Simply conduct a search online on the term ?Best Affiliate Programs? and you'll soon be flooded with a whole list of merchants promoting various affiliate programs. These affiliate products range from (very commonly) informational products, to service consultancies, right up to physical products (such as cameras and home theater systems).



While the range of these products may all seem worthwhile to spend you time and effort to promote on your websites, are there any so called guidelines or factors one should look out for? And most importantly, any ?red flags? to watch out for in such affiliate programs?

What about the commission payout? Isn't that important as well? While that may entice a lot of affiliates into promoting such products, one should also be aware of its rate of refunds made. Just imagine, spending all your effort pushing these products on your website (and worse still, through pay per click advertising) only to find that at the end of the day, you face more concerns pertaining to refunds, rather than profits made per sale.

As a general rule of thumb, the following factors should be considered:

a)Always diversify amongst the various affiliate programs available even for a particular given niche. That way, you'll know eventually which one is a performer and which one is not;

b)If you represent 10 affiliate programs, don't place them all on the same keyword-focused content page. Instead, work in only the few that are tightly relevant to the content of each page;

c)Always try and pick the best of breed from each category of each merchant. For example, if you intend to promote (say) online bookstores, it would be advisable to signup with the 2 top merchants rather than simply with one of them. This is particularly important where your niche maybe highly competitive and you expect prompt support from these merchants once a sale has been made through your websites;

d)Try not to ?over-diversify?. You'll need to track each affiliate program as time goes by. As such, a maximum of 10 to 15 programs should prove a good balance. Should any of these merchants fail to deliver or the product goes bust, you won't be left with nothing; and,

e)Always choose quality affiliate programs. Essentially, these products should be excellent, complement or even enhance one another, fit your website concept, and (most importantly) be from a highly reputable company or merchant.

Always remember, don't lay all your eggs in one basket and expect to make supreme profits from that one single affiliate product. You'll need to constantly test them out and eliminate those that fail to perform or deliver in the long run (that's part of the process of creating your own virtual real estate)!

You can choose to do all these manually, or consider leveraging the work of other resources or available (but affordable) tools. I shall be posting a second part to this article soon as well.