Work from home affiliate programs avoiding merchant traps

by Justin Boyce

Many affiliate programs are written and designed so that the program owner gets more than ninety percent of the benefits of your advertising efforts. Here are the criteria and a guideline to building your own profitable program for earning income from affiliate programs.

Only a very few people in most affiliate programs ever make any income and it has very little to do with the amount of traffic or the advertising techniques they use. Most follow the merchant’s guideline and use the provided promotional tools this is the first step towards failing miserably.

First of all, you must research an affiliate program that is profitable and that other affiliates are indeed making money from this.
A good place to start is Google Adwords. If you see a program being advertised regularly for certain keyword phrases it’s a pretty safe bet it makes money. Another criteria to this is if the program have a long term record and is consistent. There are numerous matrix type programs that come out with a bang and a few months later slip into oblivion as new members find it difficult to obtain paid up members underneath them.

Any affiliate program you choose must have the following criteria.

A transparent hierarchy and a reliable contact system. You must be able to find the program owner and they must be easily contactable not having to go through manned help desks or have to resort to doing espionage type searches to find their details just so you can query their program.

You can set up a system where by you bypass the merchant’s squeeze or capture pages
using redirecting software so that you can capture the interested parties details and provide follow-up information. You also want to use redirect software that mask or hides your affiliate URL from the prospective buyer. Many people are now aware they can get products cheaper by buying from their own affiliate link so by masking your URL so it appears they were sent through to the homepage and not an affiliate link will automatically increase your chances of a successful sale. Of course creating your own sales copy pages is even better as you control the visitor’s options right up to the buying process.

conditions. Acceptable payment terms and transparent conditions that you understand. For example Click bank has certain criteria that must be meet before you get your first payment for example a number of sales must be obtained using at least two different credit card and being at least from A money back warranty and a reputable payment processor I use Paypal as one of my own criteria as it has well founded reasons why some programs aren’t acceptable under Paypal Mastercard and Visa and not using paypal before you are eligible for a check.