Having Problems Choosing The Best Affiliate Programs?

My affiliate website won't be complete without products, but sometimes it's hard to pick the best program. Here are some guidelines I use to help make sure I earn good money from my efforts.

Sometimes an affiliate program jumps out at me because it's for a quality product that fits my niche website perfectly. Other times I have a list, and I'm unsure how to choose between them. And sometimes they just flat out look so much alike, I'm really lost.

My knitting website is a good example to show you how to figure this out. I want to offer links to books, ebooks, courses, yarn, and knitting supplies, for starters. There are a million online bookstores, and of course there's Amazon. How do I choose between them? I combine common sense with my own strong preferences.

The first thing I look for in any program is, of course, products that I want to sell. There are a dozen books that I want to review and sell for sure, and those books are sold in most bookstores. Plus, any bookstore worth its salt will order books for you.

I made my final choices about bookstore affiliate programs based on my personal preference for independent bookstores. I don't like supporting stores that purchase books based on how quickly they estimate the books will sell, which they base on national statistics. This pretty much keeps new authors and authors of books with strong regional interest out of the picture.

I also look for bookstores that specialize in something. This will set them apart from the rest. Just because a woman is looking to buy a particular knitting book doesn't mean that she won't browse around for other books, especially if she's looking in a store that specializes in another interest she may have, such as children's books, for example.

As an affiliate, the next most important thing to me is how I earn commissions. My favorite affiliate programs pay me every time my customers return and buy again, forever. From a marketing point of view, this is very important. The hardest thing to do is to get that customer into a buying mood the first time; it's much easier to keep them returning than it is to continually be looking for new customers.

These principles that I've applied to books can be applied to any affiliate program. To those of you who only want to make money and don't care about politics (which may cut into your bottom line)...I really have nothing to say. You will follow your own desires.

With books, I don't pay much attention to commission rates, because they are all pretty much the same. What I do pay attention to is how often commissions are paid, and how simple the commission structure is. If an affiliate does really well with selling a company's products, often a private contract for a higher commission can be negotiated.

I like to "test the waters" with a company, if appropriate, to see what kind of service they give. For example, I emailed a yarn company owner to see if she might be interested in starting an affiliate program. She had just bought the company from another owner, and I realized it was probably premature to ask her, yet I wanted her to have it in the back of her mind as she set up her new business. She wrote me back, a very brief but friendly note, saying it was indeed bad timing but she wouldn't forget about the idea. I considered this an almost perfect response, and definitely have her in the back of my mind as well.

I emailed another yarn company owner, after joining her affiliate program, and told her about my website, asking her if she might be able to put together a box or two of a mixture of the yarns she carries. Many of them are novelty yarns I've never worked with before, and I would like to try them out, designing patterns around them. Her yarns would then be prominently featured within a pattern I distribute around the web for free.

I purposefully chose this rather difficult niche for a website because of my love of knitting, and because of the challenge it offers me as a webmaster. There are very very few yarn companies with affiliate programs, for example, and many of the ones that exist carry many of the same yarns, or, the opposite, are so specialized to make the interest in them limited. So finding affiliate programs that will be successful means combining features to come up with a mix that will be financially successful over time, while keeping my interest and passion alive.

I have to expect that I will join, leave and find other programs over time. I'm glad to be able to share my journey. You can see that, with a bit of creativity and imagination, you can overcome problems with even the most challenging niche.

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