Selecting The Right Product and Merchant to Affiliate

As both an affiliate marketer and product owner I see a lot of good and poor merchants who are looking for you, the affiliate marketer, to represent their product. Read on for tips and signs of a good product and product owner to represent as an affiliate ....
Download the ebook version of this if you like which contains resale rights. You may sell the book version of this for whatever you think it's worth keeping all links and material intact.

http://kirkhamsebooks.com/Marketing/Articles/SelectingAProduct.htm

Where to Find Products

Well, as an author and product owner obviously I'd like you to pick me , I even have a large collection of books and software I've either written or acquired with resale rights so you can own them outright and start your own collection of products for which you may wish to utilize the talents of affiliate marketers, but if I want to find another product to represent, first, I'll check with those people with whom I have established a relationship. Not finding a suitable product for my marketing needs with them I may check my Clickbank storefront and do a search for the type of product for which I'm looking. This is also a quick way to get a start as a free version is also offered.

Although an owner of a Pro Storefront myself, I admit to enjoying searching for and marketing individual products as well as writing my own. The next place I'll look is the Paydotcom market place. Both Clickbank and Paydotcom offer free signups for affiliates. Finally last but not least, I'll check Payloadz merchants who have affiliate programs.

Now that you know where, let's move onto some additional questions.

Are You Interested in The Product?

If this is your first affiliate product pick something you're interested in yourself. People buy for emotional reasons and later on figure out logical reasons why they bought. It's much easier for you to be excited and discuss the benefits of a product you're interested in and people will sense your excitement!

Anyone who has known me more than one day knows I'm a martial artist. I'll discuss the benefits of martial arts training all day to anyone who will listen. People take martial arts for fitness, self-defense, weight loss ... well, you get the idea.

If this isn't your first product and you want to find a popular product my storefront shows the number of downloads. Another way to find popular products is to open up my Submission Sites Clickable ebook, go to the list of article submission sites (a good free way of marketing) click on a site to open the web page and see what topics on which marketers are writing articles.

Does The Product Fit Your Website?

Even though I love martial arts, if I'm selecting a product for my education subindex or Steve Weber's full time pet supply site, I'll need to select a more appropriate product or, since domain names and web space is so cheap now, just start another website.

Will The Product Sales Page Help You or Hurt You

Look for leaks. A leak is a chance a prospect may click off the sales page without ordering a product for which you'd be paid. An example of a leak is my own sales page for my Affiliate Page Maker.

Why do I have leaks on my own product page? It's a $2.00 product with resale and giveaway rights. I can't feed the family on that too much unless they upgrade or order one of the other products. Notice the 2.00 order link takes the prospect to a page showing the difference between the $2.00 version and the enhanced version, thus helping the guest see the advantages of the enhanced program. This is referred to as an upsell.

Here's an example of a page designed to target martial artist interested in increasing their striking power Notice the testimonials with a final one from a female champion near the order link who read my book. I ask for an optin via my self-defense tips newsletter. The only leak is the search box at the very bottom. Since I have such a huge website, I'd rather people stay on my site instead of the search engines.

Look for multiple order options. let's say for example someone is trying to sign up Paydotcom affiliates You look at the sales page and discover the merchant is offering a Clickbank order option on the same page. That means there's a 50 - 50 chance of you, as an affiliate, being paid for your work.

An exception to this rule would be my Paypal Order Form Maker which, like the Affiliate Page Maker offers a cheap promotional resale rights version of the program. As long as the purchase link inside the program will give you credit if prospects buy the full version later on this will help you and not hurt you. Something I recently started doing to make my affiliates are paid is to offer custom resale rights versions to anyone who has ordered the full version with my affiliate's link right in the program he or she sells or gives away.

Is There Contact Information?

A few years ago I decided to attempt to increase my affiliate base by going through the Clickbank Market Place and contacting the merchants. My plan was to become their affiliate and give them my affiliate information in exchange. What I discovered was a severe lack of contact information on these pages. Some of these pages didn't even have offers for newsletters, also known as ezines which is short for electronic magazine. Based on that experience I wrote What Does a Good Sales Web Page Need? Most merchants still don't have contact information, but those that have newsletters will often respond to their readers. I'd say I'm about 95% successful in receiving emails back from merchants by subscribing to their newsletters and emailing them from there.

Why else do you want to subscribe to their newsletters? To check for leaks in the newsletter itself! It won't help you even if you have a one year cookie like Paydotcom if the merchant's newsletter offers payment directly to Paypal.

Are There Affiliate Tools Available?

I really don't see this from merchants as much as I'd like to, but articles, book covers and email templates do make an affiliate's business easier. Naturally I've done my best to provide tools for my affiliates. Any articles I've written can be changed by my affiliates to their affiliate link using software I've written. My index page of my products produced by my HTML Indexer can be copied and pasted into emails with my affiliate's link and any graphics or covers for my books and software can easily be taken and used by my affiliates.

Conclusion

Finding the right product and merchant is fairly easy following the above steps. I hope you consider representing my products as well.

About the Author

J. Richard Kirkham is a dual certified teacher and martial arts instructor. He has expertise in alternative teaching methods and positive reinforcement methodology. He's written several books in the printable electronic format and has made downloadable videos and DVDs. He currently resides in Honolulu with his wife Jan and son Hunter. Feel free to visit Mr. Kirkham's website at http://KirkhamsEbooks.com or you may email him at help@kirkhamsebooks.com .

You may get the downloadable version of this mini-ebook with resale and giveaway rights by joining Affiliate Tools

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/AffiliateTools/files/