Affiliate Marketing In’s and Out’s.......How To Choose The Right Products

When you consider all the products and programs that are capable of generating affiliate income, it can be mighty difficult choosing which ones have the most potential.

In most instances, you won’t know for certain until you actually start promoting any given product. But there are factors that can help diminish the risk of choosing products that have little or no potential.

1. First and foremost, you need to establish whether or not there’s even a viable demand for a product. Aside from determining if people want the product, you have to find out what type of people would be interested and if you can easily reach that target audience.

2. How good is the product sales page? If it doesn’t look as though it can convert visitors into buyers, you have to decide how much work it will take on your part to override that particular drawback. Then you need to decide if it’s worth the extra effort you’ll invest.

Overall, you have to decide whether the website will help or hinder your ability to make sales. Go with your instincts. If you don’t feel comfortable with the look, the sales copy, or the order process, chances are the average viewer won’t either.

3. Can you make enough profit by promoting the product? Some owners reward their affiliates by giving them generous commissions while others merely offer a very small percentage. For the most part, those differences are associated with two very specific categories… digital and physical products.

For example, you can usually make at least 50% commission selling ebooks and software products. With physical items such as vitamins, print books, and pet products, an affiliate commission can be relatively low (on average, somewhere between 5% and 10%).

Although the percentage is important, it also depends on the price of the product. If you’re selling an exercise machine that retails for $1800, even a minimal 10% commission will gain you $180 for each sale that you make.

On the other hand, if you’re an affiliate for Amazon ( http://www.amazon.com ), you’ll be dealing with items that most often carry a very low sales price. In order to gain any substantial level of income, you’ll need to move an incredibly large volume of products.

4. The quality of the product is extremely important. If you yourself don’t feel confident about how good it is or how well it performs, it’s going to be difficult for you to launch a successful promotional campaign, much less maintain it over an extended period of time.

5. You need to have the ability to track and monitor everything related to your affiliate activities. That would include things like the number of visitors you send to each sales page, how many of them actually made a purchase, and running sales and refund statistics.

Make certain that you can do that, either through the program or using your own independent tracking device. This will keep you abreast of each product’s performance, allowing you to determine which campaigns need to be tweaked, increased, or dropped altogether.