There are a lot of affiliate programs out there to choose from. It’s often difficult to know which are the best programs to promote.

Here are 5 tips to help you find the best affiliate programs:

Life-time cookies – A really good affiliate program will offer life-time cookies. Unfortunately, some shopping cart systems don’t allow the vendors this feature, which isn’t so great for you – the affiliate. A life-time cookie means that you will get paid for referring a customer who makes a purchase through your affiliate link even if they buy at any point in the future.

When looking for a good program, try to lookout for those which offer life-time cookies or at least a minimum of a year. Remember sometimes it takes customers months before actually making a purchase.

Training and Customer Service – A good program will provide training tools and resources for their affiliates. Ideally, they should have a member’s area where you can log in and grab promotional materials, your links and check your stats and commissions.

Good communication is also important. If you email an affiliate program with a question and don’t hear back from them or hear back from them 2 weeks later, what will it be like if you ever have an issue with payments or other important question? A good affiliate program will respond to your questions in a timely manner. By the same token, a good affiliate will make sure they read all the provided materials provided on the website before contacting the program.

Sales Pages that Convert – Before promoting a specific product, have a look at their sales page. Does it look like it will convert into sales? If a sales page is sloppy, has grammar and spelling mistakes, or just looks unprofessional, you may not make too many sales – no matter how good the product is.

Now that you know some of the things you should look for in a good program, here are a few things you should be careful of!

Advertisements and Google Adsense – If you’re promoting an ebook and sending customers to a sales page, be weary of sales pages with Google ads or other types of advertisement on the sales page. If you’re working hard to send traffic to that page, it’s not fair that your traffic will be used to make someone else money through ads (without you getting paid anything in return).

If you see a sales page with ads on the page, I say stay away. You work hard as an affiliate and you don’t want to waste your traffic.

High Sales Minimum – Watch out for programs who ask you to sell a certain amount before being paid. For example if the commissions on a $20 eBook are 10% (that’s $2 per sale) and they ask you to accumulate a minimum of $200 dollars in commissions before they send you payment, that’s a whole lot of books you need to sell before getting paid – 100 books to be exact.

Some of these programs operate on the basis that affiliates will usually not make that many sales and they’ll never need to pay out. It’s unfortunate but this does happen, so always check payment terms before promoting a program.