Choosing an affiliate product: three important considerations

There are literally thousands of affiliate products you as an online marketer can promote and sell. Choosing an affiliate product or products that are right for you and your campaign can seem at first glance to be a bewildering and daunting task. But it's really a simple matter when you recognize a few important considerations. This article will take you through three important things to consider when choosing an affiliate product.

1. Choose your campaign topic first, then your product.
Many people make the mistake of first choosing an affiliate product to promote, then building a campaign around it. Back in the day when affiliate marketing was just getting started and there were few affiliate products to promote that strategy worked well. Today, however, there are so many products to choose from that you don't need to use product availability to determine your choice of marketing campaigns. You will be far better off first choosing a campaign topic that matches your level of passion and knowledge. Once you have done that, you will rule out the vast majority of available affiliate products and still have plenty of relevant ones to choose from. This will make choosing an affiliate product and effectively marketing it so much easier.

2. Choose a high quality affiliate program
You can easily make a list of possible relevant affiliate programs either by browsing through affiliate networks such as ShareASale, Commission Junction, ClickBank or PepperJam by category, or you can enter your product idea + affiliate into Google and go through the results. In any case you are going to be looking for the merchant or company with the highest quality affiliate program. A high quality affiliate program is one where the commissions are generous, the average sale amount is high, the pay is frequent, the pay threshold is low, and the affiliate support is high. You also want to look for the ability to link to specific products and the quality of the promotional materials such as banners and special promotions available to affiliates. Scoring the best in all these areas won't be the only determining factor (you still have to evaluate the company and product), but you should be able to rule out some of the least favorable affiliate programs. This will further narrow down your list, making choosing an affiliate product that much easier.

3. Evaluate the company and the products
Once you have selected several possible companies with good affiliate programs, you will want to familiarize yourself with the rest of the website to evaluate the overall pros and cons of each merchant. There will be considerations that are unique to certain products, but universal considerations are product price and quality, customer service, appearance and ease of navigating the web site. These things can make a huge difference to the success of your marketing efforts so do take the time to truly evaluate each company. With so many companies having affiliate programs, the competition for affiliate marketers like you is high, so choose the winners.

Once you have chosen an affiliate product, or narrowed your choice down to a few products and vendors, you need to apply for each one's affiliate program. Some companies have an in-house affiliate program, meaning you deal directly with the merchant on all aspects of the affiliate program. Other companies contract with an affiliate network to administer their affiliate program but you still deal directly with the company for affiliate support. In either case, you apply for the company's affiliate program by following the directions. Affiliate applications can take anywhere from a few hours to a week to process, so once you have decided to join an affiliate program, start the application process immediately.

Choosing an affiliate product is greatly simplified when you use these important considerations to evaluate and narrow down your options. This process will help you to easily choose the very best affiliate product options for you out of the thousands of possibilities.

About the Author

Choosing an affiliate product is one of many online marketing related topics I cover on my website Online Marketing 101. Visit Online Marketing 101 to learn more about online marketing.