Choosing an affiliate program

When choosing an affiliate program, you should try to figure out as much you can about your visitors and where they arrive from.

A few things you need to figure out is:

• What kind of visitors is your site likely to attract? Age, gender, interests and nationality are all of high importance
• Where do they arrive from? Is the major part of your traffic from search engines? Or are you attracting visitors from other sites?
• If you have a lot of SE traffic - What search terms are they using to find your site?
• In your opinion - Why are your visitors looking at your pages? Are they likely to find what they are looking for?

All of this - and much, much more - are important factors to contemplate before choosing an affiliate program.

If you are getting visitors from a SE - with a term you feel might not be a total match - you have a great opportunity to choose a program based on just that.

If they are arriving to your site - looking for topic A, but finding topic B - they will still be looking for topic A. A banner or text link targeting topic A, will of course convert very well in this situation.

This is an excellent example on where an "off-topic" program will convert better then a program matching your content. Another situation where this is true is when your site is "to good", i.e. you are presenting your visitors with a complete service or product - making it highly unlikely they will click a banner promoting the same services.

Try to use the Affiliate Ranker Search as much as you can - and remember to look at your competitors. It is often a good idea to choose a different affiliate program then your competition - simply because it is less likely your visitors have looked at or clicked your banners before. If you can't come up with any keywords to search for, simply browse the affiliate directory for ideas.

When making a web page designed for affiliate marketing - the potential revenue is of course a very important factor. You should be picky when choosing a program, not settling for less then the best.

Even with Affiliate Ranker Search - This task will take some time. Do not rush this - This is where your website will make you an income, it IS worth while to fully explore the various choices you have.

When you have decided on one or a few affiliate programs - it is time to choose banners and text links, and learn how to place them for maximal exposure. How and where you place your advertisement will be an important factor in the end.

source: http://www.affiliateranker.com/resources/choosing.jsp