Affiliate Marketing Training:
How to Find The Best Affiliate Programs

By Sarah Jamieson

Affiliate Marketing Training: How to Find the Best Affiliate Programs? To assess the best affiliate programs in your market, you'll need to make sure the numbers will work with the type of online marketing you want to do.

Let’s say you can get a 75% commission as an affiliate for a $97 eBook. If you already have an email list you can promote the book too, congratulations.

Sending the emails costs practically nothing, and since they're coming from a trusted source (you!), more people will buy than in a "cold" marketing situation.

However, if you need to pay for marketing, then you'll need to do a little math before diving in ...

Your potential commission is $72.75 per eBook sold. This percentage is a good commission on Clickbank and it attracts many potential affiliates to join a merchant’s program.

Commission rates vary and many don’t exceed 50%. Clickbank allows a maximum commission of 75%. This may seem like a great deal – but it’s still difficult to make the numbers work!

The merchant may suggest that affiliates use a range of say 20 keywords and provide ad suggestions. Most affiliates in the program use these same keywords and this drives up the AdWords cost-per-click – especially if the eBook is "hot".

In addition, many affiliates are not aware of the Google Quality Score and this can lead to an affiliate's AdWords campaigns being rejected or even to Google shutting down an affiliate's account.

If you do want to use PPC for an affiliate promotion, what might the numbers look like?

• A < 1% conversion rate is typical for online cold sales – but even if you say 1% it takes approximately 1,000 clicks to make 10 sales.
• Even if your cost per click is only $1.00, those 1,000 clicks will cost you approximately $1,000 ($1.00 x 1,000).
• Your 10 sales bring in $727.50 ($72.75 x 10).
• Your LOSS = - $272.50 ($727.50 - $1,000)

I don't want to discourage you, but the reason I ran through this scenario is to show how easy it is to get carried away with enthusiasm and not do a bit of math before you jump in.

And despite what you'll hear, it's often just not possible to make a profit promoting an affiliate program with pay-per-click advertising. Even merchants often take a loss on the first sale, because PPC can be expensive.

That's why it's so important to run your affiliate marketing like a business.

At a minimum, that means a unique selling proposition, your own website and quality content, and an email list.

Acquiring a customer is the hardest and most expensive part of marketing, so you must build your own email list and backend sales to raise your profit margin.

Quality content will help you achieve high search engine rankings, attract social media followers, and turn visitors into loyal repeat buyers.

Affiliate Marketing Training > Do Affiliate Marketing Programs Work? > What is Affiliate Marketing? > How to Find the Best Affiliate Programs > Affiliate Marketing Pitfalls >