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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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I have been affiliate marketing since the dawn of time; at least it feels that way.  Cool

I literally made my first money online back in 2002ish with affiliate marketing.  And it's been my primary business model and focus since using a variety of models.

I have also learned over the years what makes a good program and what an affiliate needs to succeed.

There are millions of merchants with affiliate programs.  They are in large networks or stand alone mom and pops (in-house programs).  Merchants (and brands) sell their products on their own sites or on sites like eBay or Amazon.  It's HUGE.

And there's a TON of information and help online for affiliates.  Much of it you'll find after a while follow the same themes and advice.

Yet, affiliates still struggle.

Of course, there's a lot to it including targeting the right market etc..

But what I want to talk about here is what contributes to getting MORE out of an already potential profit situation.

Detail and Control - Who are These Visitors?

What do I mean by that.

First of all this can be applied to digital and physical products.  I'm hugely focused on physical product niche sites these days and I find this is even more important. 

Some affiliate programs give you a link, some banners and say, get to it!

ok, good.. you have the traffic, targeted visitors (you think) and a good landing page.

But do you 'know' what's really happening?

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