- What would someone visiting your site on your topic need or want?
- How can you help your readers?
- What problems does this product solve and how?
- What kind of person or “perfect customer” are you looking for?
- What kind of searches do potential customers use to find the product or service they need?
- Can you give added value on your website?
- Will the product or service blend in with your website content?
Answer each of the above questions when deciding what to promote.
You want the products or services you are advertising to be helpful to your audience and blend in very well with your content, as well as allow you to create even more content like “reviews of products” or services you have tried and tips for getting the most out of them.
Picking a product to promote can be a crapshoot, unless you do your homework.
This means you should buy the product, check out the customer service. Really look at the website.
- Would you buy from them?
- Are there potential leakage problems like 800 numbers or other areas where your sale may not be tracked?
- List the reasons why you desire the product or why you think others will want it.
- Write your own review of the product.
- Take a video of the package when it arrives, show what is inside and how you use the product.
Just from doing these things, you now already have some unique content for your site.
Where to find products to promote?
My top recommendation for finding products is to stick with the top performing networks first before venturing out into a private program/in-house program. Some of the major factors for my decision are payment, tracking, reporting, return days (cookie life) and availability of creative (banners, articles, videos, instant storefronts and widgets).
This is not to say there are not some excellent in-house programs available that are very profitable and niche specific for you out there. However you will need to do some checking on them before deciding to work with them.
Important Reminder:
Be aware that any program that charges you a fee to sign up is a scam or insists you have to be a customer before you can be an affiliate is not worth your time and trouble. Be sure there is an affiliate manager to contact and that they respond in a reasonable amount of time to your questions.
To find out if a merchant or product retailer has an affiliate program I start out with just doing a search for “product name affiliate” or “company name affiliate”. On the retailers home page the affiliate link is usually at the bottom and will say “affiliate” , “affiliate program” or “partners”. Look at your competition in the market space you plan to enter and see what types of ads they are running. Click on a few to see where they go and if you see the “affiliates” page linked at the bottom. Make a spread sheet of all the programs or products you are interested in promoting.