How to Boost Your Affiliate Earnings in 3 Easy Steps

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.

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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/
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