After you have carefully researched your category, it’s time to start finding potential merchants to promote. This section is dedicated to helping you find the best merchants within your category.
After you have found a list of potential merchants for your website, you will want to carefully evaluate each of their offers. As an affiliate, you want to send your valuable traffic to the merchant with the best conversion and commission rates. Your job as an affiliate, is to pre-sell the customer on a particular product or service. If your merchants can’t close the sale, then all of your work is for nothing. Before I start promoting any merchant, I carefully consider all of the criteria outlined in this section. Once you’re up and running with a merchant, you will want to continually monitor their performance.
There are three ways to find merchants with affiliate programs:
1. Join an affiliate network
2. Search online for affiliate programs
1. Join an Affiliate Network
Perhaps the easiest way to find merchants is by joining an affiliate network. An affiliate network is a trusted third party company that handles all of the transactions between affiliates and merchants. In addition to handling all of the transactions, affiliate networks provide detailed reporting, and handle payments between merchants and affiliates.
There are many advantages to partnering with an affiliate network:
• A trusted third party tracks all of the transactions.
• You get one consolidated payment, rather than individual checks from each merchant.
• Consolidated reporting allows you to run numbers on all of your merchants in one place.
• A single place to find and review merchants offers.
• Some networks allow you to compare merchants performance side by side. This takes some of the guesswork out of finding good merchants.
• It’s 100% free!
There are dozens of affiliate networks out there. The two biggest networks are Commission Junction, and LinkShare.
These two networks attract some of the biggest and best online merchants. Some of Commission Junction’s merchants include Yahoo, eBay, Home Depot, and Citi Group, and thousands more. Some of LinkShare’s merchants include Wal- Mart, Dell, Avon, and Apple.
More Affiliate Networks to Consider:
•Share a Sale - The favorite network of many affiliates. They provide all of the enhanced functionality and reliability of the big networks. The only drawback is that they don’t have a lot of big name merchants.
•ClickBank - If you are into promoting “info products”, or software, ClickBank has thousands of merchants.
•Performics - They feature a lot of high-end retailers like Eddie Bauer, Bose, and Kohls.
Go to Section 2 Resources to see more affiliate networks.
2. Search Online for Affiliate Programs
Another great way to find merchants with affiliate programs is to simply search for them using your favorite search engine. When I’m looking for prospective merchants to promote on my website, I search for terms like: “{Merchant } Affiliate Program”, or “{Category} Affiliate Programs”. {Merchant} represents a specific merchant, and {Category} represents a specific category. By searching for merchants this way, you may have your eyes opened to some opportunities you never even knew existed.
The main advantage of using a search engine to find affiliate programs is that you’re able to find merchants who run in- house or self-managed affiliate programs. I’ll discuss the pros and cons of these self-managed affiliate programs later
on in this chapter.
3. Go Directly to an Merchant’s Website
One of the most straightforward ways to find out if a particular merchant has an affiliate program, is to visit their website. Most merchants with an affiliate program place a link in the footer of their website. Look for a link titled “Affiliates” or
“Partners”. If you’re unable to find a link to their affiliate program in the website footer, checkout their sitemap. In most cases, if a merchant has an affiliate program, you will be able to find it in one of these places.
If you’re not able to find a link to their affiliate program anywhere on their website, you can try using their contact form
to inquire about their affiliate program. Some companies don’t like to advertise that they have an affiliate program. For example, Chase Bank, which has a credit card affiliate program does not disclose anywhere on their website that they have an affiliate program. This is because Chase’s affiliate program is by invitation only. This is the only invite-only program I have ever seen. Most of the time when you can’t find a link it’s because the merchant either overlooked it, or forgot to put links to their affiliate program on their website.
