7 Best Ways to Increase Affiliate Earnings
Learning to increase your affiliate earnings used to feel so complicated, but really it just comes down to being a match maker. Connecting your people with products they need to make their lives easier is the basic foundation of affiliate marketing.
How to Increase Affiliate Earnings
Why do you want to learn about affiliate marketing? For me, that answer is financial freedom. Making money while I sleep feels pretty fucking amazing.
Financial freedom is more and more within our reach these days. It seemed like we had to work for decades before achieving it in the past, but now you can start a business today and be financially free in a few years. Is that your goal? If so, keep reading about how I've started my journey to financial freedom with affiliate marketing.
Know Your Topic, Know Your People
For example, you could have a blog about cooking. Digging a little deeper, you could have a blog about organic cooking. And, taking that one step further, you may wish to specialize in homegrown organic vegetables and cooking.
What does this have to do with affiliate marketing? Once you have a clear and specific target audience in place – once you know who your people are – you can then delve into what they need help with – and what they want to purchase.
Once you know your audience, you can promote various kitchen tools, cookware, and utensils that make your organic homegrown cooking easier and faster, too. You can even promote other blogger's courses, ebooks, etc that would resonate with your audience.
If you can help somebody to do something faster, quicker, easier, then you have a lot to market! Knowing your target audience and their potential needs, wants, and desires will give you a better chance at being successful with your affiliate marketing endeavors.
Note: Affiliate links may be used in this post. I earn a commission when you make a purchase through them. 🙂
Authenticity
Choose a niche you have experience with, are knowledgeable about, and feel passion for.
• Be authentic; be vulnerable; be engaging
• Create good content – make certain you have enough to say on the subject so that your audience views you as a person of authority and experience
• Test out and review different products if you're doing a product-based website; don't phone it in. Really dig.
• Match your products with your blog or website – don't try to sell crap your audience doesn't need or want, just to make some money.
• Do your research! You need to create THE BEST posts on the web.
Increase Affiliate Earnings
In my blog income reports, I include some of the affiliate income I make. Here are the best tips I can give you for increasing your own affiliate earnings.
Become a Cheerleader
The best way to make $1000 a month or more with one affiliate? Become a cheerleader for the product or service!
Dive in head first, learn everything you can about how it works.
Do tutorials and teach your audience. Deliver value while being excited about the product. I did this when I first learned about Jasper (formerly Jarvis, formerly Conversion.ai), and while I was never a top affiliate (there are 7-figure earners in this space with 100,000+ on their lists – I started with 200 on my list), I went from $0 to over $1,000 in just a few month’s time.
I did this by joining their group and delivering value, while creating helpful content on my blog. I didn’t promote my content in the group, but I was asked by the team to become a “Jarvis Expert” and I accepted. This gave me more credibility and the page they used linked out to my content.
Due to how the company handles things, I decided to take a big step back and am no longer part of the cheerleading crew there, but I still make money with the affiliate program because I still believe the tool can be helpful.
One thing to keep in mind when you go all in is that the company can shut the program down at any time, or you can find something out about the company that you just can’t get behind anymore, or a myriad of other things that could happen that affect your earnings.
Because of this, I don’t recommend being a cheerleader for more than a handful of companies at a time and I highly recommend diversifying beyond these companies that you’re cheerleading for, just in case. 🙂
Ask for a Coupon Code
Email the affiliate company and ask if they will give you a coupon or discount code.
For example, Kevin promotes iTrackBites (now called Healthi). Their affiliate program is old school and it’s really not one I’d recommend joining, but it fits his niche perfectly and serves his audience, so he deals with it. The tracking is difficult because they don’t have a link you can promote; readers have to manually put in a coupon code when they are signing up.
However, the coupon code saves them $5. In order to make sure he got the most sign ups out of all affiliates (he’s the top affiliate 10 times over), he wrote a post about how to redeem a healthi coupon code.
He just slipped down to position 2, but was ranking #1 for a long time for it on Google and even won the snippet, so anyone who wants to grab a coupon code will see the blog post he wrote and the video that accompanies it. While this isn’t possible with every company (there are some heavy hitters out there!), it’s worth writing helpful posts like this when you have a coupon code available.
As you can see above, you don't have to click through to the post to get the coupon code. That is a benefit for Kevin because the site that ranks above Smiley's Points makes you click through. Yes, that may reduce the click-through rate, but probably not.
Ask for More Money
One quick way to increase affiliate earnings is to ask for a higher payout. One of the affiliates I promote pays $15 per sign up. I negotiated and got $20 per sign up.
This works best when you’ve already delivered value to the company. If you haven’t sent anyone their way, don’t ask for something already. Send your readers to them, make them (and you) some money, THEN ask if they will increase the payout.
Offer Bonuses to Increase Sales
If you’re selling products or services that are more expensive, that pay you really well, or those that have a lot of competition in your niche, you may want to offer a bonus when people buy through your link.
Be SURE this is allowed in the affiliate program. It’s called “incentivizing”. Email the company and say something like “hey, I want to promote xyz and offer abc as a bonus – how can I do this in a compliant way?” – this will make sure you’re on the up and up and not risking your affiliate earnings.
Add Affiliate Links to Images
People click on images more than they click on links, so including affiliate links in your images can increase your earnings quite a bit.
Link to Affiliate Posts
Interlinking your top posts with other affiliate posts will help increase your traffic to those posts, increasing your earnings. This also reduces your bounce rate as long as you’re linking to helpful, relevant posts.
Google Web Stories
When you create Google Web Stories, link to your affiliate posts. You can also link out to your affiliate links, but that is colder traffic. Warm them up by delivering value through your content.
Send Emails
Include affiliate posts in your welcome sequence as well as your nurture sequence. This makes it completely automated on your end, because once you set it up it runs on auto-pilot.
Every time you send an email, think about how you can be as helpful as possible. Maybe one of those ways is to link to an affiliate post. Work these links in naturally, and remember you cannot link to Amazon using your affiliate link via email. It is against their TOS. Be sure to link to your Amazon Influencer STORE if sending out through email.
Schedule Social Media
Y’all know I’m not a huge fan of social media, but it does have its benefits. If you use Facebook, Pinterest, or even Twitter, you can schedule your affiliate posts out on a regular basis so they’re always being seen.
Even if you send each post out once or twice a month, that’s enough to get more eyeballs on them (but not enough to annoy your readers).
Are you ready to start TODAY?
If I had to start my business journey all over again, I would focus more on affiliate marketing and less on social media. Get rid of the idea that affiliate marketing is spammy or scammy; use your affiliate marketing posts to change lives… to HELP people. That is what I do and I LOVE it, but I also make a lot of money in the process! 🙂
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