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Article
Choosing a merchant and picking affiliate program
© AffiliateSeeking - This article is not allowed to be re-published but can be linked to.
So, your website is ready for affiliate marketing? If you deem that your website has passed the basic requirements and is market-ready, the next thing to do is to search and choose for the right merchant and affiliate program with the best deals.
Choosing Your Merchant
There are lots of affiliate merchants that are looking for affiliate websites to promote their products and services. In fact, they are just one URL away from your browser. If you are serious to realize your website's revenue potential, you should carefully pick the right merchant owning or selling the right products which your site can refer. Failing to do so may result having lesser revenue to none even if your website rendered a good number of referrals.
Basically, acquire a list of merchants who look for affiliates and sells products or services that your website can recommend. It must be closely related to your website's specialization or niche. This is very important because you need to provide qualified leads to your visitors. As a webmaster, you must earn your visitor's trust by imparting them quality services through your website's contents and leads that point to destinations that the visitors might be looking.
Let us say for example, if your website's theme is about Information Technology which talks about computer-related theories like computer programming, information systems and animation, you would have the credibility to recommend or suggest to your visitors to buy a specific I.T. book if they want to learn more about a topic. This is a quality lead because your visitors might actually be looking them on your website. On the other way around, it would be completely irrelevant or inconsistent if you recommend books about traveling or promote kitchenware on a website that deals about computers.
When you found merchants that slanted towards your website's type, do not rush to apply yet. Have a good research of each merchant and make comparisons of their compensation models, incentives and benefits. Research how many affiliate members the merchant website has, the type of payment and their minimum pay-outs. Read their terms and conditions for you to be able to identify their strong and weak points. Check also if it is a local or international merchant, because you would be dealing a currency conversion issue if your future merchant is the latter. It would be no good if you receive commissions worth ten Singaporean dollars if converting it to your own currency would cost thirty dollars.
Picking Affiliate Program
Now that you have prospective merchants, the next thing you need to know is about their affiliate programs or the way they pay affiliate websites for the incoming traffic. Affiliate programs are merchant-dependent and usually they have their own mechanisms on tracking down sites that referred them.
Currently, there are three major affiliate programs that are being implemented on the affiliate network market:
1 Pay Per Click (PPC) - The merchant, which plays the role of an advertiser, pays an amount of money every time a visitor clicks on the advertiser's ad that leads through their site. In short terms, the merchant is actually buying the traffic from affiliate websites. This is common and effective for them because they render no cost to affiliate websites if there is no traffic coming and yet their ads are still displayed on the pages. The most popular affiliate program present on most sites is Google's AdSense. This program is also called Cost Per Click (CPC).
2 Pay Per Sale (PPS) - This is when merchants compensate affiliate websites only if the visitor they referred generated some purchases or sales on their site. The affiliate websites usually get a percentage of every sale depending on the merchant. This is also called revenue sharing or Cost Per Sale (CPS).
3 Pay Per Lead (PPL) - The merchant pays an amount to every visitor who performed desired actions after being referred by affiliate websites to their website. The visitor must perform actions such as signing-up forms, subscribing to merchant's services, or creating accounts. This is also known as Cost Per Lead (CPL) or Cost Per Acquisition (CPA).
Minor affiliate programs also exist in the web such as Pay Per Call, and Pay Per Impression (PPI) or Cost Per Thousand (CPM), where advertisers pay a certain amount when the affiliates generate traffic to their website from 1000 unique visitors.
Good affiliate programs can be determined by better commissions and payouts, offer greater potential for growth, and provide clear definitive structure of the business system. Choose the merchant with the right affiliate program you want to work for. Make efforts to provide your customers with quality information and recommend best products - and then you will find yourself in the beginning of a lucrative affiliate business. After all, revenues depend largely on your website's performance and your efforts as the webmaster.
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