Choosing Affiliate Programs
Choosing the right affiliate programs for your unique situation may play a role in how successfully you make money through affiliate publishing. Poor affiliate programs will leave you high and dry, and that's not what you want for your web site.
Relevant Affiliate Programs
It seems obvious, but it's still worth mentioning that you need to pick affiliate programs which are relevant to your site's/blog's content. If you have a web site about cats and you're trying to recommend a good web site to buy kite building materials, it's just not going to work.
Research shows that you need to make your advertisements and affiliate links relevant to your target audience, or they may as well not be there at all.
Choose Affiliate Programs You Like
Make sure the web sites you're linking to are professional, and that they're the kind of web site you would be willing to buy something from. If you wouldn't be willing to spend money on the service or product you're recommending, nobody else will be either.
Affiliate Commissions
The amount of commission each affiliate pays out is worth taking into account when choosing your affiliate programs, but it's definitely not the most important aspect. The higher commission affiliate programs won't necessarily make you the most money.
If one affiliate program pays you a hundred dollars per sale, but they get very few conversions, you might consider signing up for the affiliate program that pays less for commissions but gets more conversions.
Second Tier Affiliate Programs
When possible, try to pick affiliate programs with second tier commissions. That way if users sign up for the affiliate program you could make commissions through them, too.
Affiliate Cookies
Try to choose affiliate programs which have the longest possible cookie retention time.
Cookies retain information about the user who is linked to your affiliate from your site. If the user leaves but comes back later - before the cookie has expired - you still get the commission.
This is absolutely vital. The longer the cookie retention time is the better. Most people won't buy something right away, but may shop around a little, or wait to get their wife's permission or for payday or something. The longer the cookies last the better chance you have of making a commission off people.
Don't Sign Up for Too Many Or Too Few Affiliate Programs
Having too few affiliate programs has the obvious downside of not giving your users enough options. This limits your potential conversions, and therefore the potential of more money.
On the flip side, if you have too many affiliate programs, you could run into some other problems. For one thing, it will be hard to keep track of them all. You don't want to make some money through a program only to forget you're even signed up with them among all your other ones and lose out on valuable profit. Additionally, you don't want to overload your site or blog with too many or you'll overwhelm users and scare them away.
