A really effective, low cost and low risk way of making money from your blog is as an affiliate marketer. This is especially true in the period during which you are establishing whether your blog is a good enough “make money online” venue.

Here are some suggestions to help you choose the best affiliate programs for your blog. This information would apply mostly to blog owners who are just getting started but should also be useful to those who have been operating their blog for a while now.

These recommendations concerning affiliate programs are generally based on the experiences of affiliate marketers who specialized in physical products that I have read about. However, if you are running a blog about a different topic, you obviously will not be writing about the same physical products and perhaps did not realize that many of the products were not actually physical products at all.

So, let us look at some important points you should pay attention to when choosing the best affiliate programs for your blog:

1. Commission Rate

You should always be very careful to any affiliate program that does not offer a high commission rate. Some of the low commission rates are around 5% to 10% commission. You should avoid any program that offers commission rates below 10%. Also, don’t join any affiliate that offers less than 25% commission, unless the products are very expensive.

The very best affiliate program would probably be one that offers 40% or higher. Several high paying affiliate programs offer affiliate signups commissions of 40% or higher. By signing up for these affiliate programs, you get paid consistently after you make your sales.

2. Lots of Affiliate Support

The best affiliate programs provide an affiliate manager when you sign up for their programs. This affiliate manager should be available to your affiliate questions on 24/7. So you really need to have the constant support all the time – support from the affiliate manager and his team of affiliates.

Good affiliate programs like ClickBank, PayDotCom and ShareASale all provide affiliate support via email and have some experts who help affiliates to sign up for their programs, teach them how to get started and make their affiliate sites more attractive.

3. Good Quality Products

The very best affiliate programs don’t recruit people who are just trying to make a few bucks. There must be products to promote for these programs. And you should know which products are the best to promote and are the best to promote with PPC campaigns.

Avoid any program that offers products that are too cheap and too poor quality. Make sure to join affiliate programs that offer quality products and services. They should also provide you with similar products for your affiliate promotions.

4. Recurring Commission

You may not have a single sale or sale per month from a single customer, but you should still try to receive at least 5 to 6 monthly recurring commissions. That is, you continue to get paid for the same customer as long as the customer keeps paying the monthly fee.

Even if you don’t achieve conversions as high as you would like, you will still earn good commission as long as the customer keeps buying from the merchant. So even if you have lower conversion rates, you can still earn good commissions if you have the ability to get paid every month for as long as the customer keeps subscribing.

The real truth behind affiliate marketing is that it is a lot of work. You will have to advertise the affiliate product or service and then you will have to encourage your website visitors to click on the affiliate link.

As soon as you earn your first commission, you will surely want to continue to add more affiliate programs and even other products and services to promote and make money online from.

The highest recommendation for your success in affiliate marketing is to focus and attract your target niche first before ever thinking about setting up your first affiliate site.

In order to set up your first affiliate site, have your own website. It is really important to have your own affiliate site after you have already selected the affiliate product or service that you want to promote.

Fact is, by then, your site will be very different from all the other sites and you will surely stand out from the crowd. And you will definitely be getting a lot of affiliate checks from your first site. Thus, having your own affiliate website is by far a better business decision.