What's The Best
Free Affiliate Program

Are you looking for the best free online affiliate program? Well, I'll tell there are so many out there that you affiliate marketers can join, literally thousands. If you make some bad choices, you can waste a lot of time and money promoting products that very few want to buy. So before you spend your time on anything, there are 5 questions you should ask. This way you improve your chances of selecting a hit product.

1. Is It Really Free?

Since you are looking for a free affiliate program, watch out for hidden charges. If the site has something to sell, you should not have to pay just to promote it. They should be making their money from their customers, not from you.

Although it is illegal to make you pay just to be an affiliate (that would be a pyramid scheme), there are some sites that require you to pay for promotional tools, a copycat website or traffic. They are allowed to do that. However, it is not usually a very good deal because all of their affiliates will be using the exact same tools. You need to find your own promotion methods if you are to stand out from the crowd and make plenty of sales.

2. How Much Is The Commission?

Commission varies hugely depending on the type of product purchased. Downloadable products like ebooks, which have very low costs, usually pay 50% but may go as high as 80%. In some cases a cheap ebook will be sold on 100% commissions and the owner makes all their money on later sales to the customers that joined their list.

For physical products you can expect to earn anything between 2% to 20%. Some affiliate programs such as eBay's partner network will pay you an additional fixed amount if you are referring a new customer who has not bought from them before.

3. How Are Sales Tracked?

Most sales are tracked by cookies. This is a system which places a marker on the customer's own computer when they visit through your link, so that future sales will be credited to you.

Some cookies will expire after a certain time so that if the visitor does not buy within, say, 30 days you have lost the chance to make money from them. Other cookies are will last forever ... in theory. In practice as soon as the customer deletes cookies on his computer your commission is lost. The same is true if he visits the site on another computer by typing the domain name right into his browser, and then buys. Also, if he visits the site through another affiliate's link, your cookie will normally be overwritten - the most recent affiliate gets the sale. So you are not guaranteed to get a commission from everyone who visits through your link.

Some affiliate programs track customers by their email address instead of cookies. In this case the first affiliate to refer the customer keeps him, and it doesn't matter if the customer deletes cookies. This is usually a better way to be sure of getting your commission but it is not very common. You will still lose the customer if he forgets what email address he signed up with and switches to a new one, of course.

4. Do They Pay Commissions On Repeat Purchases?

Some companies pay you for only the first purchase that a new customer makes. Others go on paying you for subsequent sales, sometimes for a limited time e.g. 6 months, and sometimes forever. Depending on what the company sells, they may have a lot of repeat purchasers so this can make a big difference to you.

Often a customer will only make a small purchase from a company the first time they use them. Bigger purchases come later when they trust the merchant. Receiving repeat commissions can mean that your commissions build up pretty much on autopilot while you continue doing the same amount of work.

5. How And When Do They Pay?

Some companies will pay you once a month by check, usually in US dollars. They may need your social security number. Some use bank wire transfer and have a list of countries they will send to. Others pay through PayPal to anybody who has a receiving PayPal account, no matter where they live.

Some programs will only pay after you reach a certain target amount of sales. Research all of this thoroughly before you start promoting, especially if you live outside the USA. You don't want to refer a lot of sales and then find you do not qualify to be paid.

So there you have it, the basic questions that you must have answers to before you spend time promoting anybody's affiliate program. And it's surely a great idea to test or view the product if there is a way that you can do that without having to buy it. This way, you'll know what you're talking about when you promote it. And with this, you'll find the best free online affiliate program for you to promote.

One parting tip: start by selecting affiliate products under the Clickbank network. They have thousands of digital products in many categories, only downable. Clickbank makes life easy for the would-be affiliate, as they rank the product in a category by popularity, in other words by best sellers first.

Here is a good example of a Clickbank affiliate product Click Here!

Here's another very popular Clickbank prodcut Click Here for Dominating CB2

CLICK HERE to Join ClickBank at no cost to you. You use your new account to sell your own products or affiliate products.

Fred Farah