The Budget Room

Affiliate marketing includes two active working principles: Affiliation and marketing. Some affiliates are excellent, good business partners with strong products and healthy payouts, others are pitiful scams, more like Ponzi schemes with tired spruikers cranking out non-information about “instant riches” for mugs. These “instant riches” are as flat and uninspired as a beatup old retail commercial carpet, and about as saleable.

Criteria for good affiliates

The best affiliates are easy to spot if you know what to look for, and how to research their viability for your own business.

The criteria are all business- based:

• Good affiliate documentation: There are no gray areas, no vague terms, and the agreements are very well laid out. You simply cannot read anything on these agreements without getting clear, useful information.
• Hard products: Top affiliates have excellent ranges of good products, and
• Sales is the driver: With good affiliates, the emphasis is all sales, not mumbo- jumbo about obscure ways of making money signing up other people. The best affiliates do sell the benefits of getting additional affiliate members, but the core business is the driver, not a sort of recruitment agency effect.
• Proof of success: The top affiliates show real profits, like big corporations. Their figures are backed up in industry reviews, business magazines, and other reliable news sources. (See Research, below)
• Well regarded in affiliate industry: Being well regarded isn’t easy in the affiliate industry. Affiliates succeed by being actually successful, not hype..

Research

Research is critical when checking out a promising affiliate. There’s a lot of information online, and this sort of mud sticks. A bad reputation is real suicide.  Since this is such a huge market the reviewers and market watchers don’t pull their punches. Nor do disgruntled former affiliates, if they’ve spent years working on a dud affiliate marketing scheme.

Things to look out for:

• Any information about non- payment (There may be a reason. There may also be a scam in progress. This counts as two strikes, unless there are mitigating circumstances.)
• Complaints about servicing affiliate agreements. (Don’t bother with these. If there’s multiple cases all alleging the same thing, the affiliate is unreliable.)
• Complaints about dud products and furious customers. (Forget it. If it’s even half true, it’s more trouble than it will ever be worth.)
• Non- delivery of goods or services. (An absolute “Avoid like the Plague” issue)
• Misleading information on the affiliates promotional pages. (This is just plain amateurish, but people will do it despite laws and the most basic requirements of business sanity.)

Just getting back to the commercial flooring analogy, Don’t be a doormat. You don’t have to believe anything about any affiliate.

The best affiliates can back up their affiliate schemes up with hard facts and a good reputation in a very tough, cash- driven industry.

The worst expect you to swallow whatever unspeakable rubbish they’re using as a sales pitch, with no supporting information and often a lot of major issues with even basic business practices, definitely not a recommendation.

Believe nothing, until you’ve really done your homework.