Merchant Affiliate Programs and Newsletters

Building a newsletter to keep in touch with the people who visit your merchant affiliate site is a great idea. Getting people to think of you and return to your site will be a great boost to your merchant account affiliate program.

Create a sign-up form on your web site so that it's easy for people to register for your newsletter (most people recommend using a double-opt in sign up process so you don't get accused of sending spam).

In the newsletter, encourage your subscribers to forward the newsletter to a friend. If you participate in online forums, add a line about your newsletter with a link to the sign up page in your signature. Put your newsletter archives on your site so people can see what they're signing up for and search engine spiders can index the contents.

Content for Your Merchant Affiliate Site

Once you've selected your merchant account affiliate program, learn all you can about marketing, how people use the Internet, and what you can do to help attract visitors to your site and click on those links.

People are often using the Internet to learn something so start by giving them what they're looking for:

• Write articles and reviews about the different products you are selling through your merchant affiliate site
• Write an article specifically about what you like about this product, why you want to sell it, and how it improved your life
• Put some text links to the affiliate merchant site in your articles in addition to using the graphical ads they supply

Affiliate Merchant Tips

Signing up as an affiliate merchant is only the first step in improving your sales--you also need to make sure your web site is ready to direct and guide people after they've clicked on a link from your merchant affiliate.

Help your merchant affiliate by having attractive and functional ads and creating landing pages to go with them. Test different versions of the landing pages and see which convert more visitors into customers. Set up two different landing pages and send half your traffic to one page and half to the other. Then, compare conversion rates to figure out which page performs the best.

Merchant Affiliates and Stealware

"Stealware" is the term used to describe programs that steal commissions away from your site and trick your affiliate merchant into paying someone else for a lead or sale that came from your web site.

Merchant account affiliate programs often use cookies to track which site led a visitor to their site. However, stealware programs overlay your cookies with their cookies. Stealware can come piggybacked onto free software programs that users download. Unfortunately, there's not much you can do about stealware other than encourage your merchant account affiliate programs to steer clear of companies that that dabble in such thievery.

Selecting Merchant Account Affiliate Programs

*Select your merchant account affiliate programs carefully.

The business of tracking and setting up everything necessary for successful affiliate marketing is complex. Your merchant affiliate programs should be handling many things including:

• link generation
• cookie setting
• commission payments
• banner and text displays

Before you select a merchant affiliate program, be sure to investigate their anti-fraud efforts (you don't want to pay for fraudulent clicks, nor do you want your honest affiliates to lose out on their due). If your affiliate program isn't performing, you may earn a bad reputation anda have trouble recruiting affiliates later. Protect your reputation and your affiliates by being diligent in your affiliate program investigation.

About Merchant Account Affiliate Programs

Merchant account affiliate programs give you an easy way to deliver ads and links to your affiliates and also offer marketing and reporting tools to help you be more effective. In addition, they manage payments to the affiliates.

As an affiliate merchant, you can extend your sales force around the globe and pay only those affiliates who perform and bring you customers. Look for a flexible program that lets you easily run multiple campaigns and deliver branded ads to your affiliates.

Avoiding Click Fraud

As a Google Adsense affiliate, when telling your family or friends about your web site it might be best to avoid telling them that you earn money through people clicking on your ads.

While you'd be happy if they clicked on websites naturally with the intent to purchase something or sign up for a refferal program, you don't want people trying to 'help you out' by simply clicking on your Google Ads otherwise Google will terminate your account for click fraud. It's best to let things happen naturally in the case of these types of affiliate programs.

Focus On One Program At A Time

As you get started in affiliate marketing, choose a single program to work at and become successful with. As tempting as it can be to join the dozens of programs you are interested in, the best way to grow your business is by starting small and expanding it slowly. This way, you find out what works and can focus on growing your business one product at a time.

People who go live on day one with a new website and a dozen different focuses may find themselves confused about why they aren't making money. With each program having various nuances and terms/conditions you would be more able to expand successfully with one program at a time.

A Brief History of Merchant Affiliate Programs

While other sites already had merchant affiliate programs in place before them, Amazon probably did more to popularize the concept of paying commissions on sales to web site owners.

Companies wanting to set up merchant affiliate programs in the past had to spend a lot of money and development effort to create programs from scratch. Today, however, much of the process of signing up and approving affiliate publishers can be automated. And, companies don't need to build their own programs from the ground up anymore, but rather can sign up with merchant account affiliate programs that manage much of the process for them.

Merchant Affiliate Programs

*Help your affiliates succeed!

As a merchant account, affiliate programs are your route to success. Affiliates are your global sales team and should be treated well. Communicate with them regularly and ask them what you could do to help them. Find out what kind of promotions work best and do more of them. Talk to your super affiliates and find out what they're doing, then communicate that to your other affiliates.