Affiliates who are just starting out can sometimes find it difficult to generate as much money as they like.
Whether it's getting the traffic to your site/video/review in the first place or converting that traffic into buying customers for the merchants in question it doesn't matter.
In practice the business of selling somebody elses' products isn't as easy as some people make it out to be.
However, by taking a few steps you will soon be able to earn affiliates commissions envied by many with less effort and less cash than you'd think.
Here are 10 simple things you can do make your commission earnings explode.
1) Talk To The Merchant's Affiliate Managers
If a merchant is leveraging the affiliate system of getting traffic there is a very good chance that they have a staff member that is dedicated to handling affiliates.
This person is likely to not only understand promotional methods, technical problems, and product lines and can help you design campaign so that both parties make money.
After all it's in the merchants best interest to help you sell because it means more sales for them.
Which ecommerce vendor doesn't like more sales?
2) Link Deep Not Wide!
This is where communicating with the merchants' affiliates manager and getting to know the merchant's site really come in handy.
By linking to a product that is most appropriate to the 'conversation' you are having you increase the chances of making a sale and increasing your commissions.
There's also steps you can take to analyze which links are getting you sales and, by making some changes to the URLS you will be able to work out which links work and which links don't.
3) Monitor Your Statistics
Visit the ¡°Activity Details¡± and ¡°Activity Summary¡± links regularly to view details on your sales and clicks. Sign up to Google Analytics if you have your own website.
If you have specified optional afftrack values for links you¡¯ve created, you¡¯ll see those next to your completed sales.
This will give you more information about what things work and what things don't.
4) Study Customer Behavior
So what do you do with all that information you're gathering. You use it to improve your conversion rate of course.
You can use the ¡°Return Days Analysis¡± to see how long it takes buyers to make a purchase after seeing a link.
You can also see which campaigns work better than others and fine tune efforts in the future.
5) Ask Your Merchants For Feedback
If merchants have strong positive or negative feelings about how you are promoting their products, they may leave you feedback. Keep track of this to build better relationships with the merchants and lift your commissions in the future.
Even if there is no feedback get in contact with them and see what they think. They might have some ideas that could lift your results considerably.
6) Monitor Merchant 'Health'
Merchants can get low on affiliate funds. They can leave networks completely.
Before you start any new promotional campaign, you need to ensure the company you are doing the work for has the money to pay you when it's successful.
If a program says ¡°Low Funds¡±, proceed with caution. If it¡¯s closed, move on to something else.
7) Stay Up-To-Date With Your Network.
Networks are businesses in themselves, they are communities of loosely assoiciated merchants, affiliates and administrators.
What does that mean to you?
What it means is that there are rule changes, new promotions and new developments all the time and new opportunities and obstacles may be facing you and you don't know it.
Some networks like shareasale maintains an active blog with news and important information for their affiliates. But even with others there should be some forum where affiliates and merchants get together to discuss the health of the network.
By getting involved, or at least monitoring that network, you will always be in the loop and in the best position to profit from any changes.
8) Help Your Customers Get Discounts And Results
As a rule people shopping online want one of two things:
Faster results and cheaper prices.
With affiliates networks like commission junction or shareasale there is often a ¡°Coupons/Deals¡± link that will help you find available deals for merchants in the network. This will allow you to set up coupons where customers can make a 'saving' on an item and you can get a higher conversion rate.
With some ecommerce websites, many customers do not do not speak English as their first language. This puts you in a position to increase foreign-language sales for the merchant and tap into an under developed market.
9) Leave Page Design To The Experts
If you're slowed down by page design and coding then there are solutions to this problem.
Many affiliate networks, like Shareasale have a ¡°Make a Page¡± feature, which allows you to create specific product pages quickly.
All you need to do usually is to enter in details about which items you¡¯d like to promote and you¡¯ll get back the raw HTML code you can upload to your website for an instant page.
Otherwise there are sites like elance that has many coders who can also do the job for you in a fraction of the time for little cost.
10) Put Earnings On Automatic With Datafeeds
The great thing about the internet is that once its set up it can be automated so that, with little ongoing input from you, it can go on generating money for you.
The secret behind this is often datafeeds. Some affiliate sites like Shareasale have merchant datafeeds that you can download by clicking on them.
However, even if a site doesn't have a datafeed it is still possible to generate one if you know your way around code. RSS feeds can be 'repurposed' if you know a site has one.
There are also some third-party tools like PopShops and GoldenCAN that will do the job for you.
By doing this you will be able to make your commission earnings explode all with little effort and little cash. What more could you ask for?
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