However, that is a rather simplistic view of an affiliate business. All of the above is perfectly true but if you want to earn a full-time living at affiliate marketing then you will need to accept that it is something that requires your focus and commitment. This basically means that you will need to market your vendor's products in order to earn the big commissions.
To do this, you will probably need a review website, possibly a blog and certainly a system for generating and converting traffic. All of this will require a fair amount of time and probably some capital for advertising and training.
Let us assume, for a moment, that you have covered all of the bases and have your affiliate program all set up. Where do you go from there? Well, the obvious answer would be to ramp up the business so you could double, triple or even quadruple your commissions whilst automating as much of the business as possible.
Easier said than done I hear you say and if I were perfectly honest I would have to agree with you. There are however some basic things you can do that would certainly set you on the right road.
The following are just 3 basic yet powerful tips you can implement to boost your overnight affiliate commissions.
Product Selection:
Spend some quality time getting to know which are the best affiliate products and programs to promote. There are many ways to do this, but you will need to spend time learning the techniques. For example in Clickbank there are tools available for affiliates to research products with a plethora of stats and figures.
If your not into number crunching then you may want to go online to blogs and forums and see what is current and work back that way. There are many ways to find the best products and one of the great benefits of being an affiliate marketer is that if a product or program does not live up to your expectations then you can just dump it and move onto another better product.
Always remember that vendors NEED affiliates, they are the lifeblood for product creators so as an affiliate you can afford to be selective.
Build Your List:
As an affiliate, never forget that you are first and foremost and Internet Marketer and as such you should always be looking to build a list. Your list is your greatest asset because it is the core of your business. With a list, you can send emails for similar affiliate products or services.
Many affiliates never bother building a list because they mistakenly believe it is the seller's prerogative to collect customer's emails and similar information. As an affiliate, it is your duty to collect this information in order to build your list.
Just because you're an affiliate and you generate traffic, it doesn't mean for one moment that you will make a sale. Most affiliates redirect traffic straight to the vendor's sale page and rely upon their hoplink to make the commission. This assumes the sales page persuades the prospect, again assuming that it is a good converting sales page and doesn't just click away to the next bright shiny object.
In the meantime, you will have probably paid for that prospects click and never have the ability to contact them again. It is imperative that you set up your own sales funnel, or at least the very first part of the sales funnel i.e. the opt-in page.
At least that way, even if you don't get a sale you will be left with a warm lead that you could follow up with a similar alternative product from another affiliate vendor. Multiple bites at the cherry for you, only one bite for the vendor.
Negotiate:
This tip will probably scare away most affiliates, as it is slightly unconventional. If you are successfully running a campaign selling a product or service and you believe that you are one of the top affiliate sellers, then ask the vendor or merchant for a better commission payment.
Now you may be thinking why on earth would the vendor pay me anything higher than what was originally agreed. Well, I take you back to the earlier part of this article where I told you that affiliates are the lifeblood for vendors.
Think about it, if you sell say 500 units per quarter for the vendor, he makes a very nice profit. If you increase your sales to say 800 units per quarter then he makes even more money for no extra work or input but you still only get the flat rate commission even though you may have upped your budget for advertising, put in more hours etc.
The vendor would not be a good businessperson if they did not see the win-win benefit of the increased sales. So your request for a better commission would be in the vendor's best interest as well as your own.
Many vendors already realize this and reverse the situation by offering their best affiliates bonus items or payments. You may have noticed that many of the product launches utilize this technique by running launch competitions for their affiliates to see who can be number one in the leader board.
There are many strategies that can be used to ramp up your affiliate commissions; the above 3 are just a sample.
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