Choose an Affiliate Program with seven rules

If you are new to Affiliate marketing it is important that you use some guidelines to help you choose the best Affiliate program. They say rules are meant to be broken but if you are a beginner then its best to have some rules for choosing an Affiliate program when you start out.
Here are some guidelines for you; ( see also the note at the end of this article)

1) Don't just pick the first affiliate program that you see- particularly if signing up is going to cost you any money. If you are going to integrate an Affiliate program into an existing website business then you need to make sure it is a good fit. This is less of an issue of course if you decide that you are going to build the website around the affiliate program - but that's another issue.
If you are integrating an Affiliate program with an existing website product then he product you choose to promote will reflect on you and your business - so take time to thoroughly examine the affiliate program first.

2) Consider testing the Affiliate product yourself. This can be money well invested. However, if you do not feel that you want to do this then do some searching an see what you can find out about the product. Use the Internet and do a standard search and see what others are saying. See who else is promoting the Affiliate product and how they are doing it.

3) Read all of the Terms and conditions, rules, restrictions, or guidelines associated with the affiliate program. Many affiliate programs prohibit their products from being advertised on websites that display pornography, foul language or other offensive content. If you know the rules then you will avoid the risk of being denied from the program or later banned.

4) Make sure the product relates to your your website or business, in some way.

5) If you really like an Affiliate product and your existing website does not relate to it then consider if you could create a website around that niche. Think about what will be involved in doing this and marketing this. This can be an extremely profitable way to do Affiliate marketing -- but only if you are serious about it.

6) What is the Affiliate commission rate and how dear is the product. Consider the volume of sales that you might reasonably generate from the product. Think about the commission you will earn on each sale. Some products may have high sales but low commission. Some may have low sales but high commission. Do the Math.

Commission rates for affiliates can vary from as low as three percent of each sale made to programs that pay around fifteen percent and more.

7) Trust your own judgment - at the end of the day its your business. As long as your mistakes are not very costly you will learn from them You may learn how other Affiliate marketers operate and even how some of the Affiliate product suppliers work which could be your next step up the ladder.

If carefully chosen, you can easily make a full-time living just with affiliate programs. You will usually need to sign up with more than one but believe me it can be done by almost anyone.

Tip: When you leave this page/site a search box will pop up. This will show you a vast range of Affiliate programs that you can check out and search. This is meant to be helpful rather than annoying!