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Working With
Affiliate Programs |
by:
Jude
Wright |
Working With Affiliate
Programs
by Jude Wright (c) 2004
Everywhere you look
you see affiliate program offers for
every product or service
that you can think of. Some have
fully automated systems that
sell high volumes of hard
products all over the world. In
case you don't know, "hard"
products are those that you can
touch...unlike an ebook or
downloadable web template. Many
affiliate programs have
several thousand affiliates and one
or two of the bigger
companies have over one million
affiliates.
What are the advantages of joining an
affiliate program?
They provide a ready-made business.
This is a very big plus
for those people who want to earn
some kind of living off
the Internet but lack the knowledge
or inclination to set up
a business by themselves.
Commissions and rewards are generally good, and the more
established programs offer a real chance of advancement to
higher and better-paid levels.
Other affiliates are
usually on hand to offer practical
support.
What are
the limitations?
You are restricted in your promotional
activities due to the
fact that you do not actually own the
affiliate site they
give you. You won't be able to put such
things as banners,
images, links, meta tags, etc. onto your
page.
The URL of your affiliate page is often either too long
or
contains such awkward things as question marks, which many
Search Engines will not index.
Any promotional ads or
articles have probably already been
used by thousands of
other people and consequently may have
lost its impact,
making it more difficult to achieve sales
or referrals.
If the program you have joined has not yet established
itself
(or in some cases even if it has), then you may
encounter
problems with payments owed to you not being
honored. You
also run the risk of low quality products or
sub-standard
statistics that do not accurately record how
many referrals
or sales you have made.
You may be required to purchase a
minimum quantity of the
product on a regular basis before you
start to qualify for
commissions or even before you can
become an affiliate.
You may not get the technical or
affiliate support you might
expect from the company. This may
be due to inadequate
staffing, or the company's negligence.
Other people in your downline do nothing to promote the
program.
At least four of the above limitations can be
overcome with
a little time and effort. You could, for
example, come up
with fresher ads to promote the program
(provided this is
allowed).
If the company supplies
the email addresses of people in
your downline, then you
could offer to help the less active
members. Very often these
people are passive not because
they are lazy or apathetic but
merely because they don't
know HOW to promote effectively!
your guidance could mean
the difference between no sales or
referrals and healthy
downlines and residual incomes.
As regards promoting your actual page, here are a couple of
little tricks that should overcome a number of
restrictions:
Cloak your Affiliate URL to stop hijackers Affiliate Masker
While this will not help you to get listed on the major
Search Engines, it will make your web page easier for
prospects to remember and type into their browser's address
bar.
Go to your affiliate page. Place your mouse pointer
anywhere
on the page and right click once. In the drop-down
box
choose "View Source". This will display the HTML for the
page. Save this to your hard drive as a HTML document using
the "Save As" function. Upload the page to your web site.
If
you don't have a web site then get some free web space
from
one of these:
http://www.tripod.com/
http://www.fortunecity.com/
http://www.hypermart.net/index.gsp
http://www.coolchat.com/
http://www.crosswinds.net/
http://www.htmlpublishing.com/
http://www.freehomepages.com/
http://www.pageproducer.com/
Submit your 'new' page to the Search Engines. You are also
now able to place banner codes, links, images, testimonials,
in fact anything you want onto these pages, because you are
in control of the HTML. A word of caution, though. Don't
change the actual HTML of your original affiliate page. Just
put the other stuff, like banners etc, around it.
Making
this "mirror page" of your affiliate page will
dramatically
improve your advertising options.
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