Maximizing Your Affiliate Marketing

Maximizing Your Affiliate Marketing Efforts Makes Sense

If something is worth doing, it’s worth doing well, in my opinion and experience. This includes your online business, and maximizing your affiliate marketing will pay off handsomely, right away and over the years.

Here, I’ll share the details of what you can do to build and grow a lucrative business by sharing and recommending what you love and benefit from with your audience.

Incentives You Can Pass on to Your Customers

I’ve talked endlessly about the importance of building a loyal list of email subscribers. Whether someone is on your list or simply visiting your blog, you want to be able to set yourself apart as a niche leader by securing incentives that others have not provided to the consumer.

There are different types of incentives that you can pass along to these people. For example, sometimes it’s a discount on a product. There are vendors and brands who will give you a coupon code that not everyone is allowed to use.

In addition to a discount, some vendors will throw in an additional freebie, so the customer ends up getting more value out of their purchase than if they simply bought a product through someone else’s link. Remember that maximizing your affiliate marketing means going the extra mile to serve your target audience.

Another incentive you might be able to secure for your readers is an advanced purchase. There are vendors who will open up a launch to super affiliates ahead of time so that they are first to be able to offer a product to their readers and subscribers.

If you are a super affiliate, many vendors will provide you with bonus material that you can give to those who purchase through your link. Depending on the vendor, they may create something exclusive just for your list.

You can also network to have a private webinar with the vendor and your buyers, so that the people who purchased through your link get to interact with the product creator and ask questions with you as a co-host, guiding the event.

So how do you go about building relationships with individuals and brands who can help you over deliver to your customers? The first thing you want to do is connect with them on various social media platforms.

You also want to sign up to the list of the person or company that you intend to form a connection with. You need to be able to see how they interact with their consumers so that you are able to propose deals that fit with what they are agreeable to do.

As a super affiliate, you want to make sure you are continually building your list and your social media following into a powerhouse in terms of both the number of people listening to you and the quality of the follower. Simply maximizing your affiliate marketing

Next, you want to interact with the brand or person and engage with them publicly for awhile, showing your support by either commenting on their posts or sharing their content with your followers and tagging them when applicable.

When the time is right, you want to reach out to them directly and introduce yourself in a friendly manner. You don’t want to ask for too much right away, but simply let them know that you appreciate their products and that you will be looking for ways to promote them to your dedicated audience.

Usually, at this juncture, the vendor or brand will respond in kind and offer to support your promotion in any way possible. They may have something specific that they want to offer, or they may just invite you to ask if you need anything.

Make sure you listen to your subscribers and readers to see what they need and want from brands and vendors that they purchase from. If you notice there is a hardship in finances, and the product you want to promote is a little outside of their budget, then asking for a coupon code to bring the price down a bit would be the perfect solution.

Be Very Selective About What You Promote as You Are Maximizing Your Affiliate Marketing

It’s important, as someone who is striving to be a super affiliate, that you steer clear of any product or vendor who might tarnish your reputation if you promote them. You need to make sure that the brand or individual has a positive reputation in the marketplace. I used to be a soft touch when someone would write to me and ask me to please share their product or course with my email list.

Don’t just go by the testimonials that are on someone’s sales page. These are often made up, or provided by some of their seedy friends who are also not very reputable themselves.

You’re not only looking for brands that you can promote that have good products. You want to look at how their buyers are treated once the sale has taken place. For example, does the brand or vendor have good customer service in place to take care of your people?

What about how they act as an affiliate themselves? You don’t want to send your subscribers to a brand or vendor who is going to promote poor quality products to them as an affiliate.

Another thing you want to consider, obviously, is what kind of value the product has to your potential customers. You don’t want to be promoting anything and everything, just because it has a good commission level or price point.

If you promote subpar products to your readers and subscribers, the value of your own word will diminish and they will only be burned once before they no longer take your recommendations into consideration.

Another thing you have to consider before promoting someone is the quality of their sales page. There are people who have great information to share, and who do an amazing job creating their product.

However, their sales letter may look as if it came from the 1990s and the copywriting may be a complete miss. If you run into this type of situation, there is a way you can get around it.

You can approach the vendor and let them know about your concerns in a kind way by simply letting them know that you are very familiar with the type of sales pages that convert well with your list.

Offer to set up a sales page just for your list that you can drive traffic to. The vendor simply has to clone their offer and give you the HTML code for the buy button and you can install it.

This will help you bypass their sales page completely and enable you to still enjoy high conversions and sales because you have elevated the quality of the sales page. If they are not able to improve or allow you to replace their sales page, then you do have one other option.

If you feel the product is worth the effort, you can create a bridge page where you do most of the selling and convincing to your target audience on your page. You can even let your audience know that while the product is incredible, you felt the sales letter was lacking, so you wanted to step up and let them know the value of what they were about to purchase.

Using a bridge page, you can also go over any additional information that you feel the vendor or brand has either missed or not done a good job at emphasizing. You can also add information about your exclusive bonus to the bridge page, which can serve as an added element to help increase conversions.

Then, you can add a call to action that tells your bridge page readers to click on the link, scroll directly to the bottom of their sales page, and purchase the product to get your bonus.

One thing you have to consider, though, is whether or not the individual or brand has been accommodating with you as an affiliate. Many newbies may not know how to properly court a super affiliate.

They may be hesitant or feel as if people are taking advantage of them, which is just a matter of not understanding how the industry works. You want to work with people who not only give you good support as an affiliate, but who are capable of supporting your customers, too.

Pay attention to how well or how poorly they communicate with you. Communication should be in a timely manner, within 24 hours. They should be friendly and accommodating.

If you notice that they are ignoring communications or that they have a rude demeanor, you may want to avoid promoting that individual until they get more experience in how to act professionally with customers and affiliates.

When it comes to the bonuses that you consider creating, save that extra effort for when you have a product that needs something more, and which also stands to pay off for you better in the long run.

For example, if you have a product that you want to promote that offers recurring commissions or has a contest associated with it, it may be worth the extra effort to come up with an exclusive bonus for your buyers.

Maximize Your Monetization Efforts By Maximizing Your Affiliate Marketing

Super affiliates go the extra mile in making sure that all of their online efforts are monetized properly. There are many inexperienced affiliates who create articles for their blog, and forget to include their affiliate link – or only include one link at the very end of the article.

There are many different factors you want to take into consideration when it comes to monetization. After all, the level of earnings that you are striving for is what will determine whether or not you have achieved super affiliate status.

The first thing you want to look at after the quality of the product and all other factors is what kind of commission you will earn from the promotion of a product. You have to look on all levels.

That includes the front end, as well as any and all upsells associated in the funnel of a digital product. If it is a tangible product, you have to think about the volume of the item that you can sell and the commission level that the platform is offering.

Keep in mind that certain platforms, such as Amazon, offer different commissions for different categories. For example, they may pay 20% for Amazon games, but only 10% for luxury beauty items and a mirror 1% for Amazon Fresh orders.

They also have what are known as Bounty Events. This is a form of CPA (cost per action) marketing that allows you to earn a set rate whenever you convince someone to take an action.

That might be signing up for a free trial of Amazon Prime Video. The normal Bounty Rate might be $2 per sign up, but they also have promotional rates that you can earn during certain time periods, where you could earn $10 person up instead.

Getting back to digital products, you may have vendors who are offering different commissions for different levels of their funnels as well. For example, they may have a low ticket front end where they are offering 100% commission, and higher ticket upsells that offer 50% commission.

Once you have achieved super affiliate status, you might be able to negotiate to receive 100% commission regardless of whether or not they are offering it to all of their affiliates.

You also want to know what the cookie situation is. This can work in your favor or against you. On one hand, you want the cookie to last as long as possible if you are the first person sending a customer to a site.

But on the other hand, if someone else has sent that person to the site before you, but your copy is what converts them into a buyer, you still may lose out on the commissions if the cookie duration works against you.

This is why many affiliates prefer it when a vendor uses cookies that attribute the sale to the last click. Cookies typically last anywhere between one day and one month if they are set on a time-based schedule.

On Amazon, you will earn commission on any items that qualify within 24 hours of a customer landing on their side and beginning to add items to their cart. After they check out, the cookie is reset so that if they return to the site later using someone else’s link, the other affiliate will earn from that transaction.

We mentioned previously that Amazon has some built in CPA promotions. As a super affiliate, you are not restricted to simply recommending and reviewing specific products that are digital downloads or tangible items that can be sent to people’s homes.

You can also monetize your online efforts as an affiliate using CPA promotions within your content. CPA marketing is just a form of affiliate marketing, but you’re getting paid commissions whenever someone takes an action and signs up as a lead or takes some other action.

These can be wonderful ways to increase your earnings as a super affiliate because the customer doesn’t have to fork over any money initially. The trial they sign up for is free, and you earn from their interest, not from a purchase.

Anytime you are promoting on your blog, you want to look at these types of offers, in combination with whatever digital products and tangible ones you can recommend to your target audience.

When it comes to digital products, these might be courses that they can download or access online, or it might be tools that they can use. For example, in the Internet marketing industry, you can earn commissions on things like hosting accounts, page builders, keyword tools and more.

Another thing you may want to consider is adding AdSense to your blog or site. These text or image-based ads can help build your income as a super affiliate, even though you’re not earning affiliate commissions from it. Maximizing your affiliate marketing requires you to be willing to test many things in your business.

If the content is already there, your utilization of the sidebar, space under the header of your blog or in the content itself can be a great addition to your monthly earnings. There are two more considerations to make when looking at the monetization of your super affiliate status.

First, the platforms you promote on. Remember, Google and other search engines like to see their users being given choices as to where they buy products from. So signing up to places like Amazon, Share-a-Sale and Commission Junction can help you achieve that goal and cater to the needs of your readers, too.

For digital products and courses, you might look into ClickBank, Warrior Plus, Shopify, Etsy and more. Secondly, think about what you can promote that will deliver for you in terms of recurring commissions.

When someone signs up for something like hosting with a company you know and use, email autoresponders or even a monthly subscriber box of tangible goods like Bark Box, you can earn steady (and growing) commissions from your one-time sales conversion.

I hope that you can see that maximizing your affiliate marketing is worth your time and effort as you build an online business that will grow exponentially over time.

I’m author, publisher, and entrepreneur Connie Ragen Green and I would love to connect further with you. If you have an interest in finding the right JV (Joint Venture) partners to help you skyrocket your way to success, please check out my training at JVs Made Simple so you may get started right away.