I’ve been working on the affiliate links on one of my sites, which got me thinking about what makes an affiliate program worth my time.

First is a quality product. If the product is going to get me a lot of complaints (and people do complain to the affiliate sometimes), I don’t want to deal with it. Along with this goes quality customer service.

Next comes a great sales page. If my preselling efforts are good but the landing page is terrible my efforts will be wasted.

You can’t forget an appropriate payout. It amazes me how little some people want to pay out. I expect higher rates for electronic goods than physical goods; after all, your costs are very low with downloadable products. However, many companies offer a just about insulting level for either kind of product. Anything under 5% for physical products I’m really going to look and decide if the product is going to make conversions worthy of so little money per sale. Anything under 50% on electronic products gets a similar review.

I also like to see high quality promotional material. If you don’t know how your products should be promoted, I might have more doubts about promoting you. I may or may not use the provided material, but it gives me some guidelines and inspiration.

Keep your promotional material up to date too. On sites such as Commission Junction, companies are allowed to post coupon and promotional codes. You don’t want to know how often I’ll see a great deal to promote, but realize it has expired. That’s very annoying.

All of the above could look great, but sometimes for one reason or another a program just doesn’t work for me. That’s just life as an affiliate. Maybe my style isn’t right for the program. Depending on results and interest, I’ll either try someone else or drop it entirely.

Even though affiliate programs are free to join, it pays to think about which ones you sign up with and promote. Quality at all levels of your business can really help you in the long run.