Here are 10 surefire ways to multiply your affiliate income:
- Promote Digital Products: The percentage of the sales value you earn as an affiliate is usually much higher for digital products than it is for physical products. I know everyone seems to be banging on about Amazon and ecommerce at the moment but personally I've never had much success with selling physical products. Digital products on the other hand typically pay between 50% and 75% in affiliate commissions, with some vendors on JVZoo paying as much as 100% to affiliates for front-end product sales. Amazon currently offers an initial affiliate commission rate of 4%. My preferred digital product affiliate networks are JVZoo, Warrior Plus and Clickbank as the products are generally of an excellent quality, the vendors typically use very compelling sales copy and getting paid is a straightforward process.
- Build a List: Most people don't buy a product on their first exposure to it. Studies have shown that just 8% of the people who buy a particular product online buy it the first time they notice it. This means that not building a list drastically reduces the amount of affiliate commissions you earn because once a visitor leaves your website without buying, they're gone for good and the work you completed or money you spent to get them to your website is wasted. This is probably the biggest ever reason for affiliate failure – people just can't be bothered to do lead generation or don't fully understand how utterly futile not doing it is if you're trying to actually make money rather than wasting time on an expensive hobby. The most effective way to build a list and make money from it is with an autoresponder which follows up automatically with your leads, giving them further opportunities to buy products from you. Autoresponders also enable you to do broadcast messages to your lists when you want to tell them about a newly launched product you want to recommend. I use Aweber because it's easy to use and they get my mails delivered very efficiently. Another important point about Aweber is that you can use single opt-in so that leads don't need to confirm their email address. Using email address confirmation is a sure-fire way to reduce your affiliate income as the more steps you incorporate into your sales funnels for your leads to do, the less sales you make. 2 step confirmation is also completely unnecessary – you either submit your email or you don't, it's a simple binary decision. Another reason for using a professional autoresponder service rather than just putting an autoresponder script on your website or using a cheaper alternative is that you need an autoresponder which maintains a good relationship with the major email providers like gmail, outlook and yahoo. Aweber has a whole team of people who negotiate with email providers to make sure your emails land in peoples' inboxes rather landing in their spam boxes or just outright getting bounced. Another important skill that you must have to build a list is the ability to produce lead capture pages that make your visitors want to submit their email addresses.
- Build a Brand: People prefer to buy stuff from people and brands that they know and trust and this also applies in the affiliate arena. You need a website of your own to build an online brand. This doesn't mean a subdomain of a free blogging website or a page on a social site, it means your own website with your own domain name. Creating your own blog website gives you a professional image and a platform to communicate with your visitors and leads. It creates an asset which grows in value as you add more and more valuable content to it. This is why websites on Flippa frequently sell for 6 figure sums (and more). As regards domain names, you can get lifetime domains with your Lifetime Hosting account but these have an unusual structure. Personally, I recommend NameSilo as they are cheap, secure and come with free whois privacy so that you don't get spammed with phone calls and emails every time you register new domains.
- Get Targeted Traffic: Targeted is the operative word here. Understanding who would be interested in buying the products you're promoting is essential. This is why it's essential to analyze your traffic sources and target the right keywords with your search engine optimization. In itself traffic has absolutely no value. Leads and sales come from real visitors rather than ‘traffic'. If the clicks hitting your website aren't made by real people or all the people seeing your website have absolutely no interest in your offers and content, then you're just wasting time and slowing down your website for when interested visitors land on your pages. I know learning how to get targeted traffic is a bit more difficult than just believing someone selling 15000 ‘hits' for $5 but it's worth it in the long run. There are only 2 strategies for generating targeted traffic. The first is to pay for it and the second is to work for it (‘free' traffic). If you've got some advertising budget available then knowing where to source advertising where you can make money instead of losing it is essential. My primary source of paid traffic is solo ads. Being able to identify quality solo ad vendors for your niche can be difficult if you aren't familiar with the solo ads market. Fortunately there is a solo ads marketplace called Udimi you can join to purchase solo ads securely from vendors who are reviewed by other solo advertisers, so that you can identify the vendors who will likely give you the best results from your purchased clicks. If you haven't got enough money to test different paid traffic sources, your best bet is to use free traffic strategies. However, ‘free traffic' is a misnomer as traffic always costs you something, either money for paid advertising or time spent working to generate traffic.
- Track Conversions: Tracking clicks from ad campaigns will improve your game a bit because you will be able to tell which of your advertising sources gets more clicks. However, to truly understand which traffic sources are really working best for you, and therefore worth investing more time and money on, you must track conversions. Personally, I use a WordPress plugin which enables me to track conversions with links on my own domain names but this method is a bit fiddly. The free link tracking system at Leadsleap provides you with a much easier system for getting feedback about what your visitors are doing when they visit your links. Tracking which traffic sources are most responsive is essential if you're going to scale up your affiliate income.
- Give Value: Giving your leads real value when they subscribe to your list or visit your website is an excellent strategy for increasing your conversions without resorting to aggressive sales tactics. For example, if you're using lead magnets to build your list, your lead magnets have to be better than those of your competitors.
- Use Affiliate Funnels: The best thing to do immediately after someone subscribes to your list is to redirect them straight to a high converting affiliate offer related to the content of your lead capture page. There are 2 ways to do this. The first way involves creating a lead capture page which collects email addresses just for showing your prospects your affiliate offer. The second method is to use lead magnets in combination with a system for informing your new leads that their content is on it's way to their email addresses, before automatically redirecting them to your high converting paid affiliate offer.
- Use Viral Marketing: There are some simple methods you can use to get viral traffic by encouraging your visitors to interact with your content more and share it more freqently on social media sites. However, in my experience, the best way to create real viral marketing campaigns is by incentivizing people to promote your content for you in exchange for further valuable content. This probably sounds quite difficult. That's because it really is quite difficult. However, if you can do this properly it enables you to multiply free traffic and supercharge the profitability of paid traffic campaigns.
- Stand OUT & Make Your Promotions ‘POP': You MUST connect with your leads and the people who see your ads. The best way to do that is to be unique and memorable. If you grab peoples' attention you're obviously much more likely to turn them into leads and buyers. Have you noticed all the identical email ads with identical subject lines written for the same affiliate products or network marketing opportunities? Do you remember the names of the people who sent them? Chances are you have noticed that a lot of people choose to promote exactly the same things in exactly the same way. What is unlikely is that you remember any of those people. It's also unlikely they inspired you to buy anything from them. Sending unoriginal emails, publishing boring website content and posting insipid banner ads reduces the impact of your message and leads to a reduction in leads and sales. Your main objective for a subject line in an email is to grab your reader's attention and pique their interest about the contents of your email. The main objective of the email itself is to build that interest and persuade the reader that clicking the link to your squeeze or sales page is going to make their life way better or satisfy a burning curiosity that you have inspired.
- Keep Learning: Affiliate marketing is a constantly evolving art form and it's important to keep your eye on what the leaders in our industry are doing and to learn about new affiliate marketing technologies and strategies as and when they happen, rather than when the affiliate masses learn about them as this is usually too late.
