How To Make Money with Affiliate Programs

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Do you want to make money as an affiliate? I have already written about how to find affiliate programs to promote. Today I want to talk about how to promote these affiliate programs on a blog.

First, here’s what not to do. It is not enough to just put up an ad or a link to the product in your sidebar. You might get some curiosity clicks on the link this way, but you won’t get many sales.

You have to do what is known as pre-selling. What this means is that you have to put your reader in the right frame of mind to be interested in the affiliate product. It is best to do this in an actual blog post, rather than the sidebar.

Product Review

One way that some people do this is to write a review of the product. This is fine if you do it right. You have to do a little work to get things rolling with a product review:

• Know your product. You should be using the product yourself, or at least you have read the ebook, watched the videos, etc.
• Think about the benefits of the product. There is a difference between features and benefits. Features are the objective things about the product. For example, you can say that the book is about increasing blog traffic.

  But what is the benefit of that? The benefit is that more traffic to your blog means more money, more admiration, the chance to be an a-list blogger, etc. These are the benefits – the things that really mean something to the reader.

• Don’t over-hype the product. Give a good honest review. It helps to mention something you did not like about the product as well as the good things. This won’t hurt you – it actually helps, since your readers see you are being honest.
• If possible tell about some tangible results you have gotten by using the product. For example, if it is an ebook about how to get more traffic, then tell about how it increased your traffic by 42%, or whatever the case may be. Don’t lie though. People can tell when you are being honest.
• You don’t need to actually sell the product. Don’t try doing a hard sell. You just have to pre-sell it. This means getting the visitors in a receptive frame of mind and interested in the topic.

Post About the General Topic

Doing a product review is only one way to pre-sell the product.

Another way is to write a blog post which gets people excited about the topic, and just mention the product in passing.

For example, do a post about the benefits of getting traffic to your site. Then in passing you can mention the ebook about getting traffic.

Or, do a post about how to do keyword research and why it is important. Then you can just happen to mention that you use Keyword Elite to do your keyword research.

The idea here is to get people thinking in the direction of the topic and how it would benefit them. Then when they click through to the sales page about the product, they are already in the frame of mind where they want something to help them in that area.

Create Interested Visitors

I can give you an example with a product I created, which is, coincidentally, a book about how to get lots of traffic to your blog.

I have been advertising it on AdWords with keywords such as “blog traffic” and “getting traffic to your blog”. It has been converting very well. (I just wish more people were searching for those keywords.) The reason it is selling well is that the people searching for “blog traffic” already have the topic in mind and are looking for help with it. So it’s easier to sell it to them.

On the other hand, I also see the sales statistics in Clickbank for people promoting my ebook as affiliates. Unfortunately, these are selling very poorly. I can only assume that they are just putting up a link in their sidebar and are not really doing any pre-selling.

It is the same sales page, whether the people are coming from affiliates or from AdWords. But the AdWords visitors are often purchasing, while most of the affiliate visitors are not.

So keep that in mind when you are promoting affiliate programs on your blog. Be sure to do your job of pre-selling, and you will make much more money.

Update: I had to search for the link for this, but I finally found it: Make Your Content Pre-Sell by Ken Evoy. It’s a free ebook about pre-selling that’s written in kind of hokey language, but it does teach you how to pre-sell effectively. It’s worth reading if you want more tips on the concept of affiliate marketing and pre-selling.