[Linda Buquet]

Thanks Peter, thats a point I usually bring up.

For some reason I assumed you had an established site Chris, but if the site, pricing or model are new the 1st thing you need to do is some PPC and conversion testing. Peter's right, the last thing you want to do is burn out affiliates and ruin your reputation if your site conversion isn't up to par.

I recommend to merchants that arent sure about their conversions to do this before even THINKING about an affiliate program:

Set up a PPC account at Google. Set it up to track your sales. Set up a budget of 1,000 or 5,000. NOW PRETEND you are an affiliate for YOUR program. Pretend pay yourself 10% or whatever you think you'll be paying affiliates. At the end of the 1,000 or 5,000 PPC spend did you make a pretend profit? Would YOU want to be an affiliate for YOUR program???

Not that every affiliate will do PPC, that's not the point. The point is that PPC is the fastest more direct way to get sales. As you see your money leaking out the door YOU have the power to make tweaks in your copy, cart, pricing, offers, landing pages and YOU can test and tweak and improve conversions. Your job is conversions and sales - their is only to send youn the traffic.

Many affiliates will test a new merchant and give them 200-500 clicks and if they dont get a sale they drop the merchant. IF they send lots of clicks and get 0 sales they often post in forums that the program is dishonest or the program is terrible and tell other affiliates not to join.

Every affiliate and their expectations are different and various products have different conversion rates. Many affiliates shoot for a 1/100 conversion rate. But I think the average conversion rate for merchants is only about 2% but again varies by industry. So that will give you some guidelines.