In past 6 & half years, I have been an affiliate with almost 67+ direct affiliate programs and everyone is different in their own way. Different in the terms affiliate policies, payouts and their affinity towards affiliates like you & me. Especially when you are joining a new affiliate program, you should look for certain features. Here I’m highlighting those features which are important & If few of them are not available, I ended up not signing for it. Let’s have a look at what are those options:
Payment option:
This is the very first option I want to discuss, because I know I have skipped many affiliate program due to lack of PayPal payment option. Especially in India, where the best possible way to get money from offshore companies is via PayPal, I would love to see PayPal as one must have payout method. Apart from PayPal, cheque is another option that is good.
Update: These days most of the companies including CJ.com, ShareASale offers
direct bank deposit.
direct bank deposit.
Single product Affiliate link: (Deep linking)
Imagine you sign up for an affiliate program with a WordPress theme club and you can’t find a direct affiliate link to individual product, how annoying this could be for you. It’s very important for every affiliate program or product to offer individual link to their product. If possible buyer lands on homepage instead of product sales page, most likely he will skip and move to somewhere else. Do you wish to lose a sale just because of one important feature?
Custom link option:
Following up from my above point, obviously price page will not be considered as an affiliate product page but to showcase the product, you might like to link to price page. A direct link? Well boy, you might be going to lose some sales here. How about an option to create a custom link for any page using your affiliate URL. This feature is something which elegant Theme affiliate program offers.
Custom Discount coupon code:
Discount coupon codes is one of the best method to promote any product, as it encourages sales. Most of the affiliate programs, especially hosting affiliates, offer discount coupons. However, how about option to create your own brand discount coupon. For example, I created custom coupon codes: VSR30 for Hostgator Hosting which helps me to get about $520/month as an extra affiliate sales. (I have shared the tricks of generating affiliate sales via coupon below). Apart from offering discount, such coupon codes helps in branding. Very few affiliate product offers an option to create custom discount coupon. Such option will be useful for an affiliate marketer like us. Don’t you feel the same?
Email updates:
So now you are a part of one of the top selling product as an affiliate promoter and they are running a great deal of offer which one can’t refuse. But they don’t send Email updates and being an affiliate, you get to know about this offer when 10 other blogger have already written about it or by the time when offers is coming to an end. Make sure you are subscribed to the product affiliate newsletter or ping the affiliate manager to add you in the email list. Alternatively, you should also subscribe to product updates, FB page, Twitter page or what ever way you can stay updated with latest happening about the product.
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