The ideal world of affiliate marketing does not require having your own website, to deal directly with customers, refunds, product development or maintenance. But pretty quickly even the ideal world of affiliate marketing becomes stale, and your profits start to show it.
Has your marketing ventured down this path? Well if it has, here’s the top 3 ways to boost your affiliate commissions almost overnight.
1. Know and chose the best programs and products to promote.
Obviously you would want to promote programs that will enable you to achieve the greatest profits in the shortest possible time. But there are several factors you need to consider in selecting such a program.
Choose the ones that have a generous commission structure, and have products that fit in with your target audience.
Maybe you are good enough to sell ice cubes to the Eskimos, but why?
Always look for the high commission items that have a solid track record of paying their affiliates easily, and on time. If the programs you currently promote don’t meet those criteria, dump that program and keep looking for better ones.
There are thousands of affiliate programs online, which gives you the best reason to be picky.
Write free reports or short ebooks to distribute from your site about the programs you are promoting. There is a great possibility that you are competing with other affiliates that are promoting the same program.
If you start writing short reports or ebooks related to the product you are promoting, you will be able to distinguish yourself from the other affiliates as an expert.
Stick to the facts in your writing, and stay away from the fluff. In the reports, provide valuable information about the product for free. Research the product thoroughly and dig out those nuggets of gold.
You only need to know one item more than your audience to appear as an expert.
If possible, add some recommendations about the products. With reports and ebooks, you get credibility. Customers will see that in you and they will be enticed to try out what you are offering.
2. Collect and save the email addresses of those who download your free ebooks.
Plug the free report or ebook you have written into a good autoresponder. You don’t want a great sales piece to be hindered by a fly-by-night autoresponder. Your customers and prospects will spot that a mile away, and run the other direction.
I recommend AWeber. They have been around for decades and have the customer service to prove it, if you need help.
It is a known fact that people do not make a purchase on the first offer or solicitation. Your customer may have to see your message six times before they will buy your product. That is the understood norm for “same customer” views.
The key is to not send a single blast email and simply call it good.
This is the exact reason why you should collect the contact information of those who download your reports and ebooks. You then can make regular follow-ups to these contacts, give them new and substantial information, and remind them to make another purchase from you.
Get the contact information of a prospect before sending them to a vendor’s website or to your free offer.
Keep in mind that you are providing free advertisement for the product owners. You get paid only when you make a sale. If you send prospects directly to the vendors, chances are they would be lost to you forever.
But when you send them to a landing page or splash page first and get their names, you can always send other marketing messages to them to be able to earn an ongoing commission instead of a one-time sale only.
Publish an online newsletter or Ezine. Get your name out there as an expert, and collect subscriber names. It is always best, and easiest to recommend a product to someone you know than to sell to a stranger.
This is also the purpose behind publishing your own newsletter rather than use someone else’s.
This allows you to develop a closer relationship based on trust with your readers and subscribers.
This information publishing strategy is a delicate balance between providing useful information and a sales pitch.
If you continue to write informative editorials you will be able to build a sense of reciprocity in your readers that may lead them to support you by buying your products.
A key marketing law is to never betray that trust, never, ever, ever.
3. Ask for higher than normal commission from your merchants.
If you are already successful with a particular promotion, you should try and approach the merchant, and negotiate a higher percentage commission for your sales.
If the merchant is smart, he or she will likely grant your request rather than lose a valuable asset in you.
Keep in mind that you are a zero-risk investment to your merchant; so do not be shy about requesting for additional commissions. Just try to be reasonable about it.
The higher producing affiliate marketing vets regularly see a bump in their commission structure. A new or low volume affiliate usually have no idea that this is even offered by the vendors.
Write strong Pay Per Click (PPC) ads and increase your returns on your offers. Your PPC ads could even outperform the ads available from the vendor. Don’t limit your earnings to the stock ads.
PPC search engine is the most effective means of advertising online. As an affiliate, you can make an income just by managing PPC campaigns such as Google AdWords and Overture.
You should monitor the ads to see which ads are more effective and profitable, and which ones to dispose of. The basic concept is to find a fire and then throw gasoline on it.
Regular PPC ad folks run a series of ads first thing. They monitor which ads are producing. They quickly pull the duds and throw substantial money at the good ones. At the end of the day they have gleaned a pretty good profit!
Regardless of which specific strategy you focus on, the underlying key is you have to actively implement something.
Forget the adage of set-it-and-forget-it. There is no such thing. If you don’t actively manage your affiliate offers then don’t expect any more than lackluster earnings.
Above all, internet marketing is a business. And it must be ran as a business.
If you’ll simply try out these strategies and actively use them, you can see the difference it makes to your commission checks.
