Do you need to find the best free affiliate programs for your online business? There are many companies out there and you just need to pick the right one. You will have to consider many things, and here 5 of those factors which you may want to consider:

1. Is it really free?

This is something that you really need to investigate as a lot of companies will offer promises that they cannot keep. Essentially, a lot of companies are quite selfish and economical with the truth and may not actually be free. You need to discern whether they are free or not, something which comes through extensive research.

There are some sites which require you to pay a lot for marketing tools and other such equipment whilst saying that the program is free, so be very wary of these sort of claims.

Of course, whatever affiliate program you join, you will need to send traffic to it. You can find out about both free and paid traffic methods from a good training course.

2. How much is the commission worth?

Again this is something that you need to look at as you do not want to be losing any profits that you derive from your affiliate marketing. Essentially, you want to keep as much money as you can although some companies may charge up to 60% of what you offer, although this may come with the benefit or guarantee of making more money with the services that they provide.

This is the key thing to consider when deliberating between each company as you want your profit margins to be quite high.

3. How are sales tracked?

The majority of sales are tracked by cookies. However, some of these will expire within a certain time period such as 30 days if a user is not active in using the link perhaps because they are disinterested or by other reasons.

It could be assumed that some cookies will last forever, in theory. As soon as a customer deletes the cookies from their computer, your commission is lost which is something that you certainly want to avoid. This means that you are not guaranteed to get some money from everyone that visits your link, something which you should bear in mind.

On the other hand, some affiliate programs track their customers by e-mails instead of cookies which is not a bad alternative. This saves you losing the commission if they delete the cookies, although if the consumer switches their e-mail then this will leave you not receiving the commission.

4. Does the program pay commission for repeat links and visits?

Some companies only pay for unique visits to your link and will not compensate you for any repeat clicks. Some may pay you for repeat clicks for a certain duration of time such as 6 months or maybe slightly longer in some cases.

The advantage of repeat clicks being compensated is that customers tend to purchase more from a site later on after they have built up trust in the company. This means that the slice of commission you get is bigger.

5. What is their payment system?

Essentially, signing up for an affiliate program is all about the money that you receive from it. You need to know when you are going to get the money and what payment options that they offer such as bank transfer, check, PayPal or some other method.

Once you have determined all these things then you will be sure of the correct free affiliate programs to go for.