18 Ways To Increase Your Affiliate Marketing Income

I talk to a lot of people every week about affiliate marketing. And along with general affiliate marketing questions. People always ask how they can increase their affiliate marketing income.

You know, make as much money as possible. And that’s a very valid question. As an affiliate marketer my goal is to make as much money as possible, and I know we’ve never met, but I think it’s safe to say that’s your goal too.

So, I thought I would share with you 18 ways that you can increase your affiliate marketing income.

Remember it’s not one big thing that’s going to increase your affiliate commissions it’s a lot of little things that produce those BIG commission checks.

1) Promote Products/Services That Offer Higher Commissions (duh)

This sounds pretty obvious, but you would be surprised how many affiliates are promoting products with very low commissions.

Personally, I will not touch an affiliate product unless it has at least a 50% commission available.

You’re going to be devoting the same time and effort promoting your affiliate products it only makes sense to maximize your profits. Why make pennies when you can make dollars.

2) Provide Social Proof

Ideally you want to be using the products and/or services that you promote. And by using the products or services you promote you can provide social proof.

So how do you give social proof?

You can provide testimonials, video proof, before and after pictures. You can even provide case studies.

Bottom line people want to see results. And if you can provide legitimate proof that a product or service works, you will increase your sales. Plus, providing social proof gives you far more credibility.

3) Find The Right Affiliate Program To Promote

I know this sounds pretty basic but you would be surprised how many affiliates are promoting lousy programs.

Here are some of the important things to look for:

• Does the affiliate have a good (high) conversion rate? You can ask but the real way of finding out is testing yourself.
• Do they have good support? Test them out. Call or email them and check them out. It’s pretty simple; poor customer service means a poor program in my opinion.
• Sales content. Do they provide an assortment of great sales content? This would be emails, solo ads, articles, banners, classified ads and such.
• Training. Do they have training. Such as how to material and ideas on promoting their product?
• What’s the companies track record? That’s easy to do simply start searching on Google and play detective for an hour or so to find out.

4) Become Unique

Every quality affiliate program provides you with ads, emails, solo ads, articles and so on. A good affiliate marketer will take that material and make it their own.

The fastest way of getting your advertising ignored is by using the same thing everyone else is using. So change things up, use that material given to you as a template and make it your own, stand out from the crowd.

5) Track Your Sales

Yep it’s boring; however, it’s a necessary evil of doing business online.

Think about it. If you don’t know what’s working and what’s not. How are you going to know where to increase your efforts and get rid of the things wasting your time and money.

And once you know what’s working that’s when you can scale things up in that area.

All the affiliate programs I’m associated with provide tracking within their back office. Also, all of them allow me to create my own tracking links. This way I can have unique links for things such as landing pages, posts, PPC campaigns, social media channels, etc.

There are also 3rd party services that you can use to create tracking links. Such as ClickMeter.

6) Don’t Jump Around

I get emails all the time from people saying, “I’m not making any money with this affiliate”.

My response is how long have you been promoting the program? In many cases they say a few weeks.

You’ll never have any real statistical data telling you if the affiliate programs product or service is a winner in a week. Not unless you’re using paid traffic to promote the product or service. And that’s a whole other converstation.

However when it comes to free traffic, such as serach engine and social media.

You need to give it time; things do not happen overnight. So, you need to be diligent and patient. Hopping from one program to another will only guarantee you one thing…Failure!!

But I need to mention this. You must have done your homework when it comes the affiliate and the offer itself.

If you’re associated with a lousy affiliate and promoting a crappy product or service. Chances are the sales just won’t be there no matter what you do.

So, make sure to do your homework when it comes to the affiliate offers and the products/services you’re associated with befoer you do anything.

7) Protect Your Commissions

Many affiliates have their commissions lost on a regular basis and don’t even know it.

This happens when a customer clicks through your affiliate link to buy a product or service and then before making the purchase strips away the affiliate ID attached to the URL. Thus, you lose out on your commission.

I’m really not sure why people do this because it’s not costing the customer any more money nor is it saving them any money. But there are people that do this.

To prevent that from happening you can protect yourself by hiding your links.

There a many affiliate cloaking programs available. One of the more popular cloaking solutions is a plugin called Pretty Links. With pretty links you can shrink, cloak, track, organize, share and test all of your links on your own domain and server.

8) Find Recurring Affiliate Programs

Start promoting membership programs also known as continuity programs. So instead of getting paid once on a sale, you will be paid a recurring commission from the affiliate for as long as that customer stays a member. This is a fantastic way to build a huge passive income.

The great thing is you’re not starting from scratch each month. You’re building on income from the previous month. Here’s my best recurring affiliate program.

9) Give People A Compelling Reason To Buy From You

Think about this for a second, why should I or anyone else buy through your affiliate link over the other guy, if you’re selling the exact same product at the exact same price?

It makes no difference to me if I bought the product through Joe Blows affiliate link or yours. If I still end up with the product I want who cares where I get it from. Right?

But what if you gave me a Compelling Reason to purchase through your affiliate link instead of anyone else’s, what if you offered me more than the other guy?

You need to have something that will convince people to buy from you. Sounds like a great idea but what could you offer? There are a bunch of different things you could offer, for example;

Provide a free product, offer a free additional special report, offer your time and provide free mentoring, coaching or support.

You could purchase a PLR (private label rights) product that complements your affiliate product and give that product as an added bonus.

By doing this you’re not doing what every other affiliate marketer is doing. You’re standing out from the crowd.

Persoanlly I offer personal one-on-one coaching and support through one of the affiliate programs I market.

10) Build Your Mailing List

Building a mailing list is a long term marketing approach, but a very sound one. By having a mailing list you have a better opportunity to build a relationship with people.

And once people know, like and trust you they will buy from you and do so over and over again. So, you want to build your mailing list at every opportunity. So, this means having some sort of lead magnet (opt in offer) on your website.

Or you’re directing people to an optin page (landing page) where you’re building your list.

Now, your opt in offer is the ethical bribe you’re offering in exchange for someones email address. And make sure your offer is unique and can’t be found anywhere else online.

Neil Patel has a great post on how to build your email list using top notch ethical bribes.

11) Talk To Your Affiliate Manager

This is something many affiliates don’t do. And because of that you’re missing out on increasing your income.

And with every quality affiliate program, comes an affiliate manager. And with some programs they have more than one manager.

And as affiliate manager he or she only has one job, and that’s to increase the earnings for you and the program they are managing.

So get in there and start building a relationship with your affiliate manager. They’ll be able to tell you what to do to increase your earning.

Now if the program you’re affiliated with only has one manager and they are not really helping you, well that sucks and there’s nothing you can do.

But if you’re with a program that has more than one and you feel they are not really helping don’t be afraid to ask for a different manager.

12) Increase Your Traffic (duh)

Online marketing is a numbers game plain and simple. So, it stands to reason the more traffic you have coming to your website the greater the opportunity there is for you to make more money.

Now you can increase your traffic with both free and paid methods.

Free is through organic growth by targeting the right audience with higher and more first page listing in the SERP’s (search engine results page). You can also generate free traffic thorugh social media.

You can also increase traffic by using paid methods such as Google Ads, Bing PPC or Facebook Ads just to name a few.

13) Write Reviews

Reviews are a fantastic way of show casing a product or service. I’ve done countless reviews of both good and bad products and services.

And as with any review you need to show both the pros and cons of the product or service, no product or service is perfect.

What I like about writing reviews is it a very targeted audience. Because these people are looking for more information about the product or services they want. And because of that many people are at that tipping point of buying that product or service you’re reviewing.

Also, a well targeted keyword researched review can get ranked at the top of the search engines. And as I just mentioned in point 12 regarding traffic. Writing reviews will increase the free traffic to your website.

I have many reviews that are on the first page of Google and I get a ton of free traffic and conversions because of that.

Also, reviews are great pieces of content to promote through your social media channels.

14) Focus On Helping People

Here’s where many affiliate marketers drop the ball, they don’t focus on helping people first. They focus on making money first. BIG MISTAKE!!

Don’t Sell – Help

I don’t care what niche you’re in. You need to focus on helping people. When someone does a search online, they are typically looking for a solution to a problem.

And it’s up to you to provide that solution for them. And by helping people solve whatever challenge they are having you’ll make money, don’t you worry about that.

People are always asking themselves “What’s in it for me?” And if you can answer that question, you’ll increase your affiliate income 10 fold.

You will get all you want in life, if you help enough other people get what they want – Zig Zigler

15) Limit The Products You Market

Most new affiliate marketers think if they market a lot of different products, they can make more money. Well in theory that’s true, but only if you are promoting the right products.

Here’s what I mean.

It’s far better to focus on 1 main product, plus niche related products. Rather than promoting a main product and a lot of different nonrelated niche products.

If you’re promoting nonrelated niche products, you’ll just end up confusing your visitors. And when people feel confused you know that they do? They leave without buying a thing.

So, what do I mean niche related?

For example, let’s say you’re in the weight loss niche and you’re promoting Weight Watchers. Niche related products could be workout clothes or an exercise machine.

What doesn’t work would be having products on your weight loss website that has dog food that helps your dog lose weight. That’s not a niche related product. You may think it is, but it isn’t.

Don’t laugh I’ve seen this type of none related products on websites. It’s just weird,

The reality is you don’t need a lot of different products to make a lot of money as an affiliate. I only represent 3 different affiliate products and I make over $200, 000 per year.

16) Work On Increasing Your Conversion Rates

It makes no difference if you’re driving 1000 people a day to your website if no one is buying your affiliate offer.

And if that’s happening, it makes more sense to focus on increasing your conversion rate then it would be to increase your traffic, right?

It’s far better to have 100 people coming to your site each day and have 4 or 5 of those people become buyers. Then a 1000 people not buying anything.

So how do you increase your conversion rates?

It comes down to testing and a lot of it.

It’s best to set up some type of A/B testing if you can. And when performing these tests, you only want to change (test) one thing at a time.

Because if you’re testing multiple things, you’re not going to know which thing is increasing your conversions.

As one example, let’s say you have a landing page to capture emails. You can set up an A/B test and try out a different heading and see which one performs better.

Other ways can include:

• Changing the call to action
• Changing your optin form
• Use a CRO (conversion rate optimization) planner
• Adding social proof (point 2)

You can use tools like Crazy Egg to set up up A/B testing. As well as analysis other areas of your website to see what’s working and what’s not.

You can also use tools such as Thrive Leads to build your mailing list. You can set up A/B testing for things like different forms designs and content, different triggers, different form types and even completely different offers.

17) Make Your Links Stand Out

When it comes to your links you don’t want them to bend in with your content, you want them to stand out. So, make sure they do.

When it comes to links, most people recognize them as a link when they are colored blue. And as you can see with all my links though out this post, they are blue because I know that’s what people recognize, plus they really stand out.

18) Clear Calls Of Action

Don’t expect people to know what you want them to do. I don’t mean this as an insult but you have to treat everyone like a 5 year old when it comes to getting people to do what you want them to do.

If you want people to take any specific action, tell them what action they have to take. So if you want people to click a link, tell them to click the link. Want people to sign up for your newsletter? Tell them to.

When I talk about wealthy affiliate this is one of the calls to action I have. Hard to miss and it’s very clear.

Now of course not everyone is going to do what you want them to do. But if you never tell them what to do. You’re guaranteeing your opportunity NOT to increase your income.

What’s Working For You?

I’m always trying to learn more. So, if you have a way that’s not on my list that’s helping you earn more I would love if you shared it with me. You can share or add a comment below.

Also, feel free to share this post with your audience. And as always if you need a hand with anything you can email me anytime.

I believe in you!!
Leo