Choosing the right affiliate product to promote can make a big difference to sales.

Get it right and the sales come in almost automatically.

Get it wrong and you either get no sales or the refunds start appearing and your list begins to lose confidence in you.

But what can you do to choose the right affiliate product?

Ideally, the product should be one that you’ve personally used.

That way your content promoting the product can be talked about from experience.

If you’re just starting out with affiliate marketing, I’d strongly suggest that you take that approach.

It lends more credibility to your pages and I’ve certainly found that I get the highest proportion of sales when I’m writing from a position of strength as I’ve used the product.

That’s an ideal situation and certainly one to aim for.

But it can be limiting.

After all, there are only so many products that you can personally use. And if you’re promoting something like – let’s say – men’s razors, you’ll only personally be using one of them of a regular basis unless your facial hair grows at a phenomenal rate.

Review copies

These are the next best thing in my view.

Once you get established in your niche (and sometimes even when you’re just starting out if you can write a plausible request to the product owner) then you can either request a review copy or you may even be offered one without asking. I’ve had that for product launches in various niches I’m involved in.

A review copy is normally the same as the actual product.

It happens all the time – computer magazines get “review copies” (or often even review machines) to do their tests on. Even at the height of their circulation, It would have been far too expensive for them to buy every single product reviewed. The same goes for cars, travel and lots of other products. You usually have to skim to the end of the article and increase the point size from the smallest they can get away with to something readable to find out but the information is there.

The thing with a review copy is to be open about it.

Chances are your readers will sense that you haven’t really used the product, especially if you’re promoting a new product to your list most days or even most weeks. It’s just not plausible so you might as well say up front that you’ve approached the product on the basis of having seen a review copy and you think it’s well constructed, will do what it promises, etc.

When I get a review copy, I don’t usually go through the product in the same depth I would if I owned it outright.

Life’s too short to do that.

For instance, John Shea recently asked me to review one of his programs on Udemy.

It’s an excellent course but I didn’t go through all of it. Just enough lessons (about a dozen of them, they’re quite short) to double check that John had done his usual thorough job of creating it.

And that’s another clue.

The reputation of the person creating the product.

Some people I wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole and would never promote.

Others I need to check the product as their quality varies or the subject matter (YouTube videos for instance) often includes out of date techniques such as buying views.

And others I promote without hestitation, so long as the subject itself is one that my list reacts well to.

Which is yet another clue

You won’t know the answer at first but over time your site visitors and your list will react better to some products than others.

My internet marketing list wouldn’t react very well to instant success offers as I don’t agree that instant success is do-able. So it wouldn’t be congruent for me to promote those, even if some of my list were likely to buy them.

Sometimes I’ll get a review copy and even though it’s not an area I normally promote, the quality is good enough to suggest it. With the caveat that I’m up front about it not being my area of expertise.

Sometimes the review copy is poor quality and I won’t promote it at all. But that’s rare as I find that the product owners know that and don’t send out a review copy anyway.

And sometimes the content of the product hasn’t actually been created yet.

That happens – it could be a webinar or a live “watch me” course.

Then it’s purely down to the reputation of the person creating the product.

And even then, sometimes they flounder. Myself included on a couple of occasions but I’m reasonably certain that even when that happened I delivered more content than originally envisaged and that I went the extra mile for people who’d joined.

It’s the product creators who vanish for weeks or months on end that I don’t give a second chance to, personally or as a promoter. And there are (unfortunately) a few of those around.

Sure, life can get in the way unexpectedly. A few years ago I was rushed into hospital for an appendix operation and I went dark for several weeks so I know it can happen. Fortunately I hadn’t got any recently launched products or coaching or similar, otherwise I’d have had to find a way to get an apology out to those affected.

But most of the time if it’s a course that will happen in the future you’ll know that and your affiliate review will be couched in terms of “they’re normally good and I’ve every reason to expect this to be the same”.

Maybe even that you’ll be following along yourself. In which case a good bonus is the offer of help as and when your purchasers get stuck. I’ve done that and it works nicely.

Don’t promote blind

In my view, the worst kind of affiliate product promotion is to promote products you’ve never seen let alone used.

It’s a common thing to be suggested in quite a a lot of affiliate courses – pick products based on a gravity range in Clickbank or even just if they pay out more than, say, $20 per sale or a recurring commission.

That’s not a good idea, even if it seems as though it should be.

It’s your reputation.

For instance, a lot of people promote Hostgator. Which until a few years ago was a perfectly good host but has a less than stellar reputation in recent years.

if the post hasn’t been updated in a while, that’s probably excusable.

But if it’s a recent post based just on the high payouts that a lot of hosting programs have (but not the one I’ve linked here, it’s one I’ve got experience of and is linked because they’re good value and have good support) then it’s not such good news.

So be careful, otherwise you could get tarnished with the same brush in the eyes of your visitors and list.

It’s a tightrope walk.

But it’s worth spending a bit of extra time making sure you stay as ethical as possible because internet marketing and affiliate marketing are businesses you can be in for a very long, very profitable, time.

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