Bluehost Affiliate Review
The Bluehost affiliate program is a way for companies or people to make some money from referring users who pay for web hosting services. Most affiliate marketers are Bluehost customers themselves, referring friends or customers of their respective companies.
Bluehost is a web hosting company which specializes in Linux based shared hosting and referral hosting. Bluehost has recently expanded into VPS and dedicated servers. Bluehost is has been around since early 2000 and is considered stable.
Bluehost claims to have paid out over $5 million in commissions to affiliates in 2010. Each paid referral will earn you $65. Bluehost gives you plenty of pre-made banners and links that you can use and install easily. You can also create custom links and multiple affiliate campaigns. Bluehost has a control panel to manage your links, track click-through rates and the performance of each campaign. Payments are also clearly tracked and displayed.
The Bluehost affiliate terms are described in detail, and you should be familiar with them before beginning. There are four main sections: Payment, Reversals, Advertising and Deactivation. Here is the break down.
Payment
You will receive a commission once a user clicks on one of your referral links and makes a purchase. The referred user must also maintain an active account for 90 days. Bluehost will not pay out its affiliate until they have earned a $100 balance or more. Payments are processed 45 days past the last day of the month in which the sale was made.
You must provide your tax information to Bluehost in order to be paid. It's important to upload your tax info right away, as commissions will be forfeited on sales made where no tax info has been submitted. Payments can be received through PayPal or mailed check. If an affiliate has more than $10,000 in commissions for the month they can qualify to receive payments through wire transfer. Bluehost is based in the US and pays out in US currency. You can request a payment be reissued but it will cost you $35 from your commissions.
Reversals
Bluehost will issue a commission reversal under certain circumstances to ensure their sales are valid. A commission reversal will be issued if the user fails to maintain an active account for 90 days, if the user account is downgraded to a period of less than one year, if false data is used to register the account or if a stolen credit card is used for payment.
Advertising
You are restricted to a number of advertising rules. An affiliate cannot use cookie stuffing, use domain forwarding or copy the Bluehost website or any portion of it for display on your website. You cannot modify the advertising links provided by Bluehost or offer any type of incentive to become a Bluehost user.
Deactivation
Bluehost will deactivate your account and forfeit any commissions if you violate any of the terms of service. Misleading ads or a large number of new registrations with fraudulent data will also result in deactivation. Bluehost can deactivate your account without any notice or warning.
Summary
Bluehost has been around for awhile and selling their products is not hard to do. Their sales tracking system appears accurate and they seem to pay out on time. Check out the comment section to read what other Bluehost affiliates had to say. Post your own experiences, do you like Bluehosts affiliate program?
