How to Boost Your Affiliate Earnings in 3 Easy Steps(c) 2003 Pencil Dude
Often difference between affiliates who drive traffic and sales to their affiliate programs' sites depends on little things that they do month after month. I know this is case for me. Here's what we do.
1. You Have To Do Something - Anything.
I was on phone with an affiliate manager for one of large Internet Marketing courses and during that conversation he told me an interesting thing or two. He told me that they get a lot of e-mails and phone calls from affiliates wondering why they haven't made any money from their program.
Every single person that has asked that question all had same problem. They hadn't bothered to do anything at all. These people hadn't even bothered to put up a banner that was readily available on their websites, let alone do any of better ways of promoting a program.
You have to do something. Start with easy stuff. If your affiliate program gives you banners or text ads to put on your site, use them. Put them up immediately. There - you've just taken your first positive action towards making some money from your affiliate program.
2. Keep In Contact With Your Affiliate Manager:
Hopefully your affiliate program keeps you up to date by way of a regular newsletter or some sort of affiliate update. However, regardless of whether they do or not it's important to keep in contact with your affiliate manager yourself.
Send them an e-mail and introduce yourself, tell them what you are doing in way of promotion for their program. If they sell more than one product or service, find out what product is doing really well currently. Ask them what types of creative are working best for that product. Is it a particular classified ad, HTML e-mail ad, banner, pop-up?
There are numerous instances where this really worked well for me. Let me share one with you.
I was writing an article about word-processing for a recent issue of my ezine and I was thinking of using an ad for a certain piece of software (which was a cost per action campaign), in my top ad spot. So, I asked my affiliate manager of CPA network that I belong to if this campaign was still going to be around when I published my article. He replied back and said, "Yes, but no-one likes that offer, why don't you try advertising this other software instead".