The SBI Mall

All those who want to increase your affiliate commissions, please raise your hands!

With the kind of traffic that most SBI! sites enjoy, it’s surprising that most people make much less than what they could be making. While I have talked about product creation and product + affiliates as a traffic strategy in previous posts, I shall be talking about how to increase your income as an affiliate in this post.

First of all, I hope you have the basics covered.

• Unless you have no other options, you must use the best converting affiliate merchants. Drop the ones that don’t convert well.
• Get really good at preselling.
• Don’t put too many things on a single page – Adsense, lots of affiliate links, banners, etc. I will talk about the concept of MWR (Most Wanted Response) in a later post very soon. If I forget about it, please remind me.

Now, let’s begin, shall we?

Sell the click, not the offer

Assuming you have got the basics right and only use the affiliate merchant that converts well, it makes sense to send as much traffic as possible to the affiliate.

Suppose the merchant converts at 5%. If you send 100 people to their page, you make 5 sales. But if you send 500 people to their page, you make 25 sales. See? The more people you send to their page, the more money you make.

Everybody knows this instinctively, but where most people goof up is when they try to sell the actual offer (product, service, whatever else the merchant is selling) to the visitors. They try to convince that the product in question is the best thing since sliced bread, and so on. And invariably, they fail.

Because see, we are not salespeople. We can’t write slick sales copy that can convince an Eskimo to buy some ice from us. It’s best to leave this job to the professionals. Our job is to simply create an open to buy mindset in them.

Remember the concept of MWR? Most people don’t really understand it.

Quick question: What is your MWR on a page that promotes a product you are affiliated with?

a) Get them to buy the product b) Get them to click on your affiliate link.

If you answered b), congratulations. If you answered a), you need to brush up on the basics again.

Look, no matter how hard the visitors try, and no matter how much they want to, they CANNOT buy the product from your page.

Because you are an affiliate. You are NOT the merchant selling the product.

The merchant’s MWR from the visitor is to get them to buy the product. YOUR MWR is to get them to click on your affiliate link.

Right?

Then why do so many people try to get the people to buy the product?

Focus on the right thing (trying to get people to click on your affiliate link), and you will definitely increase your affiliate commissions.

If they can’t LICK it, they can’t CLICK it

The ability to lick something on the screen implies that it’s visible, to say the least. Not to mention that someone must be sick in their mind if they actually go and lick something on their monitor. Yuck!

Ahem! Anyway…

What I meant was, if they can’t see it, they can’t click it. Agreed?

And your job is to get as many of them to click your affiliate link as possible. Remember?

See, it’s not like visitors to our pages are hunting for our affiliate links. What they ARE hunting for, is the solution to whatever problem they have, or the product they want, or the information they want, and so on.

So in order to make them click on our affiliate links, we must make sure they can SEE the damn link in the first place.

Now, those who read your entire article will probably see the link as they scroll down, but what about the people who just hit the back button as soon as they arrive?

Here are a few things you can do that will help:

• Put the affiliate link up top, right next to the place where you are used to putting your 250×250 Adsense ad. If it means getting rid of your Adsense ad, do it (read: test it).
• Put the affiliate link in a colored box (div or table, whichever suits you) with a border around it. Give it a neutral sounding headline such as “Recommended resources” or something. If you really feel the product/service you are recommending is a good one, feel free to slip in your endorsement too. Keep it short, though. People should be able to read your main article without feeling pitched. For more information on how to create colored boxes, you can refer to the FAQ thread in the HTML/CSS forum in the SBI! Forums.

A good “Call To Action” makes a world of difference

So how do you ask them to check out the product you recommend as the affiliate?

Do you even ask them, or do you just shyly slip in a link, hoping they don’t notice the link and don’t get cross with you if they do notice you actually linked to a third party product?

Listen. You are my friend, so let me get straight with you.

You are doing your readers a SERVICE by getting them in touch with people who can provide solutions to their problems, or products that would make their lives better and happier.

Similarly, it’s NOT a wrong thing to get paid for consulting. When you recommend a solution to someone, guess what? You are playing the role of a consultant. And I am sure you know how consultants charge big sums. And in this case you are not even making your “client” pay the bill. It’s the affiliate MERCHANT who is going to foot the bill, which is a very small one anyway.

So please stop being shy and apologetic about your affiliate links. You are doing everyone a great service – your visitors, your affiliate merchants, yourself, and your family.

So with that out of the way, how should you ask your visitors to click on your affiliate links?

There are several ways, and their effectiveness depends on your preselling, context, your audience, the type of product, and several other factors. With time, you will develop a feel for it, but here are a couple to get you started:

• The standard “Click here…” link. This is VERY powerful if used sparingly. Tests have revealed that the “Click here…” type of links get more clicks than the normal “keyword loaded” links. For best results, at most two links on your whole page (including navigation links) should be “Click here…” links.
• Let them know in advance that you are going to mention a product. Then mention the product (unless you don’t want to reveal the name of the product before you link to it, to prevent them from leaving the page before they click on your affiliate link). Then tell them you are going to link to the product. And then finally link to the product. By the time they get to the link, they should be anticipating it and actually looking for it. (Don’t actually go and tell them, “Hey, I’m about to link to the product.” Be subtle about it. Of course, you know that. But I still included it for others.)

A whole new post can be written about the topic of calls to action, but the above two should get you started and give you very good results.

And do keep testing stuff and moving them around to find out what works best for YOUR site.

If someone is already going to buy, grab their cookie

Here’s what I mean.

Sometimes people research a product before purchasing it. Maybe they read about it elsewhere, or on your competitor’s site, or on the merchant’s site itself. Whatever.

The point is that they are researching to make sure if there are any negative reviews about the product before they make the big leap.

That, my friend, is a big opportunity right there for you. Wield the power of SBI!

Create a Tier 2 page called “Recommended products” or whatever. Then create a Tier 3 page for each product you recommend on your site. It doesn’t matter if you already recommend it on some other T2/T3 page. Create a separate page for it as well. And go about it with the name of the product as the keyword.

So for example, if the product was “CompanyName WidgetName ModelName” your primary keyword for the page would be “companyname widgetname modelname” and the page name would obviously be companyname-widgetname-modelname.html.

It doesn’t matter what the Brainstormer says about the demand/supply/profitability of this keyword. You are not trying to get a lot of traffic for this particular keyword. All you want to do is to win the people who are searching for it, no matter how small in number they may be, because these are the people who are READY TO BUY.

And on this page, just put some basic information about the product, like price, a short description, etc. Put in some actual user feedback as well. You can get people’s comments on forums. You can use this material on your page, but be careful not to use the whole feedback/comment, or you may be in copyright violation. Just use a sentence or two at the most. Also include a comment that describes something negative, but is really a minor issue.

Important: Be sure to put the affiliate link at the top of this page. This is one page where you can’t afford to hide your affiliate link or require your readers to scroll down till they see your affiliate link. Remember, they are not hunting for your affiliate link, they are trying to find out whether or not they should buy that product.

They already want to buy the product. So you don’t need to do ANY preselling here. In fact, preselling could kill the sale. All your page needs to do is let them justify in their mind that what they want is the right thing to do, and nudge them in the direction of buying. And when they do decide to buy, they will just click on your link, and be on their merry way.

I have made more money using this strategy than anything else, so be sure to give it a careful read, multiple times if necessary. And if you have any questions, feel free to ask them in the comments below.

Read the Affiliate Masters Course

The Affiliates Masters Course, as you know, is the Bible of affiliate marketing. It’s what first exposed me to the world of possibilities in internet marketing, and got me started. Before I read it, I was making money selling a little software tool that I had created, but was only moderately successful. And by the way, whatever income I had then was all thanks to the affiliates I had, which is why I keep recommending to have your own product.

Anyway, the Affiliates Masters Course is a free e-book as you already know, and is a must read if you want to increase your affiliate commissions. You can download it from Site Central after logging in to your SBI! account, or you can download it here:

The Affiliates Masters Course

That’s it then. Have fun, and hope you enjoyed this post. Do let me know in the comments below.

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