Market Leverage

I routinely try out new affiliate networks looking for new products and services to promote for myself and for clients. Market Leverage has been around for a while but it has only been recently that they have been making a bigger splash in the affiliate marketing world. They have been sponsoring a number of affiliate marketing challenges across the web on a number of other blogs and even have some bigger name bloggers promoting them like John Chow and Shoemoney.

Market Leverage has some good points and some not so good points, like all affiliate networks. The good things I have found about Market Leverage is their people. I have personally talked with my affiliate manager over the phone and they are open to being in contact with their affiliates. I hear from my affiliate manager quite often through email, and over the phone. It is only the second affiliate network that I have ever actually heard from over the phone.

Market Leverage also has a large number of programs to promote in a large number of categories. Depending on your topic it is likely you will be able to find a program to promote. Many programs are also very open to using PPC for sending people to the offers, so you can try Market Leverage without have to place their ads on your website. Each program is clearly marked what types of promotion is allowed, Email, Web and Search. The programs also list where they are targeted so you can set up your PPC and other advertising to only send people from the United States. Most of the programs I have looked at all provided a good assortment of advertising formats. The majority of the ad formats are for email and web campaigns, so if you are thinking of doing PPC you will need to make up your own creative and keyword lists.

Market Leverage also keeps affiliates up to date with their MLTV blog. There they post some of the latest programs that are available and some of the best performers that you might want to look into promoting. This is helpful to stay on top of the new programs and changes in existing programs. Getting in on a program early can make a huge difference in the amount of profit you can make on a program. The programs that I have had work the best for me are the programs I joined soon after they launched the affiliate programs.

While you might not see a lot of negatives on the blogosphere about Market Leverage, no affiliate program is perfect and Market Leverage does have a few areas where it could use improvement. The list of programs to promote is large and many offer good compensation, but there are many programs that have a spammy feel to them. Lots of programs that you have never heard of, have only a landing page, and if you do a Google search the majority of consumer reviews about the service or product that you find are negative. Not to paint the whole network with a bad brush, but I would recommend you pick and choose wisely in the programs you promote from Market Leverage. It does not help your own credibility to promote a bad product or service, so be picky.

The best program that I have found on Market Leverage is its own affiliate program for referring new publishers. This is both a positive and a negative. You can earn 5% of the earnings of every new publisher that signs up under you. The Market Leverage referral program is a good program, but it always makes me nervous when the best program in an affiliate network is to recruit more publishers. My pyramid scheme sense goes off and I am suspect. If there were some high quality programs to promote in the network it would easy my suspicion. (For the record the links on the site to Market Leverage are my affilaite links).

If you are interested in checking out another affiliate network Market Leverage might be the one you are looking for. I have been trying the occasional Market Leverage program on PPC, but have not focused a lot of energy on my efforts. Merely just testing the waters on different programs. They might be just the network you need to help pay off the credit cards after Christmas.