Affiliate programs can be an easy and profitable way to make some money online. They pay affiliates for directing customers towards their business, with the size of the commission and the exact requirements that need to be fulfilled to get it varying between programs. 

There are a huge number of different programs which potential affiliates can join. It can be difficult to select the best program to join from this overwhelming and confusing wealth of choices, but there are certain criteria on which affiliate programs can be judged. 

Perhaps the most obvious criterion is the amount which will be paid for each customer that the affiliate passes to the merchant. Some programs pay tiny fees that are hardly worth the time and effort needed to get them. The best programs have commission rates that are over 50%, although affiliates should also be aware of the rules that govern when they will be paid a commission. Often it is not enough simply to send a potential customer to the merchant's website; the payout will only be made when a sale results from this traffic. 

It is important to select an affiliate program with a good conversion rate. The conversion rate is the proportion of visitors who complete the desired action. In terms of an affiliate program, this is the rate at which the visitors an affiliate directs to the merchant actually buy a product. Since the affiliate is likely to be paid only when this happens, a top affiliate program will have a high conversion rate.

The popularity and reputation of an affiliate program is also important. A profitable, established program will quickly build up a large number of affiliates and will generate a great reputation for itself. Experienced affiliates will stick with them, and payments will always be made promptly and correctly.

As well as these general criteria, the potential affiliate should consider whether a program will suit them personally. The product should be attractive to the sort of people who they will be exposing it to in their website, newsletter or wherever else they will be promoting it. 

Many potential affiliates jump in to the first affiliate program which they come across, or even if they make an effort to learn about an opportunity before they join are limited to the few programs which they have time to investigate. They often end up earning less than they should. 

The best way to find out about affiliate programs, and to gather some information about which programs meet these criteria is to use a website which has already collected the facts. Often the top programs will be ranked accordingly, making it much easier to find a good affiliate program than by searching for them individually. Innovative Affiliate Networks provide a regularly updated list of the best affiliate programs which can be checked each month to find out which are the top affiliate programs.

TOP AFFILIATE PROGRAMS

Top affiliate programs list at Click2Sell.EU

• Commissions size – only 50% or higher payout offering programs are included into this list. They can be considered as top paying affiliate programs.
• Product‘s conversion rate – products which convert above the marketplace average can be here.
• Products popularity among affiliates – if a affiliate program is very good then sooner or later it gets a big army of affiliates. This is quite good indicator for new affiliates when looking for a top affiliate program.
• Merchants reliability – owners of affiliate programs included into Top Affiliate Programs list have never failed to pay their affiliates on time. If merchant fails to pay on time, his program will never appear in this list.

List of top 10 Affiliate programs at Click2Sell.EU (December 2009) 

1. Everything4360 - Unleash your Xbox
2. Automated Income System
3. Email Processor
4. 6 by Six Millions
5. Daily Cash Jobs
6. Forex Phantom
7. My Data Source Team
8. Customer Service Assistants Needed
   
9. iPhone Unlocker 3G / 2G
10. Needs Focused Lessons

 

These Top 10 Affiliate Programs are making biggest turnover, they have solid history at Click2Sell, owners of these programs always pay their affiliates on time! This list is updated once per month, so don‘t forget to check it at least once in a month!

When I say "merchant accounts", I mean accounts at PayPal, Moneybookers, Worldpay, Authorize.net and Google Checkout. The same regular ones that you use to receive money online.

Why should i have merchant accounts?

You may ask why these merchant accounts are needed at all. Well, first of all, having only Click2Sell account doesn’t mean that you will be able to receive money from your product buyers. It’s not like in some other systems where you sign up for an account, add some products, make some sales, the system’s owners receive money from your sales and then you ask them to send the money to you in order to be able to do something with your earned money. Although such model has some advantages such as less steps to start selling, however such advantages definitely vanishes on the longer term, while a lot higher fees and "frozen money" status keeps hurting you forever.

In order to work with Click2Sell you need to have at least one PayPal, Moneybookers, Worldpay, Authorize.net or Google Checkout account. Just one or a few of them. You can imagine Click2Sell as a powerful add-on to your, let’s say, PayPal or Worldpay merchant account. You keep receiving money directly to your PayPal / Worldpay account (and thus having money from sales available to you almost instantly), but in addition you get affiliate program tracking and affiliate tracking reports. You can look for more details at Click2Sell working principles and payment processors post. This post is more intended to explain how to manage your merchant accounts in Click2Sell.

How to manage merchant accounts at Click2Sell

When logged into your Click2Sell account, in "My Profile" -> "My Payment Processors" page (in green sub-bar) you can do everything related to merchant accounts. There you can add additional merchant accounts, edit/update or delete some of them, set which of your merchant accounts will be used for receiving payments from credit cards or PayPal/Moneybookers.

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If you want to:

• add an additional merchant account, in Step1 select payment processor from drop-down list, click "Create" button and then enter necessary information that you are asked for (on the right side you will find full instructions how to find one or another data). That’s not all. Look at the next bulletin.
   
• choose which of the available accounts will be used for payments. In Step 2 you will need to determine which of your created accounts will be active for receiving money. Click on "Setup" button.
   
• edit or delete available merchant accounts. If you want to make changes in existing accounts (e.g., save API data for PayPal), then just click on any of existing account in the table. In the same way you can delete accounts. Just keep in mind that you can’t delete active accounts (that are chosen in Step 2).

Having several merchant accounts

Here is one thing about merchant accounts that I want to highlight. As I have mentioned before, you can have several merchant accounts of different payment processors saved in your single Click2Sell account. This is a great thing that you shouldn’t miss. What’s the point of having, let’s say, PayPal, Google Checkout and Authorize.net accounts when you could use just one as their purpose is the same - accept payments from your customers? Here’s a trick: having bigger variety of payment options will increase the number of your sales. Yes, if your customer doesn’t have Google Checkout buyer account, then he/she can quickly get one. However, people usually don’t trouble themselves with getting a new account in some system. In some cases they will just decide not to buy your product.

So I urge you to spend a half an hour for getting additional merchant accounts at PayPal, Moneybookers, Google Checkout, Authorize.net or Worldpay, if you don’t have them yet. Most of them are free and quite a lot of buyers use them.

Once you setup several merchant accounts (let’s say, PayPal, Moneybookers, Google Checkout, Authorize.net) in Click2Sell system, then your customers will be able to pay you not only by direct credit card payments, but also by PayPal, Moneybookers or Google Checkout funds. People just like to use their preferred payment systems, so give them a chance to pay you in their favourite way.

Things to be avoid when setting up merchant accounts on Click2Sell

1. Setting PayPal email which is different from your PayPal account’s primary email.
   Once a purchase takes place, PayPal returns us a different PayPal email which doesn’t match with your PayPal email in Click2Sell, thus anti-fraud prevention doesn’t allow buyers to continue. The outcome of this is that buyers pay you money, but don’t get your product.
   You need to make sure that your PayPal email in Click2Sell would be the same as your PayPal’s primary email.
    
2. Trying to use fake PayPal email which doesn’t exist at all.
   Yes, if you tell to Click2Sell that your PayPal email is doepaypal@email.com, then please make sure that such account is active, otherwise you won’t receive payments there. Writing an email address in Click2Sell sign-up form doesn’t automatically create PayPal account for this email.
    
3. PayPal for direct credit card processing.
   Although you can select your created PayPal account in "Credit Card" slot, however the only PayPal account type that is capable of accepting direct credit card payments is PayPal Website Payments Pro. Regular, premier or business PayPal accounts can’t handle CC payments, so please do not select such Paypal account in "Credit Card" slot in Step2.
    
4. Google Checkout is only for US and UK merchants.
   Thus it means that if you create Click2Sell account and set EUR currency as main processing currency, you won’t be able to use Google Checkout payment gateway. Google Checkout will work only with GBP or USD Click2Sell accounts.

Happy selling and merchant account management at Click2Sell Affiliate Network!

In this post about checkout page customization there will be two main parts and a tiny third one which is worth to be mentioned. Let’s see the first one.

Modifying text in the checkout page

Briefly speaking, you can just modify any word or sentence used in the checkout page. If you don’t like our chosen phrasing, you can easily change it. Of course, in most cases changing any English word to another English synonym in the checkout might not be really breath-taking, however its true power lies in helping to translate the default English checkout page entirely to any language: be it French, Russian, Italian, Zimbabwian or even Chinese with all its hieroglyphic.

You know, if you are selling a product/service to a specific non-English language market, then with the ability to translate the whole checkout page into necessary language will save your customers from fumbling in the checkout page while ordering your product. It will definitely improve the number of sales from each hundred of visitors. You know, not everyone will buy your product, if he/she would need to enter their credit card data in "something" that they barely understand or have no clue at all.

How to do that?

Just navigate to "Checkout Page customization" page which can be accessed this way:
"For Merchant" -> click on product name -> Customize product pages -> click on "Checkout Page" link.

In the opened page just go a bit down. Under WYSIWYG editor you will see several large text fields which are full of lines of duplicate phrases. Let us take just one line for example:

<Enter Your Information>=<Enter Your Information>

As it is said right above the text field (<ORIGINAL TEXT> = <YOUR CUSTOM/TRANSLATED TEXT> , the left side is original text which you have to leave untouched, the right side is the one where you can write whatever you want on top of already existing phrase. So if you want to change the phrase, just delete Enter Your Information on the right and write something in place of it. Leave "<" and ">" marks intact. For instance, if you want to translate it to French, then your line should look like:

<Enter Your Information>=<Écrivez votre information>

(autotranslator was used here, so maybe the translation is not really good).

Well, that’s all! Go through each line (that’s not a lot of work) and you’re done! As you have noticed, there are three big text fields: one for editing the checkout text, another one is for editing CVV page (the one which is opened when you click on "What is CVV?" link in the checkout) text and the last one is for editing purchase confirmation email text. The latter one is a bit different from others: there you can change everything (of course, everything has to be written in HTML), but just don’t change anything what is inside $(…) brackets (like ${billFirstName} ). If you want, you can drop some parts of the email, that’s perfectly fine.

Adding custom content

Frankly speaking, it is not a new feature, however it got no attention so far in this blog, so it’s a good time to talk a bit about it.

This feature allows you to add some extra content to your product’s checkout page. You can add text, pictures, tables, links. Just a few examples how our merchants use this feature:

• a nice image with "<ProductNameHere> secured checkout page". It just improves your customers’ impressions upon the checkout page.
• Additional order information. You know, it is better to place some information in order page than in any other place ("your order will be shipped in two days", "if you have any question regarding the product, contact us", etc.).
• some merchants add there some even more promotional text to maximize their efforts to encourage a customer to finish an order. They use various testimonials, delicious facts about a product and so on.

How to do that?

Just navigate to "Checkout Page customization" page which can be accessed this way:
"For Merchant" -> click on product name -> Customize product pages -> click on "Checkout Page" link.

The first text field with a lot of buttons is the place where you can add your custom content. It is a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor, so you might be already familiar with it.

Add or write there whatever you want. Just keep in mind that scripts added this way won’t work. It is so for security reasons.

A tiny nice feature

And the last customization that I want to tell you is being able to show your business/company name instead of your real name. In this way you can separate your personal life from your business.

In "My Profile" page you will see an option to setup your Business/Company Name. If you write something there, then it will be displayed in your product’s checkout page instead of your real name.

 

As you see, the new checkout page is fairly customizable, so catch the opportunity to make your product’s checkout page even more appealing to your customers. Perhaps it’s time to think about translating your product into a foreign language and start selling it to a local market? This is a great way to expand your current customer base! Don’t limit yourself with just English speakers!