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Hello everyone and welcome back. I hope you are all doing well. Let’s get right to it then. I want to talk a little bit about some important questions to ask an affiliate program when you are deciding to join and promote their products.
These are five of the questions I feel are the most important. When you were going to join an affiliate program you were probably going to have a lot of other questions to ask your affiliate managers and those should be your priority.
However, these are simply ones that I think are Universal and the information garnered from them is something that is really going to help you along the way.
Of course on the flip side, there are times when you are going to want to join an affiliate program and you have all the information laid out before you. This is typically the case with large affiliate networks, like ShareASale, that have a huge amount of information available to you so you can make an informed decision right then and there.
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The Questions To Ask Affiliate Programs
Ask About The Tracking Cookie Duration?
The tracking cookie is underappreciated and often overlooked by even experienced affiliate marketers. This is the amount of time you have to make a sale after someone clicks your affiliate link and still get a commission from that click.
The standard tracking cookie duration is about 30 days but you will see some much longer and some quite a bit shorter.
The reason you always want to know what type of cookie duration you’re going to get is because it will help you determine which affiliate programs to put into which content.
If you have a 20 hour tracking cookie duration, for example, can you were going to want to put those affiliate links into content that is very buyer intent focused.
basically a tracking cookie that short is going to be used for reviews or top 10 list or other content that is designed to be the last stop before I purchase.
If on the other hand you have a 180 day tracking cookie you can put that into a lot of your information content because people that click on that link are going to have 6 months to determine whether they want to make that purchase or not.
The other aspect of the tracking cookie that you really want to be aware of is that it’s going to directly impact your conversion rate. As a general rule the longer the tracking cookie the better the conversion rate is going to be all things being equal.
It’s important not to overlook the tracking cookie when you decide on what affiliate programs you were going to promote. You only have a limited amount of time to create content and promote these products and you don’t want to waste it on an affiliate program that has a tracking cookie of one day when some of their competitors have tracking cookies of 60 days for example.
Most of the time the tracking cookie duration is going to be readily available for affiliate programs. So you won’t have to dig too deep for asking about about it. This is especially true of any affiliate program that is on one of the major affiliate networks.
However, a lot of Independence affiliate programs often leave out the tracking cookie duration so you really want to ask about it and make sure you’re getting a good duration for your efforts.
What Payment Options Are Available?
It is crucial that you ask about, or research the types of payment options are available for any given affiliate program in your region. It is pretty straight forward if you live in the U.S because you will have access to most payment options.
But the rest of the world is much more nuanced. Don’t assume that just because you have a Paypal account that the affiliate will process payments in your region.
Many affiliate programs use might use Payoneer or a similar service instead of Paypal and you will need to decide if you want to join these payment services, many of them require quite a lot of information like Tax forms and quite in-depth personally verification for their anti-money laundering (AML) protocols.
So what might have looked like a great affiliate program going into will start to look less appealing when you find out exactly what type of payment service they’re using and how much information you are going to have to give that payment company in order to join that affiliate program.
PayPal is still probably the biggest payment service for affiliate marketers so you can probably find Affiliates that use PayPal especially if they’re part of a big affiliate network.
But it’s always something that you want to make sure of when you were joining these affiliate programs so that you don’t simply waste your time joining them only to realize that you are going to have to jump through a lot of Hoops to actually get paid.
Is There A Dedicated Affiliate Manager?
This question is not a hugely important one but it’s one that I think a lot of people Overlook. when you join the affiliate program you want to find out if there is a dedicated affiliate manager to help you with your promotion of their product.
Many of the larger companies are going to have one and quite a few of the smaller affiliate programs will have someone that can help you out as well.
It just makes things a lot easier when you have someone that you can go to if you have a problem with your affiliate links or with any other aspect of the affiliate program that might need addressing.
Ask About PPC (Pay Per Click) Terms For Paid Advertising
This item is often overlooked. Typically most affiliate programs will have a set of rules for you to follow if you choose to use paid advertising to get traffic to your affiliate links.
The terms vary from affiliate to affiliate but most of the time you cannot use the names of the affiliate program or any trademark terms when bidding on keywords for your advertising.
It is also important to note that many affiliate programs simply don’t allow paid advertising as a way of promoting their affiliate program. Make sure to find these terms or ask your affiliate manager to give you the specifics on their advertising policy for each affiliate program you join.
Violating these terms often leads to immediate expulsion from the program. So be careful to have all the info and try not to violate the affiliate terms.
How Often Do You Get Paid?
This question might be the most important one we have. you will want to find out how the payment scheduled work for any given affiliate program.
Most affiliate programs are not going to pay you in real-time. quite a few of them will pay you on a monthly basis for your earnings of the previous month.
I know it seems complicated but that is often how these works. Some even have two or three months’ lead time for your payments to get there.
So basically it works like this. You make $100 dollars of sales in June and it locks on the 30th of June. You won’t get that payment until to first of August if that affiliate has a 30-fay lead time on their payments.
The Reasoning for this type of thing is important to know is so that you can incorporate the payment schedule into your overall business. You don’t want to be spending a lot of money on content before you are actually getting those payments in and into your bank account.
The Wrap Up
And that brings us to the end of our look at these five basic questions to ask an affiliate program when you are deciding whether or not to promote their products.
A lot of times this information will be ready live available but sometimes you’ll have to dig a little bit deeper and ask the people who are operating a Philly program exactly what type of terms you were going to get when you join up.
There are times when even the commission rates are not readily available. That could be a little bit dicey and you want it really do your due diligence when you are looking at a program like that.
The best bet is to use large affiliate networks as much as possible. Whether that’s Avantlink or ShareASale or cj.com.
These networks typically have a lot of information about the affiliate program, including the commission and cookie durations as well as many other statistics, that will give you a good idea of whether or not that particular affiliate program is going to be a boon for your business.
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That’s all I have for you today, thanks for stopping by and have a wonderful day.