Partnerships: The Top Level of Affiliate Marketing

After some time as an Internet marketer or as an affiliate marketer, you will eventually come to a certain golden moment. You will have generated enough authority and enough trust among your peers that you can enter into partnerships and joint ventures. You have truly made the top rung of affiliate marketing, but now is no time to drop your guard.

You have made it this far for one reason: You have been good to your customers. Mistakes along the way about affiliating yourself with bogus products can almost be forgiven, just so long as you treat your leads well. Of course, promoting shoddy or shady products can tend to get expensive if you have to make things up to your customers. Careful selection of what you promote is obviously in your best interest.

At any rate, now that you’re entering the realm of joint ventures, you have to be especially careful about what company you keep. After all, promoting a product as a JV Affiliate is one thing, while having your name on it is another. How can you avoid the trap of having your name attached to a crap product?

First of all, as soon as you can afford it when you’re “up and coming,” you need to go to conferences. You need to have social interactions and make friends. Much like any other social group, the company you keep in Internet marketing reflects highly on your personal image. Be selective; it may sound like high school all over again, but there are still yet the good crowds and bad crowds.

Once you have a good circle of friends and associates, keep up with each other. You don’t necessarily have to know how “the wife and kids are doing,” but you should all be apprised of each other’s success level in particular ventures. Naturally, knowing how the wife and kids are doing goes a long way toward lubricating negotiations.

Once everyone is comfortable with each other and have determined that a joint venture is a mutually beneficial arrangement, it’s still not time to drop your guard. You know the quality of the person, but you don’t as yet know the quality of the product.

To get this, you need to have statistical information. While you may think the sun rises and sets around the other person, you still have to know that the product actually works. Alpha and beta test results are absolutely essential before jumping in on a product launch.

Even at that, there’s no sure guarantee that the product that you put your name on is going to work out in the long run. Due to the fickleness of certain Web 2.0 properties, for instance, something that worked as late as the beta testing phase may become disabled. This ultimately amounts to a value judgment on your part.

Even if a product seems to work in the later testing phases, you still have to ask the question of if it might become banned as an unsavory practice by websites that it interacts with. You may get stuck with a lame duck in the actual implementing phase otherwise.