Affiliate Marketing – Alternative Income Opportunities

(part 2 of 3) This article first appeared for ETP Network

The reason why people promote affiliate products is simple: it’s for the money – which can be substantial and a secondary or even primary income stream. Yet, with the many affiliate programs and products currently available, how do you determine what and how you decide to promote? Some important factors include:

Revenue produced. For the same amount of effort, would you want to receive a $5 or a $100 commission? (This is a rhetorical no-brainer.)

Consider the products or services you want to promote. Are they things that you are familiar with or believe in? It’s always much easier to promote things in this category – and achieve significantly better results. People can easily distinguish between enthusiasm and insincerity.

Determining what your requirements are to be successful. Is a website required? Is there an extensive learning curve? How much of your time and effort is required? Can you utilize your current network? These (and other considerations) are important considerations that can greatly affect your success and time management.

How supportive is the company for which you are an affiliate? Is there someone who can answer questions and provide information and documents to you on request? The support (or non-support) services can have a large effect on whether your efforts as an affiliate are successful.

Do you have a referral network you can utilize? Depending on the product or service, some of your existing contacts and many more contacts from them can help you form an extensive referral tree with many branches originating from people who know people, who know people, etc.

Being able to answer these questions will help you choose the right products or services to promote and generate money as a successful affiliate.

Bruce Newman is a long-term ETP Network member and Vice President at The Productivity Institute, LLC which provides a free matching service between rated outstanding consultants and the specific software products and services needs of almost any company, thereby providing excellent prodinst and value. It also offers an extensive and well-supported affiliate program that can manually or automatically track referrals. Additional product and service information is available at: http://www.prodinst.com/