How To Find Good Affiliate Programs That Earn Residual Income

Will you decide to become an Marketer? The first choice you have to make is what products or services you will promote. Hopefully you have already researched and found a lucrative market to target, and you have a promotion plan in place to start making money. Now you need to choose good products, services, programs, and merchants that fit into your overall niche and marketing plan.

Choosing programs can be very difficult. For many beginners, it can be a difficult trial and error process for a while. But it doesn't have to be if you apply these key points when deciding on a good programs.

What Commission will you be paid? This tends to be the first thing new affiliates look at, because they want to know how much money they can make with each sale. And most people choose to promote products which offer very high commission rates. What they don't realize is that sometimes you can make much more money with lower commissions.

Really, it's not the commission rate that's the most important. It's the dollar amount you'll be paid. If you choose to promote a product or service that sells for $25 just because you'll earn 75% of the sale, you're only going to get $18.75 each time you make a sale.

While that might look good, there could be much better options. Suppose another product sells for $100, but it only offers 30% commissions. Would you pass it by just because the percent commissions seem lower? Unfortunately many would, and often do. However, on examination you'll realize something: 30% of a $100 sale is $30. Almost twice what you can make with the 75% commissioned product.

So don't make the mistake of choosing products or services based solely on the commission percentage amounts. Think about the actual dollars you'll make instead with a good program.

Conversion Ratio is the next important factor to consider. If you send 100 targeted visitors to an sales page, how many of those visitors will actually pull out their credit card and make a purchase?

In this case, percentages count a lot. If 1% of the people buy, that's a 1% conversion ratio, which means 1 person out of 100 will buy on average. If however, a product has a 10% conversion ratio, then 10 people out of 100 will buy.

If you combine conversion ratios with commission rates, you can get further insight on which product might be the best to promote. Let's say the 75% commission product has a 2% conversion ratio, and the 30% one has a 3%. Since you already know you make more actual dollars with the 30% product, it's a no-brainer to stick with it because it also has a higher conversion ratio. However, if the 75% product has a 10% conversion and the 30% product has a measly 0.5% conversion ratio, you would probably change your mind about which one to promote. Because no matter how much money a product can earn you, it will not be profitable if people won't buy it.

Now let's look at the Sales Page. This is a step many new marketers miss. If you visit the sales page that you'll be sending prospects to, and you see Google AdSense on that page, it might not be a great idea to promote it. Why? Because if you send visitors to the page and they don't buy, they might click the merchant's Adsense Ads and the merchant make money while leaving you out of the picture.

The same applies if the merchant has other links on their page. If they've signed up to someone else's program, and they put those links onto the page you're trying to make sales from, they might make other sales from the links but again you would earn no money.

Another problem can sometimes crop up with merchants who sell physical products. It's not uncommon to find a toll free phone number on the sales pages. The merchant needs to have a contact number so sales aren't lost, but if they make very prominent, chances are the potential customer you sent to the page will just pick up the phone and bypass you all together. Some merchants

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