What should one look out in Health Affiliate Programs?

Health Affiliate programs is a very broad segment for affiliates interested in promoting health care related products and earning handsome commission. You can type “Health Affiliate programs” in Search Engine and you will find a long list of directories and websites promoting health care related products and their affiliate programs on SERP. The reason is very simple and that is the lucrative market available on the globe. People are coming online to research or find health related information and since they find health care products at significantly low price, they get lured to buy those products online rather going to the physical pharmacy and wasting their time as well as money.  Genuine online pharmacies or online health stores provides same products that are available in physical stores at cheap price. So for affiliates there is a huge market to earn money with health affiliate programs where affiliates can get commission ranging from 10% to 50% of product price.

More are the options more will be the confusion – Which health affiliate programs are best? Which affiliate programs are genuine? Who will provide highest Commission? Many such questions would be running in a mind of affiliate and we hope this article will help you up to some extent.

First of all you as an affiliate have to decide which market you want to target – natural products, Rx products, sexual health products, weight loss products. Sexual health products (Viagra, Cialis) and weight loss products (Reductil, Xenical, Proactol, Hoodia) are one of the highest selling products on internet and so are  their affiliate programs - sexual health affiliate programs and weight loss affiliate programs. Certainly you will get good amount of competition if you are trying to promote sexual health or weight loss products, so if you are new you can start with other products like women’s sexual health (Intrinsa) or smoking cessation (Champix) where you will find less competition. If you are well versed with Internet marketing techniques you can directly start with those products.

Once decided with the target market, you need to focus on websites providing those products and their affiliate programs. Checking for products is very necessary as you may find many generic version of products which are either not allowed or sometimes may not sold as much as brand products (you may find many generic version of Viagra, but they are not sold as much as Viagra is getting sold and the simple reason to it is the trust build on brand Viagra). Thus always prefer online stores providing brand products or brand as well as generic products but never prefer those selling only generic products. Apart from getting involved in genuine business, the added advantage of preferring brand products is that you usually get more commission on brand products compared to generic products and their conversion rate is also very high.

Find out legal information of the online store. It may be a possibility that online stores selling pharmaceutical products today may not be in existence tomorrow. So always ask for their legal information and try to get as much information as possible like their physical existence, their registration number, their phone number, from where they ship the products, etc. from their website and affiliate manager. Read more on why legal information is so important for affiliates: Getting Legal Information of Online pharmacy.

Usually affiliates make mistakes by getting lured seeking percentage commission value of an affiliate programs. There are many online health care stores claiming to give you commission up to 50% or even more. But always try to find out the actual commission value instead of commission percentage value. Calculate the commission value you will earn by selling one product and compare this with others. For example there can be two genuine online health care stores A & B selling two different products. Store A provides 50% commission selling generic product priced at $50 so commission you earn is $25. However Store B provides 20% commission selling brand products priced at $150 so the commission you earn with Store B is $30. Also the conversion rate of brand products is always higher compared to generic products.

The above factors would be visible to you before joining any affiliate program and thus you can make a smart choice of working with good and genuine Health Affiliate Programs using above factors.

If you find all the above factors good, sign up with them work with them and see what banners and promotional tools they provide. Find out how affiliate manager interacts with you. See what is the response time from affiliate team? Are they providing payments on time? Write about them and let other know about their affiliate program. If they are good let other know about their positive points if you find them bad complain about them.

Fake online pharmacy report

The biggest flaw of affiliate marketing is that affiliates unless don't get their money cannot assure wheter they have actually earn that money or not. Many affiliates have complained against fake online pharmacy for not paying them the actual commission earned by them. They could see thousands of dollars in their account in affiliate panel but when time comes for getting their amount, their account either get suspended or the pharmacy itself gets closed.

I have recently read a comment by an affiliate for one such online pharmacy called RxPayouts.

"Rxpayouts pharmacy affiliates. Nov 2, 2009 I sign up as an affiliate to this pharmacy affiliate site. I began sending them orders (around 12 orders daily) i sent them a total of around 50 sales and they never paid me a dime." - Paul (Manila)

You can check out the complete record of the complain on: Ripoff Report

Usually this kind of pharmacy affiliate programs tries to keep their threshold limit very high: $400 or even more. So by the time affiliates reach their threshold limit they can either stop their their account or stop the completer website of online pharmacy. Thus try working with pharmacy affiliate programs who have less threshold limit or are paying you in weekly or monthly basis. Again some may claim to pay you weekly but they keep their threshold very high which is difficult to achieve. Always try to find out their threshold limit and their legal information before joining any pharmacy affiliate program.

Read more on how to find out legal information of online pharmacy.


 

Health Affiliate Marketing: In house affiliate programs and affiliate networks

Health Affiliate marketing is a boon for affiliates. Affiliates are earning handsome commission from health affiliate marketing. However many are confused between affiliate networks and in house health affiliate programs. 

Usually big affiliate networks on internet are not working with online pharmacy or health care products, there are very few affiliate networks that are participating in health care products. However there are many health care merchants which are generating good amount of revenue using their in house health affiliate programs. With this amount of information let’s discuss some pros and cons of health affiliate networks and in house health affiliate programs.

Being an affiliate, the first thought that comes in a mind is that "if I move to affiliate network then I can get more merchants and thus more product options to promote." But we usually forget the level of competition existing in affiliate network. Thousands and millions of affiliates would be promoting the same products and getting same commission and sometimes one of them or all of them could be strong competitor to you. So this could be one of the disadvantages of joining health affiliate network, but at the same time the advantage of joining a network is getting more products to promote. If one product or merchant does not work you can shift to other very easily in a network.

You cannot have a full transparency in affiliate networks, whereas in an in-house affiliate program you know whom you are working with? What products they are selling? Are they genuine? Usually affiliate networks do take care of some of these points but while working for health care products you yourself should interfere and try to find out the genuine information about the health care merchants.

With affiliate network you are always assured of getting payment. However with in house affiliate program once you don't work with them or know from someones experience you cannot be assured of getting your payment. However in health care related products, usually who are involved in genuine online consultation and selling of genuine medication, they always makes sure that they will never do anything that can hamper their reputation. But usually the credibility of payment is more in networks compared to the in house affiliate programs.

Usually the super affiliates find difficulty in working with health affiliate networks as they cannot provide many times what super affiliates demands. This is very easy to achieve in an in-house affiliate program. Affiliates can easily demand in an in-house affiliate program and they request is easily & quickly fulfilled by affiliate manager for that in house affiliate program. The reason is that the affiliate team working for in house affiliate program has nothing to do expect make that one in house program better and better, however affiliate team for an affiliate network handles so many merchants account and cannot fulfill demands of all the affiliates as convincing third party is always a difficult job.

In an affiliate network, affiliates work becomes very easy. Just log in to one panel and you can access large number of merchants and their products; also get consolidated reports on all the merchants and products. Whereas in an in-house affiliate program, they have to log in to individual affiliate programs to get access to each of their affiliate panel and get the reports.

In an in house affiliate program you usually finds niche targeted segment. Thus usually pharmacy affiliate programs or health care affiliate programs are not working much with affiliate networks, they have their in house affiliate programs preferably. Advantage of getting into niche segment is higher conversion rate and better result. Apart from that the journey from a newbie affiliate to super affiliate is fast and easy in an in-house affiliate network compared to any affiliate network due to less competition in former.