12 Tips for Generating Bigger Affiliate Commissions

So, without further ado, let’s jump in…

1. Complete Affiliate Marketing Research

Your first step when it comes to selecting a product to sell is to find out what your audience wants.

Sure, you can ask them what they want – but you may not get a straight answer. A lot of people who answer surveys tend to give answers based on what they think you want to hear.

So, here’s what you do instead: do your market research to find out what your audience is already buying. You can search ClickBank.com to ferret out bestselling products, including those with a mid to high gravity (which indicates multiple affiliates are making multiple sales).

2. Select Profitable Products

Even though a product may seem popular on the surface, it may not be profitable for you if it’s not a good fit for your audience. That’s why your next step is to review and use the product yourself to ensure it’s a high-quality, engaging offer that solves a problem.

Be careful here: don’t look at what the vendor says about the product. Don’t look at reviews from other affiliates. Don’t even look at customer reviews.

Instead, read and use it yourself. Put it through its paces and see if it really does everything the sales letter promises. If it truly is an awesome, in-demand product backed by a reputable vendor, then you’ve got an offer that is likely a sure thing.

3. Beat Your Competitors and Generate More Sales

When it comes to promoting an affiliate product, you’re naturally going to have a lot of competition. But that’s not a problem if you add value to your offer, meaning you provide a bonus to anyone who purchases the affiliate product through your link.

Now here’s the key…

Offer a high-value bonus that lets you naturally follow-up with your customers and sell additional offers on the backend. A bonus with a high perceived value attracts a lot of customers, and the ability to follow up effortlessly helps you generate additional profits.

What sort of high-value bonuses fall in this category? Two good examples include an ecourse and a fixed-term membership site. Every time you deliver fresh content for the course or the membership, you have another opportunity to promote related offers.

4. Improve Your Lead-Page Conversions

Another key to running a profitable business selling affiliate offers is to build your own list, and then market your offers to this list. In other words, don’t waste your traffic by sending them directly to the vendor’s sales page, as most of them won’t buy anything without repeated follow ups.
So, here’s the key to creating a high-converting lead page: offer an in-demand lead magnet.

This lead magnet needs to be something your audience really wants to entice as many people as possible to sign up. It also needs to be something that’s highly related to the affiliate offer you’re promoting, as the lead magnet should naturally lead to this offer. In fact, the paid offer and your free lead magnet should ideally work together to enhance the user’s enjoyment or benefits.

For example:

• You’re selling a copywriting course, so you offer a set of sales letter templates and swipes as a lead magnet.

• You’re selling a weight loss guide, so you offer a report with 20 tips for boosting one’s metabolism.

• You’re selling a bodybuilding guide, so you offer a set of videos showing common lifts and their variations.

In short, create a desirable lead magnet that naturally leads to the paid offer, and you’ll both build a big list and generate more sales.

5. Be Sure Subscribers Open and Read Your Emails

So, you’re building a list: now what?

Now you need to make sure people are opening and reading your emails. There’s no sense in having a big list if it’s as cold as an Arctic glacier. And that’s why you need to focus on creating a responsive list.

There are a whole lot of factors that contribute to your list’s responsiveness. But there’s one key that’s going to keep your audience opening your emails, reading them, and coming back for more…

You need to consistently provide high-quality and engaging content. Every. Single. Email.
What do I mean by high-quality and engaging? This:

• Engaging content is something you create with a light, conversational tone. You might include stories, light humour, analogies, graphics, and other items to engage the reader on an emotional level. This content focuses nearly exclusively on the reader and makes them feel like you crafted the email just for them.

• High-quality content is not only well-written, but also useful because it solves a problem. Even better is if you can create quick wins – these are tips and other actionable info that someone can use immediately and start receiving results fast.

6. Presell to Boost Your Sales

If you want to sell more affiliate products, then don’t just drop your affiliate links on your blog and in your emails. Instead, you need to “warm up” your audience – presell them – so that they arrive on the sales page with their credit card in their hand and a strong desire to purchase the offer.

There are a variety of ways to presell, from sending “useful yet incomplete” tutorials to product reviews to video demonstrations. But no matter what delivery vehicle you’re using to presell offers, here’s a big key: send a series.

First off, not everyone reads each email you send, every post on your blog, or every bit of content on social media. You can catch those who fell through the cracks by sending multiple emails or posts.

Secondly, most people don’t buy the first time they hear about something from you. They need multiple touch points, with each email or post addressing another angle.

For example, you might send one email that shares all the benefits of the offer, a second email that shares a case study to appeal to the prospect’s logic, and a third email urging people to order now before a special offer disappears.

7. Advertise to Attract Targeted Traffic

There are quite a few ways to advertise your lead page (for free). But there’s one method that tends to generate quite a bit of warm traffic. This traffic comes to you ready to join your lead page, ready to read your emails, and ready to consider the offers you’re promoting.

What is it? It’s partner traffic.

This means you team up with other marketers in your niche and work for mutual benefit. For example, you can:

• Swap guest content to post on your respective blogs or newsletters.

• Boost each other’s social media content.

• Co-endorse each other inside your newsletters, on social media, on your blogs, and on other platforms.

• Exchange links on your thank you and download pages.

• Exchange endorsements or links within your lead magnets.

• Do webinars together.

• Hold contests together.

• Go in together to purchase an advertisement.

• Create a lead magnet together.

… and similar mutually beneficial activities.

Be sure to research your potential partners so you only work with respected people in your niche, and then build good relationships with them so that you can both benefit over the long term.

8. Create Compelling Calls to Action

As an affiliate marketer, you’re going to need to create a whole lot of calls to action to effectively grow your business. Here’s a sample of some of the CTAs you’ll need to create:

• Sign up to this list.
• Buy this product.
• Watch this video.
• Register for this webinar.
• Join this contest.
• Share this content.

And much more.

For example, the success of your entire business hinges on you creating a compelling lead page that gets prospects joining your list in droves. This benefit-driven lead page needs to end with a strong call to action, like this:

“If you’ve ever wanted to discover the secrets of [getting a desired outcome], then now is your chance to do it for FREE. Drop your name and email address below, click “join,” and you’ll get instant access to this eye-opening [type of product]. And do it now, before this awesome offer disappears!”

9. Utilize Paid Advertising

Another great way to drive targeted traffic to your lead page or your affiliate bonus page is with paid advertising. This includes placing ads on big platforms (like Facebook) as well as on niche sites.

In all cases, one big key to this strategy is to be sure you’re getting your ads out in front of a narrow, highly targeted audience.

For example, if you’re using Facebook, then you can narrow down your audience in the following ways:

• By demographics (age, location, gender, etc.).

• By interest (e.g., someone who’s joined a specific group or liked a page, such as one devoted to organic gardening or bodybuilding or dog training).

• By behaviour, such as if they’ve been to your site.

Likewise, when you use a pay per click platform, focus on targeted longtail keywords. For example, “dog training” is too broad. A better keyword is one that’s directly related to what you’re offering, such as “tips for housetraining a poodle.”

10. Establish Yourself as an Expert

People like to do business with those they know, like and trust. But they especially like to follow and do business with an EXPERT in the niche. And that’s why you need to position yourself as an expert, as people will listen to you, respect your opinions, and buy whatever you’re selling.

One of the best ways to start establishing your expertise is by “borrowing the creditability” of other experts in the niche. In other words, align yourself with respected others, and people will start to see YOU as a respected expert too.

For example, do joint webinars with product vendors in your niche. Not only is this a nifty way to generate traffic and sales, but people will also see you as an expert simply because your name is associated with another expert. If you do this enough, you’ll easily raise your status in the niche – and your sales will start to rise too!

11. Optimize Your Site, Emails and Campaigns

Here’s a sobering truth: you could be wasting a large amount of your time and money if you’re not testing and tracking your site, emails, and campaigns. For example, just a tiny tweak to a headline could double your conversions. That’s certainly worth testing to find out, isn’t it?

Now here’s the key to this strategy: focus on the variables that are going to have the biggest impact on your conversion rates. These include:

• Headlines, titles, and email subject lines.

• Calls to action.

• The offer you’re promoting.

• The benefits you’re sharing/emphasizing.

• The audience who’s seeing your content and ads.

• The overall design/professionalism of your website, emails, and platforms.

• Video sales content versus text versus a combination.

In other words, don’t focus on tiny things that may only improve conversions by .25%, when you could focus on factors like the ones above that could boost conversions by 2.5%.

And finally…

12. Maximize Your Profits

There is no one thing that the super affiliates do that separate them from the average affiliate. Rather, they consistently work on their business every day to maximize their profits. Often, they take an extra step, put in a little more work, and it pays off for them big time.

Let me give you just one example: video reviews.

Yes, it’s a bit more work to do a polished video review versus your typical text review, but it’s well worth the time. That’s because a video review is the next-best-thing to a prospect holding a product and trying it out (like they’d do if they were shopping in a brick-and-mortar store). And this is so powerful that it can boost your conversions many-fold versus a standard product review in text format.

Now a few parting thoughts…

Now here’s the thing…

These 12 tips are just the beginning to you climbing your way up to super-affiliate status. Yes, these tips will put more money in your pocket. But imagine what would happen if you had not just dozens but hundreds of additional tips, tracks, strategies, steps, and ideas to give your affiliate commissions a boost?

You don’t have to imagine it, because that’s exactly what I’ve created for you inside the Affiliate Action Plan collection.

This collection includes 12 affiliate-marketing guides with 17 of the best affiliate tips, strategies, and ideas each – that’s 204 insights that you can use to grow your affiliate business starting right now!

But don’t take my word for it – check it out for yourself right now.

To Your Success!