A Personal note from Stan about selecting the best affiliate marketing programs for your business:

When it comes to making money on the web, the best affiliate marketing programs for you should always support a long term business development strategy.

Let's use educational products for an example.

Suppose company Educational Products which offers a Personal Development and Awareness Program (PDAP) is using an Affiliate Program to promote/sell their products and services. 
 
They offer as much as a 50 per cent or more commission on each affiliate sale. While this commission might be considered very generous, before you get all excited and spend your money and your valuable time in promoting it, investigate their Cookie Tracking (how long will you be remembered as the referring cause). 
 
Most companies have what I call "Short Term Cookie Tracking." You send the potential customer to their website and they buy a product.

For this one time sale, you collect your commission -- and the game is over. "Your" customer comes back in two months or a year, buys another product and you get nothing. That's Short Term Cookie Tracking.
 
Some Affiliate Programs have referrals and customer tracking for six months. Once again, that too is Short Term Cookie Tracking.
 
We have concluded this. Short term Affiliate Programs are financially detrimental to both, the marketer (me) and the seller because it will never attract true professional marketer because she knows better and wants to be paid for her efforts, time and advertising budget.
 
What you need to require of every affiliate program you promote is what is called "lifetime tracking" because it's set to the maximum of the software used, and that is 9,999 days (that's more than 27 years). That is Long, Long Term.
 
Your policy in selecting affiliate program to promote should be very simple - "once my referral, always my referral." Cookie Tracking for long period of time, which can't be overwritten by another affiliate. Again, once your referred customer, always your referred customer. After all, isn't that what residual income is all about? I guarantee that most affiliates will agree. And, that is what selecting the best affiliate marketing programs is all about!
 
The marketing model with Long Term cookie will also attract real marketers with large data bases of people or opt-in lists. They will attract endless stream of paying customers, receiving comfortable income for their skills and efforts.
 
Many of your long term customers will purchase hundreds of dollars worth of programs DVDs, Study Packages, etc. In turn, these affiliates will promote the PDAP site and its products worldwide, knowing they are building lucrative business, securing considerable steady increasing cash flow.

Our view is that successful business is, in the first place, a creation of a cash flow highway (not just one way street) for all parties involved. If just one participant experiences loses or unnecessary delays in business transactions, everybody suffers in the long run.
 
To conclude, if you to select the best affiliate marketing programs for your web business, save yourself a lot of time, money and disappointment by conducting your due diligence first. Seek suppliers that are not greedy, thinking of themselves only, using you as a free marketing tool.

Finding those that offer Long Term Cookie Tracking is the answer.

+++++

The best affiliate marketing programs for you are those that you personally use and want to recommend to others.

Although you could build a website focusing on affiliate program income as your main source of income, you would need many, many content pages to generate income that would justify the effort.

In contrast, you could choose to focus on a single program that pays excellent affiliate income -- and then seek to dominate that niche. You approach in this case would be to have a website dedicated to that purpose and promote it using the wide variety of promotional approach now available to internet and network marketing entrepreneurs.

I highly recommend that you view affiliate marketing income as an incidental additional stream of income. Tell you site visitors how you are using those programs yourself and why you chose them. That help pre-sell you and those programs to your clients.

For example, if you look at the footer on this page you will see three such affiliate programs that we use and want to recommend to other.

The first is Oprius which is a web based contact management tool. Microsoft's Outlook is an example of a contact management tool. You can organize your emails and your contact list -- and you have a calendar to track your schedule.

What we like about Oprius is that it is (1) web based [no more worries about viruses via email infesting your computer, (2) you can handle all your email accounts through it [e.g., you can set up separate gmail accounts for each activity and have them forwarded to your Oprius account - maintain an archive of all the emails in that function area and simply manage the to/from correspondence through a single account], (3) a fully integrated calendar/appointment management system, and (4) an excellent list management system.

The second is a charitable donation for a excellent cause which is associated with a network marketing nutrition program whose products the whole family uses.

And finally, the link to Site Build It! -- the web business software development approach/tools/service we chose to use this developing this website.

There are others we use in our businesses -- and from time to time we will share them with you through this page.

In summary -- the best affiliate marketing programs are those that you use in your own business. You chose them for a reason. Just  share your reasons with your web business visitors.

+++++

 Click here to learn about our private Wealth Builders Club ....

Return to home page from best affiliate marketing programs