Being an affiliate is an awesome way to make money.  You don’t need to deal with the hassles of creating your own product. You don’t have to fuss with fulfillment. You don’t even need to deal with payments or refunds.

All you need to do to make money is drop your affiliate link in front of an eager audience, right?

Well… sort of. Doing that will help you rack up a few sales and give you some pocket money. But if you want to start generating an impressive number of affiliate commissions, then you’ll want to check out these tips…

Pick the Right Product

It’s easy to get swept up in the aesthetics of a product, such as its awesome sales page, a stunning ecover graphic, and the overall quality of the product itself.

But here’s the thing: if your audience doesn’t want this product, then no amount of “prettiness” is going to persuade them to buy. That’s why your very first step is to do your market research and make sure the product is something your audience really, truly wants and is willing to pay for.

Create Unique Presell Content

Most good affiliate programs include cut-and-paste ads and presell content that you can use to promote the offer. These save you a lot of time, but you don’t want to use them as-is. You can either create your own content from scratch, or modify the existing presell materials to make them completely unique.

Here’s why: a program with a lot of affiliates will end up saturating the web with the same ads. Your audience wants to find out what YOU think of the offer, not what the vendors think of their own offers.  That’s why you want to create unique content that shares your honest opinion of each and every product you promote. Hence, a possible increase in affiliate commissions.

Add an Enticing Bonus

Imagine for a moment that a prospect has two options: 1) They can buy the offer as listed on the sales page, or 2) They can purchase the offer and get a valuable, related bonus for free.

Which one do you think they’ll choose?

If you said option 2, you’re absolutely correct. There are very few people who are going to turn down a related freebie. Just be sure it’s something your audience really wants and values, and they’ll line up around the block to buy offers through your affiliate links.

For example, if you’re selling charcoal grills, then you can toss in a free grilling cookbook to anyone who buys through your link.

Take Advantage of Technology

Let me be clear here: don’t use tech just to use tech. Instead, use it strategically to get your offers in front of your audience.

You’re likely already doing this, such as when you use an autoresponder to build relationships and generate sales. Here are two other ideas to get you thinking:

Those are just two examples to get you thinking about how to use tech to boost your business. The idea is to use technology to help get attention, and then use strong sales copy and graphics to hold attention and get the click.

Will any of these strategies work for you?  The only way to know for sure is to test it out.  Which brings us to the next point…

Optimize Conversions to increase Affiliate Commissions

Just because you’re making money doesn’t mean there’s no room for improvement. On the contrary, optimizing your conversions could make the difference between making a little money and making a LOT of money.

That’s why you’ll want to track and test the parts of your site and campaigns that will have the biggest impact on conversions, such as:

Focus on these big factors, and you could find areas where you double or even triple conversion rates with just a few small tweaks. Not bad, right?

Avoid Using Direct Affiliate Links

Once you really ramp up your affiliate marketing machine, you’re going to have content and links all over the web.  This includes inside of lead magnets, in newsletter articles, in blog articles, on webinars and more.

First off, most affiliate links tend to be ugly (which means people are less likely to click), which is why you’ll want to use short links from your own domain that redirect to the affiliate link (e.g., yourdomain.com/product.html).

 However, the bigger issue is that sometimes you’ll want to suddenly stop promoting an affiliate offer.  Maybe the vendor retires the product or changes their affiliate program, which changes the link. Maybe the vendor gets caught doing something unethical or illegal, so you want to stop promoting their offers. Or perhaps you just find something a little better to promote.

If you don’t have a redirect link, then you could have thousands of dead or unwanted links floating around the web. If you’re running a redirect through your site, then it takes just a minute to change the redirect to a different offer, thereby saving countless sales. That’s certainly worth a couple minutes of your time, isn’t it?

Conclusion

What’s the difference between average affiliates and super affiliates?

It’s not any one thing that separates these two groups. Rather, the super affiliates employ a lot of little tips and tricks that most affiliates don’t do – including the six tips listed above. That’s why you’ll want to put this info to work to start boosting your affiliate commissions too!