Affiliate Programs for Webmasters Top 48 Hours - Using Affiliate Directories to Improve Your Program

Author: Clay Mabbitt

Who joins an affiliate program? The most common group is people who want to become rich quickly and easily using their computer, the majority of which will never become productive affiliates.
The second most common group is webmasters who have some good content and regular traffic, but are looking for a way to generate revenue from their web site. (Note these classifications are not based on quantifiable data; these are simply my impressions of the industry.)

When a webmaster decides to incorporate an affiliate program in
their site, how do they go about selecting one? Most will type
"best affiliate programs" or "affiliate reviews and ratings" in
their favorite search engine and wind up at an affiliate
directory. Similar to Yahoo!'s site directory, affiliate
directories group programs into categories that allow webmasters
to quickly locate the opportunities that best correlate with the
content of their site.

For this reason alone, it is important for affiliate program
managers to submit their programs to as many affiliate programs
as possible. (www.affiliatefirst.com offers a very affordable
submission service that will submit your program to a large
number of directories.) Affiliate directories also offer an
extremely valuable opportunity to evaluate your program through
the eyes of your potential affiliates.

Affiliate directories will allow you to make side-by-side
comparisons of your program with other similar programs. Very
good directories will also contain vital stats that are
extremely important to affiliates, such as return days. By
comparing your profile with that of other programs you can
quickly evaluate where your program is most appealing and where
other programs are going to lure your potential affiliates away.
This process gives you the necessary information to tweak your
program to increase appeal to affiliates and magnify the
effectiveness of your recruiting efforts.