I first bumped into this article at 5 Star forums..

Rae Hoffman-Dolan wrote a blog post called, 13 Ways to Make Your Affiliate Program Suck.. it's about the things that drive her crazy about affiliate programs.. 

Affiliates, two things..  first take note..

1. She pretty much hit on every important thing we should be looking for as affiliates in a program.  Take note of that.. but also..
2. These are also all the things you should consider taking advantage of too.

That second point is very important.  There are a lot of great programs out there that offer things like deep linking, tracking, datafeeds and more.  But I suspect a lot of affiliates never fully take advantage of those things.  There are programs that go beyond just the tools and offer lots of help, educate you, even talk about keywords (if not even giving you a list to start from..) and more!

One thing I thought was missing from the list was direct linking.  But she probably doesn't use it with her model of affiliate marketing.  Linking direct is an important tool for many affiliates because it allows us to test markets, merchants and products before investing a lot of time, money and resources into building out a website and fuller marketing/traffic plan.  Very valuable for affiliates starting out on a small budget.

A lot of merchants benefit from direct linking, especially smaller merchants or merchants starting out..  many merchants aren't great at promoting their sites, aren't expert search marketers, don't have someone in-house devoted to that activity or are only tapping a small percentage of the potential traffic out there.  AND could really, really benefit from the added, targeted, ready-to-buy traffic an affiliate could send direct..

If they design their terms right, it won't do them any harm in terms of brand protection or cutting into the profits.  Well, in fact..  if you just let affiliates promote your site you wouldn't be spending money on search marketing would you - just aff commissions?  Could be a wash. ;)

Anyway, I digress, lol..., point is there are many expert search marketers that'd love to help out in this department. :)

Here's a snippet from her article..

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