What do you look for in an affiliate program?
 

hello webmasters,
when looking for a sponsor/affiliate program...
what sells you....to join them? |loony|

Funny you should ask. I just posted a little about this in my blog yesterday.

It actually doesn't take much for me to join. A good review by a fellow webmaster like howlingwulf does on his blog is all it takes sometimes. Then I try to join via their referral link. Also I look at reputation/popularity as reported in forums like this one - particularly on payment history. Greenguyandjim publishes their stats on conversions, so I look at those to narrow my list of sponsors I want to consider.

After joining, the ease of which I can promote them depends on:

1. Quality free downloadable content (updated often)
2. List of top converting sites if they have several
3. Webmaster referral program
4. Variety of niches (a single niche is fine, but variety allows me to promote on more sites)

Trafficcashgold has pretty much nailed everything for me as an affiliate. Gammaecash also does a good job in the affiliate area. Other programs are close, but are usually missing one piece. For example: Topbucks is pretty good, except they require 2 sales before access to free content. Hard for me to promote them balls to the wall as a newbie when I don't have content for them.

Yeah, I don't know how the hell you're supposed to get two sales before you get content to promote. |huh

I like to have different colored banners to choose from to match the theme of the site, and good hosted promo ads are becoming more and more important to me. MovieRoom is one of my all time favorites in that area.

I like stuff that is not over promoted (hard to find) and I tend to do better with weird/micro niches. I try to find a program that will convert well for me and then I promote it as much as possible.

great if the program offers something unique.

i like to give the new programs a shot, but they don't always work out.

Hi hashbury, I just PM'd you ;)

Being that i don't yet have the extensive knowledge to promote adult effectively, and I don't yet have huge traffic streams, I try any and all of them until I find a fit for the traffic that I do have. Once I find a fit, I move on to the next experiment.

then try us out...|thumb

Maybe I will when I get into that niche. How long has the construction thing been up un your site?

Unique content is always the key, you dont want to promote a site that hundreds are already promoting as then most viewers have already signed up.

RSS RSS RSS RSS RSS RSS RSS RSS RSS RSS

When you run a blog ring...time is of the essence. RSS Feed your content galleries by adding a linked thumb with a rich keyword description. Best thing you'll ever do for yourself.

Check out KinkyBytes.com to see what I mean.

i heard blog ring is not ok on google algorithm. i dont know much about this, but what is the essential of blog rings?

When I used RSS feeds for blogs, I got nothing from Google. I started a handwritten blog, and Google loves it. Some of the long time bloggers here have mentioned using RSS feeds for blogs, but editing the text, which seems like a good way to go if you want unique content.

Also, some of the folks in the blogging section got me using:
http://www.rss2html.com/ which allows you to use RSS in a little different manner.

I use it to place a dynamic like ad on pages of my site, like in the top of the left column here:
For me, building blogs using only Sponsor fed RSS just has not been worth it.