How to Boost Your Affiliate Earnings in 3 Easy Steps

By: Pencil Dude, Thu Sep 28th, 2006

How to Boost Your Affiliate Earnings in 3 Easy Steps

(c) 2003 Pencil Dude

Often the difference between affiliates who drive traffic and sales to their affiliate programs' sites depends on little things that they do month after month. I know this is the case for me. Here's what we do.
1. You Have To Do Something - Anything.
I was on the phone with an affiliate manager for one of the large Internet Marketing courses and during that conversation he told me an interesting thing or two. He told me that they get a lot of e-mails and phone calls from affiliates wondering why they haven't made any money from their program.
Every single person that has asked that question all had the same problem. They hadn't bothered to do anything at all. These people hadn't even bothered to put up a banner that was readily available on their websites, let alone do any of the better ways of promoting a program.
You have to do something. Start with the easy stuff. If your affiliate program gives you banners or text ads to put on your site, use them. Put them up immediately. There - you've just taken your first positive action towards making some money from your affiliate program.
2. Keep In Contact With Your Affiliate Manager:
Hopefully your affiliate program keeps you up to date by way of a regular newsletter or some sort of affiliate update. However, regardless of whether they do or not it's important to keep in contact with your affiliate manager yourself.
Send them an e-mail and introduce yourself, tell them what you are doing in the way of promotion for their program. If they sell more than one product or service, find out what product is doing really well currently. Ask them what types of creative are working best for that product. Is it a particular classified ad, HTML e-mail ad, banner, pop-up?
There are numerous instances where this really worked well for me. Let me share one with you.
I was writing an article about word-processing for a recent issue of my ezine and I was thinking of using an ad for a certain piece of software (which was a cost per action campaign), in my top ad spot. So, I asked my affiliate manager of the CPA network that I belong to if this campaign was still going to be around when I published my article. He replied back and said, "Yes, but no-one likes that offer, why don't you try advertising this other software instead".
As a result, instead of advertising an offer that probably would have flopped, I ended up selling several pieces of software that week and got myself a nice check in the mail.
3. Spread The Word.
Get an ad into your own e-zine, rotate that ad for a few issues and see how it does, and then when you've got a winning responsive ad, try some other e-zines that would be a good match for the product that you're advertising.
Here's the one that really works well for me. Send out a solo mailing to your opt-in ezine list.
There are two key elements as to why this works so well. If you've been building a good subscriber list, they're more inclined to listen to what you have to say than some stranger that they run across somewhere on the web. For me there is an additional factor here. My list tends to be more receptive to solo ads because I don't send them a lot of solo mailings in the first place. So, they're less inclined to say "Oh no not another one - Delete!"
The second reason, and this is perhaps the more important one - I personalize it. This doesn't mean that I address everyone by their name, (although that would really helpful but my list server is kind of behind the times :-) ). What I mean, is that the e-mail reads less of an ad and is more conversational in tone. "Advertorial" is the correct term for this type of an ad I believe.
It comes off far more believable than most of the ads out there. Instead of pushing against a brick wall and saying "Here's a big long ad - read it and buy what I'm flogging", I'm dropping in for a friendly chat with a neat suggestion or answer to your problem, want, or need. It works great!
There you have it - Three easy steps to help boost your affiliate earnings. Implement them and you'll be on the road to seeing better results.
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = Pencil Dude aka Robin Forbes is the Proud Publisher of Pencil Dude's Picks http://pencildude.com/ and is on the road to affiliate success.
Check out the simple tools and resources that he uses to make his ezine profitable: http://pencildude.net/ = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
About the author: Pencil Dude aka Robin Forbes is the Proud Publisher of Pencil Dude's Picks http://pencildude.com/ and is on the road to affiliate success.
Check out the simple tools and resources that he uses to make his ezine profitable: http://pencildude.net/