What I Learnt About Selecting Affiliate Programs

In the past, I picked affiliate programs that were "weird" and "interesting" to me. The kind of products that I thought were very targetted to certain market and not so competitive to promote. I didn’t think I had what it takes to compete with the big boys in the competitive markets. Well, tough luck for me…. I found out that my weird affiliate programs for health, fitness, self-help stuff didn’t convert very well. That took up over 3/4 of all my campaigns. Man! I wasted quite a bit of money there.

Secondly, I didn’t really had any way to check on the sales record of the Clickbank products. I used to go "Oh, this affiliate program seems nice, the sales page is good, no affiliate links, let’s see if it sells within 100-200 clicks….". That also cost me quite a bit of money. Its kind of risky to do that for me because you’re testing an unproven product. I even promoted stuff at Clickbank that were out of the top 20 ranking.

Thirdly, I tested way too long for some affiliate programs by becoming attached to them. I "fell in love" with some of the affiliate programs hoping they would somehow sell in the next few clicks which never happened. Now I stick to my original plan of getting at least 50% ROI of what I spend in clicks. So if I spend $2 in AdWords, I want to get at least $4 back. Let’s say a product gives me $20 in commission and I have spent like $11 and I still don’t get any sales, I drop the product because I have spent over my 50% ROI limit. I also stop my campaigns if they do not get 1 sale from 100 clicks. Some people say 200, some say 300 clicks. Personally, that’s going to cost too much money for me than what I am willing to spend. The top affiliate programs for me sell within 100 clicks.

Last but not least…. I think I am beginning to get a feel of getting profitable affiliate programs. Sometimes I look at the keywords and the estimated number of clicks and I know I will get a decent amount of traffic. Sometimes Google says you’ll get 300 clicks a day but it never happens. More like 50 a day for 1 of my campaigns. From 50 clicks to 100 clicks a day, there will be a good chance to make a sale and test your campaigns really fast.