How to Identify Merchants with Good Affiliate Programs

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
3. Go directly to a merchant's website

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:

• Some networks allow you to compare merchant’s 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:
• Azoogle Ads (www.azoogleads.com) – If you’re looking for some of the top pay
per lead offers in the industry Azoogle has some of the best programs. I’ve been
very impressed by their willingness to help affiliates at all levels succeed.
• Share a Sale (www.shareasale.com) - 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 (www.clickbank.com) - If you are into promoting "info products", or
software, ClickBank has thousands of merchants.
• OneNetworkDirect (www.onenetworkdirect.com) – If you plan on promoting
software products I highly recommend OneNetworkDirect.
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 a 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.

• 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.