If you’re just starting an Internet home business and you’ve decided to become an affiliate marketer here are some things to remember when looking for an affiliate program to join. First of all you’re starting a home business online to make money, whether you’re looking for a part time income or you want to quit your job and eventually become a full time affiliate marketer. Therefore your primary consideration should be commission and this can be broken down into three areas of concern. First, what is the commission rate offered by the affiliate company for each sale?
Obviously you want to find an affiliate program that offers a good commission rate. The good programs will offer commission rates of anywhere from 50% to 75%. The reason for these high payouts is the fact that companies make most of their money not from the initial sales but from up selling customers after that first purchase. Another reason for these high rates is to keep affiliates motivated to make more sales. With the thinking being the more you make per sale the more sales you will want to make.
Another important consideration with regard to commission is how you are paid. There are basically three payment methods available: pay per sale, pay per click and pay per lead. Pay per sale is the most popular type of affiliate program online today. Simply put you are paid a commission on each sale you make. Companies prefer this method because they are only paying for actual sales and not for leads or traffic which may not generate any income.
Pay per click programs reward the affiliate each time a potential customer clicks on an ad on the affiliate’s home business website and lands on the company’s site. These programs of course don’t guarantee any sales from these visitors and therefore aren’t as popular as pay per sale programs. With the pay per lead model a company will pay an amount for each lead the affiliate provides them. This lead could be in the form of a potential customer’s contact information or an expression of interest in the company’s product by the visitor.
A third concern with regard to commission is how are your sales tracked by the company? There are essentially three ways of tracking your transactions: HTML or mirror pages, CGI tracking and cookie tracking. With mirror pages the company provides each affiliate with an identical sales page which is differentiated by a tracking code to identify each affiliate. When someone makes a purchase from your page the company identifies your page by the code provided and you are credited with the sale.
This type of tracking isn’t recommended and is starting to die out because you cannot track your sales in real time and you’re placing all of your faith in the company to track your sales and pay your commission. Also most affiliate directories will not list companies who use this method to track deals. It’s recommended to stay away from affiliate programs that use this method of tracking because it isn’t very reliable or professional.
The second type of tracking employed by affiliate companies is CGI scripting which places an affiliate’s tracking code in their URL. This identifies the affiliate responsible for the transaction and credits their account accordingly. This also isn’t a very popular tracking method because from an affiliate’s point of view it makes it very difficult for the potential client to remember their url and if they reconsider and go back to make a purchase the customer is most likely going back to the company’s main website and the affiliate doesn’t get credit for the sale. This type of tracking isn’t recommended as well because it’s very easy to lose sales and commission using CGI script.
The third method used to track sales is called cookie tracking which according to Wikipedia is: a piece of text stored by a user’s web browser. A cookie can be used for authentication, storing site preferences, shopping cart contents, the identifier for a server-based session, or anything else that can be accomplished through storing textual data.” Simply put a website places bits of information on a visitor’s hard drive so it can identify them if they come back later.
Affiliate’s like this tracking technique because cookies remember who previous visitors are and where they came from because the cookie is encoded with the affiliate’s ID so they can get credit for sales from follow up visits even to the company’s website. Another advantage is the affiliate can check their sales in real time to make sure they are receiving credit for their deals. Programs using this type of tracking are highly recommended.
A final thought before deciding upon an affiliate program is the marketing materials provided. Most of the higher rated companies provide excellent advertising content for your home business website such as banners, pop ups, testimonials, videos etc. It’s best to avoid programs that don’t provide this type of support because the cost and time involved developing your own will certainly cut into your profits.
These are just some of the main considerations to keep in mind before jumping into affiliate marketing as a home based business. There are many affiliate programs to choose from online and armed with this information you should be able to distinguish between the pretenders and the professionals in this field.