|
        |
|
The following is a list of affiliate programs I have joined and a summary of my thoughts of each program. Click Here if you wish to read reviews from other affiliates and webmasters!
All in all I have found their products to convert quite well, and with a starting commission of 30%, they are comparable to many of the other programs. One thing that I have found with LEC that no other affiliate program (at least none that I have come across as of yet) has is their high level of affiliate support. The Staff at Leading Edge Cash is incredibly fast at answering any and all questions and in many cases go out of their way to help their affiliates in any way they can. Many Affiliate Programs out there today offer an online forum for affiliates and staff alike to correspond, however, the Leading Edge Cash forum is full of highly qualified users who are willing to go out of their way to assist their fellow affiliates. In such a cut throat industry it is amazing to see such high levels of help and support. It does make sense that the staff of Leading Edge Cash would help out their affiliates, however, for the other webmasters to provide such help I found it to be quite a shock. After all these forum users are really all in direct competition with one another! Not only do the products convert well, Leading Edge Cash has an excellent reputation of paying on time! I have been an affiliate for more than a year now, and have NEVER had payment arrive late! I would HIGHLY recommend Leading Edge Cash to ANYONE starting out in the affiliate world, and also to those seasoned professionals looking for another avenue to make some money! One more point about Leading Edge Cash is their return policy! If a customer returns their product, the affiliate keeps the commission!! Plain and simple! The only charge backs that will occur are if the order was fradulent! You wont find that with many other programs!
While the staff at MensNiche is more than willing to help, and they are quite efficient at responding to emails, the cryptic linking system for internal pages is a bit confusing.
Payment for my one sale came very quickly and I have to say I was impressed. You never really know how long you will end up waiting for that first cheque. One big downer with this program is that they do have a minimum $100 payout. In my opinion this is one of the worst things an affiliate program can do. For the big affiliates that earn thousands each month it doesn't really matter, but for the smaller guys, if you have $90 sitting there and have to wait forever, it can be quite frustrating. Overall I will have to say I like Online Future Cash, and will do more to promote it in the near future. 50% commissions are always nice. They do of course have some downsides. Their link generation does not even come close to that of many other programs. Programs like Leading Edge Cash for example, has far superior infrastructure for affiliate support. With a little work to their affiliate back end I think Online Future Cash has the potential to much bigger than they already are.
They say this is to eliminate affiliates signing up solely for the purpose of achieving a one time discount on ClickBank promoted products. I can understand this, however, I think it is a bit ridiculous. In my case I had made 3 sales near the start of promoting, and took forever to make the 4th, while the money sat dormant in my account - this brings me to another negative! If your account sites without making sales, after a couple months they start to deduct $1 per month for inactivity!! Then to top it off, when they do send out cheque's they also charge a processing fee of $2.50 per cheque! I honestly do not understand this seeing as how they already make a premium on the original purchase price of the goods! While clickbank does have a HUGE variety of products to promote, I would not recommend them for any small time affiliates. If you are making regular sales the $2.50 processing charge would not mean much, but for those who make the odd sale, it can cut into your profits. If you are driving plenty of traffic and making many sales, ClickBank may be for you, otherwise I recommend against it, at least for those starting out. One other quick note on ClickBank - They linking system is VERY limiting providing ONLY a means of linking to the main homepage. There is currently no way (at least that I am aware of) to link to internal pages of a ClickBank members web site - To me this can pose a huge disadvantage when trying to promote their products.
The link generation is quite handy. You can create a variety of ad's (different shapes and sizes) and populate them with dynamic content. Pick the category and Amazon can serve up their hottest ads related to that category - no updating is needed from the affiliates end to change things up. One big disadvantage is the payout percentages - A measly 5%! Amazon is certainly no get rich quick scheme! For those webmasters running content rich sites who are not trying to make a living off of ad revenue, you may want to consider placing Amazon Ads along side to generate a few bucks, but I can not really see a site dedicated to promoting Amazon making serious money. Extagen (Male Enhancement) Advanced Dermal
Solutions
Much of my dislike has to do with a few things - The commission structure, and the back end for affiliates. I'll start with the back end. There is no back end. Okay, there is, but it is so basic and trivial with VERY little support and tons of confusion. If you want to find banners, linking codes, or even a statement that shows your commission payout's you have to hunt and dig, and if you are lucky you will eventually find it. In this day and age where affiliate marketing is as huge as it is, it doesn't make sense to me to have a program that is so non-user friendly. Invest a few dollars and customize the "off-the-shelf" system you have in place. OR even better yet, hire some programmers to make something that you can be proud of! The most successful programs out there dominate for a reason, and part of that reason is keeping affiliates happy, and one way to help make them happy is to provide them with the tools they need to promote your products! Another, and more important way to keep them happy, is with money! Their payout's are a measly 20%. Now when compared to a number of other programs out there, this isn't that bad, and by itself. Where the problem comes in is that they have a MAX commission of $20 per sale?? What's up with that? If someone goes in and makes a purchase of $200, I should get the full $40! Many products you can promote with them are around the $10 range. What this means is that you will make about $2 per sale. With their minimum $50 payout (what's with all these minimums???) that means you may have to make 25 sales before this happens!!! You will have to be making a large number of regular sales before this program will pay off for your time. I am going to compare this to Leading Edge Cash. With their program I average about $35 per sale - at 25 sales that's $875! Another problem with Netrition is detailed sales stats. Good luck finding any. They show the total dollars earned, but don't offer affiliates a way to see exactly what it is that was sold! How am I suppose to know that they are being honest if I cant see what really going on? In my opinion I would not recommend this program to anyone starting out. You will not make the money you need to recover your costs (hosting, etc) unless you move large volume. That said, if you have an existing site with high traffic numbers, some of these products may convert really well, and you could make some money where you weren't before. Overall however, this program is not one of my focuses. If anyone out there is doing quite well with this program I would LOVE to hear from you! Contact Me with you thoughts! (Note: I never even thought about this one! As far as I can tell, Netrition does not leave any cookies. What this means to affiliates is that if the user follows your link, bookmars the netrition site, and comes back tommorow to actually buy - the affiliate gets nothing! Not a good deal for affiliates at all!) (Also, notice that the Visit Site link has no Affiliate ID attached - Thats right, no downlines with Netrition. While this does not bother me, as the commissions from this would be trivial, it is something that many affiliates may want to take note on) Web Position Gold Avela I decided to check out who the affiliate really is that I signed up under. It said that I had no up line and had signed up independently. This started to make me wonder, why had my signup not registered with their program? I went back and checked out the affiliate link I had followed and it had matched up perfectly with that of the linking techniques outlined on the Avela site. This was a flag to me - if my signup had not registered, how many affiliates would sign up under me only to not have them register as MY down line? AND even worse, how many sales commissions would I lose as a result? I had also noticed another key point. Before I signed up their site stated, "Earn 30% commission," Well, when I checked out my payment information I was recorded at a 20% rate. That just didn't add up. After seeing these two issues I decided that this program was not worth my time - there are plenty of other programs out there to promote that would not cause me nearly as much grief so I removed my account entirely (I was surprised to see this as an option!) After removing my account I also sent an email to the tech support for the program explaining my experience and why I had decided against them. I had a reply stating that if I came back they would offer me a 40% commission. They also stated that perhaps the affiliate link I had followed was incorrect and the fault of the affiliate who posted it. (Well - that link met the guidelines set out by Avela sooo...). At any rate I decided not to bother. If I was having trouble before I even got started, I was not going to chance it. I would love to hear from anyone who has any positive OR negative experiences with Avela! If you have any, please let me know!
|
