How to Choose the Best Product for Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is one of the best ways of making money. It has the potential of generating more income than some of the popular pay per click programs like Adsense and Chitika. A major percentage of John Chow and Problogger’s income is from affiliate marketing.

In Affiliate Marketing, you are promoting somebody else’s product and when somebody buys a product from your affiliate link, you are credited with a commission. The amount of commission you get on each sale depends on the owner of the product. (Usually, the commission also depends on the price. If the price of the product is high, then you can expect the commission will be on the higher side.)

Now, as you’ve understood the importance of affiliate marketing for making money online, you have to search for a good product for your affiliate marketing campaign.

A good product is the one, which can help you generate more sales and hence make you more money. Good products have certain properties, that make it a right candidate for your affiliate marketing campaign. These are as follows:

1. Relevance :

The product should be relevant to your blog or website or it should match the interests of your newsletter subscribers. If I have a blog on blogging tips niche, then I should promote web hosts rather than promoting mobile gadgets.

If you keep your products relevant, your chances of converting are pretty higher as opposed to a product which is highly irrelevant.

2. Commission per sale:

It always good to get some more money out of each sale. More commission per sale is a great attraction. Many bloggers even prefer getting 1 sale at a higher commission than many sales at a lower commission. 1 sale of the higher commission product will be able to compensate for many sales of the low commission products.

For Example, Epic Traffic Systems pays 1000$ per commission which is equal to 120 Problogger Book commissions.

3.  Product Quality

Recommending a quality product has two benefits. Firstly, it ramps up the chances of getting better conversion rate, which means more money! Secondly, it keeps your readers satisfied, as they are buying something which is worth buying and not a scam.

I like WPWebHost because I have used it for my website and my experience with it has been really great. Hence, I will recommend it to others as it is totally worth it.

4. Value for Money

A product which is a total value of money has very high chance of getting sold. Many products are heavily priced, but they do not deliver what they are supposed to. If your readers don’t get their money’s worth, they will blame you for it.

Elegant Themes is an awesome theme club, as you have to pay a meagre 19.95$ per year and you get at  least 5-10 themes each year which is like 4$ per theme – very cheap. And the themes are not low quality, they are worth more than 60$.

5. Coupon Codes

Some products offer coupons to their affiliates and some don’t. Coupon codes boost sales. They are equally effective online as they are offline (You see a lot of coupons for 10-80% off on certain restaurant). They can multiply your sales. You are actually bribing your readers to buy the product from your website. Your readers will readily take this bribe, as they are willing to buy the product.

Coupon Codes can be of two types:

1. General Coupons – General coupons are coupons that are open to all. Anybody can use it, even if they have not been referred by an affiliate. If the cookies are deleted by the referred user, there are chances that you lose on your affiliate commissions.
2. User Defined Coupons – User defined coupons are coupons that can be specified by the affiliate. These coupons will belong to the affiliate. Even if cookies are deleted, you will not lose on your affiliate commissions.

I personally offer “bloggodown” as the coupon code for 9.94$ off on the first bill of Hostgator and it has helped increase my conversions. Michael Dunlop has also seen an increase in his sales due to the addition of user defined coupons.

Obviously user defined coupons are much better than general coupons. Also, an affiliate program that offers coupon code is better than one that doesn’t offer any, right?

6. Recurring vs One Time

Products can be of two types:

1. One Time Sale:

These products are usually ebooks, single themes etc. These products are usually one of those which do not require any support or the support is not part of the whole package. As they are one time sell, the commission is also one time.

2. Recurring Sale:

Products like membership sites, web hosting are the ones that get paid every month or every year. These products include support services required for the user. These Products offer one time or recurring commission (depending on the affiliate program).

BlueHost provides a one time commission, whereas DreamHost provides a recurring commission although both products a recurring sale

It is always good to promote a product which has a lifetime earning potential i.e  has a recurring sale. Even if you are not promoting any new product, you will still be earning a recurring income from it.

7. Tier Affiliate Programs

Tier Affiliate programs are programs that offer commission if another affiliate earned a commission and he signed up for the product from your affiliate link. This means, that even if somebody is promoting a product, you’re a still getting a percentage of the sale. The only thing you have to do is to refer good affiliate marketers to the product and your job is done. You will be making money without any effort.

8. Ramping up commissions

Many product owners reward their best affiliates with either rewards or by increasing their commissions. This is a definite attraction for any affiliate marketer.

Aaron wall’s SEO Book offers 50$ per commission at first and commission per sale increases to 150$ when the number of sales start increasing.

An affiliate program having all these characteristics will be really good, but that is an almost rare possibility. As an affiliate marketer, you should chose a product which has most of these characteristics.

What do you think is a good product for affiliate marketing? What do you look in it’s affiliate program?