales person for someone else's product or service. Instead of going to their office and asking for a job as a commission-only salesman, you are agreeing to send them sales or leads in return for an agreed amount of percentage in each case.

Affiliates usually find merchants via an affiliate network and between them the network and the merchant will provide the affiliate with various promotional banners and linking codes that the affiliate can put on his website to advertise the merchant. These sales tools will contain an affiliate tracking code which is unique to that particular affiliate and which will be used by the affiliate network to make sure that the affiliate's sales are all properly recorded and assigned to his account.

The best affiliate programmes are generally those which are closely related to the content of your website or to something which you know a lot about and which you can therefore write convincingly about. The highest paying affiliate program is not necessarily the best and you need to take into account factors such as the merchant's website, the quality and nature of the product and how in demand it is.

The best affiliate schemes.