Categories

Affiliate Programs: 4 Things You Must Know

The primary objective of joining an affiliate program is to make money through your Blog.

Therefore, it is important that any program you join guarantees you on-time payments for your efforts.

In order to join an affiliate program, you may use  any of the techniques given below:

  • Join an in-house affiliate program of a company/ product
  • Join an affiliate marketplace like Amazon Associates, Impact Radius, etc.

Joining any such program is not at all a difficult task. Even more, it doesn’t cost you anything. However, the marketing and promotion of a product require a lot of time and effort.

After working hard for a product’s promotion, one thing you surely don’t want is any delay in your payments. To make it worse, there are numerous cases when you don’t even get paid.

What can be done to avoid such scenarios?

There are certain things you can check before joining any affiliate program to minimize the occurrence of frauds or undesirable events.  They are as listed below:

1. Market Reputation

If you don’t want to be cheated, you must consider checking the reputation of an affiliate program before joining it. You will find many such cases where people don’t get paid for their efforts by companies offering affiliate programs.

In order to be safe, always consider becoming a part of a reputed affiliate company or join an affiliate program only through a reputed marketplace.

2. Payment Method

The foremost thing to check is the acceptable methods of payment for the country in which you are residing.

If your country doesn’t accept any of the methods supported by an affiliate program, you’ll never get paid even if you earn a lot of money.

You may even contact the program manager to find out if something can be done regarding the acceptable payout methods.

A list of commonly used payout methods is as given below:

  • Bank Deposit
  • Cheque
  • Paypal

Read Also: Increasing the Number of Subscribers to your Website/ Blog

3. Threshold Payout Value

It is crucial that you check the minimum payout value before signing up for any affiliate program. Most of the affiliate programs have a threshold value of $50 that is there is no payout unless your earnings reach a minimum of $50.

The threshold values may vary for different affiliate programs.

The important thing, therefore, is to check the minimum payout value so as to see if you’re comfortable waiting till the time you reach that value.

4. Length of Cookie

How does affiliate marketing works?

You drive traffic to a partner’s website and if any purchases are made, you get a commission. The sales that are generated by a company may even take few days.

This is made possible by long cookie length. Nevertheless, cookie length varies from one affiliate program to another.

Generally, reputed programs offer you commission within 1 to 2 months of purchase after a click.

Even more, there are programs offering you commission if a user makes a purchase of another company’s product besides the one recommended by you.

Therefore, you must consider the following points while making a choice of an affiliate program:

  • Cookie length
  • Commission on sales of additional products

Any program that has a good reputation in the market adheres to the standard protocol that is a cookie length of 30-60 days and commission on sales of other products.

Recommended Affiliate Programs

Scroll down to find a list of reputed affiliate programs and marketplaces:

  1. Amazon Associates
  2. eBay Partner Network
  3. Alibaba Affiliates
  4. iTunes Affiliates
  5. ShareASale
  6. Commission Junction
  7. AliExpress Affiliates
  8. Avangate
  9. Flipkart Affiliate
  10. vCommission

The last two programs in the list are offered by Indian affiliate marketplaces.

Final words: The points listed above are important to be taken care of while joining any affiliate network to ensure there are timely payouts and no scams in payments.