Saturday, February 14, 2009

Thoughts on affiliate programs

I've been marketing affiliate programs for quite a while now. I have had success with a few programs. But it is tricky finding the ones that sell well. You just have to go through a process of elimination, unfortunately.

Unless you're getting squillions of highly targeted hits, my advice would be to look for programs that have wide appeal and substantial payouts. Then you only have to make a few sales before you get your first payment. Needless to say, that's a great confidence booster.

Also, try to find programs related to niches that you have genuine enthusiasm for. You'll find it very hard to build sites or blog about stuff you're not really interested in.

It's also important that you believe in the quality of the product. Even if you make good money out of something, you'll start to feel dirty if you know that it's substandard, or even a scam.

Free directories

I've been doing a lot of forum surfing of late. I keep reading posts about how using free directories for SEO just isn't worth it anymore.

I beg to differ. I've been using them on and off for several months for different websites and blogs and they certainly help quite a bit. Sure, they may not be as beneficial to SEO as they used to be. But they're still worth the effort.

You've got to have a good, frequently updated list that tells you about lots of new ones, however. (Many of the old directories are backed up with thousands of submissions, or have simply expired.) This is the best one I've found.