Affiliate marketing can be a great way to quickly start your own internet home business and make money online. You don’t need to create your own product, worry about setting up merchant services, deal with customer support, or do much of anything else except market the product or service on the internet, which is the most fun part and the main thing that brings in the cash! As an affiliate, you are basically just selling a product or service for someone else and collecting your commissions. This is one of the fastest and easiest ways to launch an internet business and begin earning money online.

Assuming you are already making at least a little money from your affiliate marketing efforts, what would be some things you can do to increase your earnings? Below, I have given you 4 things you can start doing right now that could double or even triple your affiliate commissions almost instantly.

How to Boost Affiliate Commissions

1) Find the best products or services to promote.

You obviously want to promote things that are going to make it easier for you to earn the most profits possible in the shortest amount of time. There are several factors to consider in selecting the right affiliate program.

You want to find the ones that have give very good commissions and fit in with your target audience. You don’t want to promote a product about basket weaving to people who are interested in learning how to rebuild a car engine. And you don’t want to earn 25% commissions on a $10 product when you could be earning 75% commissions on a $97 product for the same amount of work.

You also want to be sure you choose programs that have a solid track record of paying their affiliates on time. You don’t want to constantly be worrying about whether or not you are actually going to be paid for your efforts. There are thousands of affiliate programs online covering just about every niche possible, so you can be picky about finding the best possible one.

2) Write free reports (ebooks) to give away on your website.

Once you have the program(s) chosen that you are going to promote you want to start on marketing right away. There is a pretty good possibility that you will be competing with many other affiliates who are promoting the exact same thing and they might even be as good as you are (shocking, I know). One way to distinguish yourself from the other affiliates, and make more money than them, is to write short reports related to the products you are promoting and give them away for free. They don’t have to be long — 5 pages or so should do it in most cases.

In the reports, you should provide some valuable information on something in the niche your chosen affiliate product is about. Somewhere within the ebook you will insert your affiliate link to the product with a recommendation for it. These free ebooks will give you more credibility and establish more trust with your potential customers. They will be more inclined to buy from you because you have given them something of value for free first, rather than just pitching the product to them right away.

3) Collect the names and email addresses of the people who download your free report (build a list).

It is a well-known fact that most people don’t make a purchase the first time they see something. Experts say that it often takes 7-11 follow-ups in order to get a sale. That’s why they say, “The money is in the list.”

When you use an opt-in form and autoresponder to collect the contact information of the people who download your free reports you are building a list of potential customers. You can write follow-up emails that automatically go out to these contacts in set intervals to keep yourself fresh in their minds. This will remind them to purchase the product from you when they are ready.

You want to get their contact information before sending them to the vendor’s website through your affiliate link. Keep in mind that you are essentially marketing for the product owners. You only get paid when you make a sale. If you send prospects directly to the vendors, chances are they will be lost to you forever.

Plus, when you get their information, you can keep in touch with them for as long as they stay subscribed to your list. You can continue to build a relationship with them by giving them free valuable information, and sending them other marketing messages every once in a while. This will give you the potential to earn more commissions from each customer in the future, instead of just a one-time sale.

It’s a lot easier to get someone who knows you to buy a product than it is to sell to a stranger. This is the purpose behind building your list and publishing a newsletter for them.

This email marketing strategy needs to be a balance between providing useful information for free and sending out sales pitch. If you continue to send quality, useful information you will be able to build a sense of trust and respect with your readers that may lead them to support you by buying your products.

4) Ask for higher commissions from the product or service owner.

If you are already successful promoting a particular product, you should try to approach the owner and negotiate a commission increase for yourself. If they are smart they will grant you the request rather than lose out on the valuable affiliate that you are.

Keep in mind that you are a zero-risk investment to the product owner. Any sales you make are extra money for them that they wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. So, don’t be shy about requesting additional commissions from them. Just be sure you are reasonable in your request and make it a win/win situation for both of you.

Try out these 4 simple strategies and you should see an increase in your affiliate commission checks quite quickly!

Affiliate sales are a good friend of any internet marketer. Anyone can make some money with Adsense or god forbid through filling out a million surveys online. You can fight to earn a little extra money there, but truth be told the real money is in affiliate sales. The way to think of it is that affiliates use advertisers to send them traffic so they can make money. That’s right! Advertisers are the middle men, and who makes money, the middle men or the guys at the top?

There are a lot of different types of affiliates, some of them sell physical products, others sell services, and others sell electronic information like ebooks. All that’s consistent is that they will cut you in on their profits (ranging from modest to possibly huge). Small companies do it (for example, I sell maple syrup for a little mom and pop place in Quebec) and HUGE companies do it (eBay and Amazon, for example). There are as many companies selling products that want your help as you can possibly imagine.

There are lots of setups for affiliates too, some start out small and as you increase the sales you direct to their sites the percentage you earn from each sale goes up. There are programs that actually will pay you 75% or more of the cost of the product. My personal favorite are subscription affiliate programs that will pay you a continued % of sales for as long as the person you refer stays signed up, which are great because it is a fairly safe residual income, even if you stop getting anymore traffic to your site for some reason. Some affiliate programs are pay-per-click, some are pay-per-lead, and others are pay-per-sale.

Another interesting type of affiliate program are called “multi-tiered affiliate programs” or “two tiered affiliate programs”. What is so special about these programs is you don’t just make money when you sell a program, if you tell a friend about the program and they make a sale then you actually get a commission from that too. It can all add up really quickly because that can result in you having tens or even hundreds of people essentially working for you. I know this is starting to sound like a pyramid scheme, but it isn’t so don’t worry. I guess this is the point where I mention that if someone asks you to sign up for an affiliate program you should run in the other direction ha ha.

So, I guess now that you understand what affiliate programs are, I should give you a little more on how to sell them…

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First off track down high quality affiliates because the more value you deliver to your readers the more they will come back and trust your advice. You can make a lot of money from a small readership if you point them in the right direction. Now that being said, you shouldn’t see these people as your friends, especially when you’re trying to make a living online. It’s your job to sell people products, and while one needs to draw a moral line it does somewhat come down to dollars and cents. I personally wouldn’t sell people something that would harm them, or encourage someone to give away their life savings, but hey if someone wants to plunk down $20 to buy an ebook that will promise to make them millions then I guess it’s steal from the stupid and give to me.

Another good thing to do is to focus on targeting selling keywords. Basically what a selling keyword is is one that indicates a person in looking to purchase a product at the time for example “buy”, “for sale”, “cheap”, or “used” are all great selling keywords. Other good words are ones where people are seeking more information about a product for example “best”, “review”, or “top” are all good too.

The alternative to the well targeted keywords is going after the big fish. Quantity over quality can sell to, but it’s tougher to rank for these words in search engines. I generally start a site to go after the well targeted keywords and once it ranks well for those I start going after the tougher general ones.

There are no hard and fast rules when it comes to being successful with affiliate programs and it does take a large amount of work. Once you get a hit though you can make a lot of money in a very short amount of time. You don’t need to go out and find the highest paying affiliate programs. Just find a few that are high quality with good commissions, and that you feel comfortable promoting.

For a lot of people the “make money online world” can be a rough place morally. A lot of people will do pretty much anything to make a buck, others aren’t willing to compromise even a little, and thus most of the time they end up not making any money. I don’t know if it’s better to be morally or financially bankrupt, but I’d rather find myself a happy balance and be profitable and moral(ish).

When we talk about ethics in regards to affiliates there is a clear dilemma. A person is selling a product which they have a direct interest in selling. So you think to yourself this is exactly what stores in the mall do but the two cases aren’t quite the same in most cases. Generally when we make affiliate sales online we are representing ourselves as a person giving an honest opinion, but rarely will you see someone who talks about how crappy a product is selling many of them. You can see the conflict here, which gives us three real choices:

1. You can write about only those products and services which you use and like (or love).
2. You can write about anything that you know there is a market for that you can make money from.
3. You can promote pay per click affiliate programs for profit.

I do all 3 myself and see nothing wrong with it. I’m not a snake-oil salesman. I would never promote something or sell someone anything I knew could harm them. I’m not going to tell someone that a product will do something it never will. But what I will do sometimes is hawk niche products that aren’t the HIGHEST quality, or even buy myself, simply because I know there is a market for them. In my mind buyer beware on the internet, really.

There are other people, I call them bloggers (haha) who actually have a self interest in only promoting products in the first category. These people trade off their reputation as honest people. I love tech, and I would trust Leo Laporte’s opinion on laptops because he won’t screw me… it’s in his interest not to because then I would never listen to his radio show and sign up to his email lists all the time. If you are looking to buy something this is the type of guy you want to find, but it takes a lot of work to build this kind of trust where you can do this. I personally don’t have the time or energy to do this!

Anyway there is no right or wrong answer on where to draw the line, but it is a personal decision that people should be aware of when they get into the business of affiliate marketing.