What you're about to read in this article is the distillation of years of experience.
Please don't take it lightly because the knowledge you are about to gain can mean the difference between making a great deal of money online or making a pittance.
The choice is yours.
You may be here because you want a list of affiliate marketing merchants that you can possibly promote.
Well, that's not the point of this article.
You can find numerous websites that will literally list thousands of programs for you to promote.
Some of the better ones will even break them down for you by category.
For example, they might have a health category and then sub-niches within the health category.
To the contrary, the point of this article is to tell you the characteristics of good affiliate marketing merchants.
Believe me, as a full time super affiliate for 7 years now, I've promoted dozens and dozens of programs.
You know how many of those were actually really good? No more than 4! And let me define what I mean by really good.
I mean the kind of affiliate programs that you can make thousands of dollars with every month.
The kind you can actually make a living on.
Most affiliate programs are well, average.
Why are they average? That's hard to guess.
My personal suspicion is because the companies running them think that just by opening up the doors to an affiliate program, thousands of hungry affiliates will start selling their products and they'll make all of this money so who cares how good the program is.
That's a nice pipe dream.
What they don't realize is that super affiliates like me drive probably more than 90% of the sales for all affiliate programs on the Internet.
And you can be a super affiliate too.
It's just a matter of experience and knowledge.
It doesn't mean you have to be a genius.
And once you gain that experience, you start to look for those affiliate marketing merchants that have the following characteristics: 1) Great products that are evergreen (evergreen means they will always be in demand and not a passing fad) 2) Highly ethical management.
This one is so huge I can't overstate its importance.
I had a friend who as an affiliate was making some decent money with a company that we could both tell was run by shady, unethical management.
I didn't promote the products and warned my friend I wouldn't be banking too much of his efforts on them.
He didn't listen.
Sure enough one day the company closed shop.
Just like that.
His commissions went to zero overnight.
3) You may be wondering how do you determine if the affiliate marketing merchants you want to promote are run by ethical people.
Well, you got to get to know them.
One company that makes me over $20,000 a month now in net commissions was one I did due diligence on by emailing and calling and asking questions of the principals in charge for a couple of months before I felt comfortable that they were the real deal.
Now you may not have that time.
But there are other ways to tell.
Here's a fast test: 4) Email the affiliate manager of the company some questions.
Does he respond quickly? If you ask for advice on marketing their products or some question about how to link to their products to get maximum results, do they give you really helpful answers or do they blow you off? 5) What are the commissions like? Good affiliate marketing merchants pay their affiliates fairly.
I mean amounts of money that you can live on.
A lot of affiliates pay too much attention to the percentage they get paid and not what they will make net per sale.
That's a big mistake! In other words, I've heard some affiliates say "I won't promote any company that doesn't pay at least 25% on the sale.
" So what? What does that tell you? If the average sale is 20 bucks, is 25% better than making 15% if the average sale is $100 dollars? Of course not.
6) Lifetime income.
This one is so big, it's practically built my entire career.
The absolute best affiliate merchants will pay lifetime income.
Lifetime income simply means they will pay you each and every time a customer you brought in buys something from the company, forever.
Why would they do this? Well, because they're fair, for starters, and because they realize that if it weren't for you, they wouldn't have that customer to begin with.
The vast majority of affiliate programs are of the mind-set "We'll pay the affiliate one time, and then we'll keep all of the profits on any repeat business from the customer!" To me, that makes my stomach turn.
Look, I'm not saying every single affiliate marketing merchant that doesn't pay lifetime commissions isn't worth promoting.
I'm just saying that the ones that do pay it tend to be the cream of the crop.
I hope these tips have helped you.
It's taken me years to learn what I've just taught you in this article.