Written by T. Alan Younker, posted 17 June, 2021
We online marketers are presented with an amazing array of affiliate marketing offers, from a variety of sources, that we could promote. How in the world do we choose the most appropriate ones? Sometimes having too many choices can be more difficult than having too few.
You might just go to a ClickBank, JVZoo or Warrior Forum and see what is selling the best this week and choose it because it’s a hot item. Or choose the offer with the juiciest commissions.
But there’s a lot more to product selection than that! We need to do a little research, on ourselves and our experiences and preferences, as well as on a potential product to promote.
If you’re in a hurry, here’s a summary of the criteria:
- Personal – choose a product that you have used for yourself and have found to be well designed and useful.
- Price – make certain that it fills a need in your product funnel, or you are certain it will appeal to your list.
- Positioning – make sure you have thought through the “angle”, and know what problem it will solve.
- Pain – it should resolve a troubling situation that the customer is experiencing.
- Prizes – decide what prizes that the vendor is offering that you may be able to achieve
- Payout – what portion of your product funnel does it fit into? Are the commissions recurring?
- Passion – only promote products that you are convinced will change the buyer’s life in some positive way.
- Present – find a way to work some current event into your marketing campaign.
Now it’s time to get into the details of how these criteria are implemented.
HOW TO CHOOSE AN AFFILIATE OFFER TO PROMOTE: CONTENTS
Here are eight criteria to consider before you decide:
1. Personal – have you purchased the product and reviewed its features for yourself? You need to link it to you as a person. Always keep in mind, people buy from people. If you can’t convey confidence in what you are promoting, they aren’t going to buy it.
You’ll certainly be more enthused about promoting something that you know and love, rather something that you simply perceive to be useful and valuable to your audience.
Are you friends with, or deeply knowledgeable, about the creator of the product? It’s important that you can give potential customers confidence that you didn’t just pick out any old affiliate marketing offer to promote.
2. Price – bigger isn’t necessarily better. How does it fit into your affiliate marketing funnel? Do you need a “big ticket” item for the bottom of your funnel, or a lower priced one to offer at the top?
A lot of products come with their own upsells, downsells and cross-sells, which could be an important consideration in your decision-making.
If you’ve built a sizable email list, you should know the price point that would be most appealing to the majority of them. After a period of time you will recognize the sweet spot for your list.
3. Positioning – Don’t promote a product. Instead choose a position, an angle, or a story that the potential customer can relate to. The product literature typically focuses on the features and benefits, but you need to be focused on the desired outcome that the customer can expect when utilizing the product. Keep in mind that people buy to solve a problem they have.
You want to keep yourself a step ahead of the vendor. That’s why you never want to blindly use the “swipe files” that the vendor provides to affiliates.
4. Pain – does the product solve a painful situation that the customer is experiencing, such as a never-ending lack of traffic, a boring website, embarrassingly low commissions, or average-looking graphics?
People want to solve whatever is making them uncomfortable. Vendors are often too busy bragging about the functions of their product. Emphasize the solution that will be produced by the use of the product, rather than simply reciting its functional uses.
5. Prizes – vendors often offer prizes to entice marketers to choose their affiliate marketing offers during a product launch. Of course, the heavy hitters in the niche will typically get the awards and land at the top of the leaderboard ratings. 
But if you don’t feel that you are in that vaunted category, look for a less-promoted product that’s less likely to be targeted by the biggies. It’s often about the timing, getting into the launch at the right moment, when there are multiple launches going on at the same time.
Even if you don’t win any prizes a first, you should be able to get your name on the leaderboard. If you do that consistently, people will start noticing your name in the statistics. Keep working at it and you can climb in the rankings!
For an insider’s view on how a product launch is set up and run, check out this site: https://supermetrics.com/blog/affiliate-contest
6. Payout – there’s more to consider that just the commission for the affiliate marketing offer you are investigating. How likely is it to convert?
If the commission is small, but it is the perfect product to get people into the top of your funnel, it may be a great choice. After all, the real money is made in the funnel.
You also need to take into account what upsells and/or downsells relate directly to it. Do those related products have the same sort of appeal as the one you are considering?
How about recurring affiliate commissions? They are always a benefit when you can incorporate them into your campaigns.
7. Passion – it is important that you only promote an affiliate marketing offer that you personally are passionate about. If you are convinced that the product will change the customer’s life for the better, even if it’s only in a small way, you should have a built-in passion for it.
Your passion, or lack of it, will come through in your sales page. You want to acquire a reputation as someone who only promotes products of the highest quality.
8. Present – it is very helpful if you can find a twist to relate the product to something that’s currently in the news, even if the product launched a long time ago, even if the tie-in isn’t readily apparent.
For instance, if the whole world is focused on the World Cup Soccer (whoops, I mean “football”) finals, you can set up a campaign that compares your search for the perfect product to help the potential customer’s pain point to the contest currently happening in the sports world to determine the best team.
Here’s a nice summary of 17 recent successful social media campaigns, to give you a dose of inspiration: https://www.plannthat.com/social-media-campaigns-2020/
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