Is Affiliate Marketing For Your Site?

Is affiliate marketing suitable for your site? Should you rush out now and choose an affiliate network?

Probably not! Networks fall into one of two categories - those that accept every merchant and charge set-up and monthly fees and those that are choosy and charge just commission levies.

The later case sounds far better - there's no risk, just pay for what you use. But these schemes have to ensure that the sites they are promoting are quickly going to recover their set-up costs. So they have to be very choosy on what sites they promote and will want to know what your conversion rate is and will want to get the best possible commissions out of you.

So are those with monthly fees better? Well if you are desperate to start a scheme they will probably accept you - but at a cost. And to be honest, if you haven't worked out your conversion rate and so on, have you really nurtured your site to the point of knowing how well it works?

When looking at a merchant and their static costs you must work out what this equates to per sale to build that into your cost model. Until you know how many visitors you need per sale and how many visitors they are likely to send you, you have no way of knowing how long the £500 set-up fee and £50 monthly fee (or whatever) will take to be recovered.