How To Improve Your Affiliate Earnings

Affiliate programs are done on a Cost Per Action (CPA) basis, meaning they require some action inorder to get you money like signing up for the program or buying a product. Many people don’t realize that if they use affiliate programs properly, it can turn out to be one of their biggest money makers.

A common mistake made by some people are placing banners of various affiliate programs on their site thinking that it will earn just like that. I would recommend you to choose the affiliate programs that matches your blog content so that they perform well for you.

Once you find the affiliate programs matching your site content, don’t just place it’s affiliate banners on your blog. While the banners may get you some clickthroughs, the chance of conversion will be low.

Use a Pre-Sell page

The best way is to make a pre-sell page or post on your blog explaining all about the product and how they will benefit your readers and be sure to include your affiliate links on the page. This can increase your chances of conversion as you are letting your visitors know how the product can benefit them and therefore you can make more money with Affiliate programs this way.

The pre-sell posts that I have created on this blog are Text Link Ads Review and AGLOCO - Get Paid To Surf The Web.

Just placing affiliate banners can waste space which can otherwise be used for CPC or CPM advertising. To increase the chance of your visitors finding these pre-sell pages, link them on other posts and on sidebar or below post.

Give out something free

Another thing you can do to increase the chance of conversion is to give something free in exchange to people who do the action required for you to earn from the affiliate program. Regular readers may remember that I offer a free sitewide link on this blog for a month to anyone who signs up for Text Link Ads using my referral link.

You could also sign up under other peoples affiliate links for other programs and in return ask them to sign up under your affiliate link.

These are some interesting related posts that are worth reading:

The Proper Way To Do Affiliate Marketing
21 Ways to Increase your Text Link Ads Commissions
5 Tips for Improving AdSense Referrals Earnings

What do you do to improve your affiliate earnings?

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Posted on March 16th, 2007 | Category: Make Money Online |

17 responses so far, Leave a comment

Ashish Mohta

March 16, 2007 at 11:32 pm

Thats really a great tip john, I am always confused about these as it never will pay out for me…exactly as they never match my niche…If you can provide a list of affiliates for different blog niche..It will be superb

Maki

March 17, 2007 at 12:59 am

Hi John!

Thanks for the link. Not sure if you are aware of it but I recently tagged you for my FeedCount meme.

See here:

The Feed Count Meme: Studying the Impact of Feed Count on Blog Feed Subscriptions

JohnTP

March 17, 2007 at 1:27 am

Maki- I will post my answer tomorrow

Ryan

March 17, 2007 at 3:38 am

Good post John. Affiliate banners are some of the last things you want to use… but they’re a good thing to use in place of AdSense if no AdSense ads are available (or the user isn’t using JavaScript).

Maki

March 17, 2007 at 4:02 am

Thanks John.. I’m looking forward to it!

I think affiliate links are best promoted as a text link within context, i.e. within a body of text on a related or semi-related topic.

By acting as a reference, they are relevant and will naturally attract click throughs and viewer interest.

Affiliate banners don’t work after some time. I personally think that ReviewMe and TLA banners have lost a lot of visual impact because they’ve become commonplace on most blogs and website.

Ryan

March 17, 2007 at 8:33 pm

Yup, the best conversions come within context… banners are terrible at converting.

Sharique

March 18, 2007 at 1:00 am

John,
Any suggestion for a personal blog? I mean which affiliate programmes are suitable.

Ramanathan

March 19, 2007 at 6:40 pm

I had made that mistake of having many affiliate links. Then i realized it and added contextual affiliate programs. Now I use AuctionAds and ShareASale. AuctionAds seems to be good.