Do YOU Practice High Performance Affiliate Marketing?

If you want to dominate your field as an affiliate marketer then you need to implement these tips into your business plan right away.

When you have an ethical bribe, cloak your links and build a list of customers then you can count on a lot more sales.

By the end of this article you will be set to practice high performance affiliate marketing and bring in huge commission checks.

What’s Your Ethical Bribe?

An ethical bribe is something that you give away in exchange for someone’s name and email address. Most people need time to build up enough trust to by something from you. If you start out by giving them good information for free, then they’ll assume that what you’re selling is worth even more.

So what should you use as your freebie? Well, you need to find something that has a high perceived value but has a very low cost to distribute. E-books are perfect for this because they don’t cost you anything to duplicate and they’re packed with valuable information. You can create your own about a topic that relates to your field of affiliate products or sometimes the person you’re selling for will provide you with free PDFs to give away. So be sure to check their affiliate resource page and see if they provide you with a PDF so that you don’t have to make one yourself.

Regardless of if you make the PDF yourself or pull it from an affiliate resource page you need to be sure that it contains information that will be perceived as valuable to all your customers, especially if you market a bunch of different products. The type of e-books that seem to work best address the number one question or problem that your average customer would face. It has to tell them the basics on how to fix the problem but make sure it’s not something that they’ll have heard before. Then you need to “sell” your freebie as being valuable. Tell them how much you could sell this e-book for or what benefits they’ll gain from reading it.

When they realize you just gave them valuable information for free then they’ll be ready to buy from you, but you need to make sure that they can’t hijack your affiliate link.

If you don’t cloak your affiliate link then you run the risk of your potential customer noticing that it’s an affiliate link. Some people know all about affiliates and will for some reason try to go around your link so that you don’t get credit for the sale. Some people will even modify the link so that THEY get credit for the sale and end up getting the product at a discount. There are a few ways you can cloak your link.

The easiest would be to go to a site like TinyURL, enter in your affiliate link and hit a button and your link is cloaked! Sites like these are handy because they shorten your URL, which makes it more attractive and you can even type in what you want the URL to be. This option allows you to present your customers with a short, unique URL that doesn’t appear to be an affiliate link and they have no way of modifying it. The only issue here is that sometimes these sites go down and then your link doesn’t work anymore.

Another option would be to find free link cloaking software like MyLinkGuard. This is a more reliable option and it does the same thing in the same amount of time. It’ll give you a shorter, more attractive and cloaked affiliate link.

A more in-depth approach would be to make a Meta redirect on your site. All you have to do is create an html page that has code like this in the header:

And then put something like “Now Redirecting You to (product name)” in the body of the page. It’s a simple page that will instantly redirect them to the product through your affiliate link. This will require that you have your own domain but it’s used a lot by top affiliates. Then you set up the page so that it’s something like yourwebsite.com/recommends/productname. When they click this link it’ll automatically redirect them to the page through your affiliate link. Meta redirect magic!

You might be wondering how you get someone to click your links after you gave them your freebie. What do you do with their name and email, right?

You’re going to want to get an email autoresponder account and start building a list of customers. This is how the top affiliates do it and how you should do it too. What you do is make a page that says what you’re going to give away for free and why they need it. Then you put a form on the page so that they can submit their name and email so you can instantly email them the freebie. Once they fill in their information they are added to your list and the autoresponder sends them a welcome email that gives them a link so that they can download their e-book and welcomes them to your list. You can also have the form redirect them to a sales page through your affiliate link once they submit their information. This helps snag quick sales from eager buyers.

Ok so you have a huge list of names and emails, what next? This is where you build a relationship with your customers; get them to trust you. You want to set up your autoresponder to automatically email them a chain of emails. You can set this up by saying, send this email to them 5 days after they signed up and so on. You want to give them good information in your emails but ALWAYS, at some point in the email, pop in an affiliate link and tell them to check out a product. Keep reminding them how valuable it is for them to be on your list by giving them high quality content and then subtly tell them to check out a product for more information. People will buy when they want to buy, so you have to be sure that you’re contacting them consistently so that you can catch them at the right time.

Without a list you only get a chance to contact them once about a single product. But with a list you can contact the same list of customers over and over again about many different products. This means more sales for you and repeat customers. And don’t worry about having to come up with all the newsletter content yourself. Go back to the affiliate resource pages and check to see if there are any emails or articles provided for you to use. You can plug these right into your list and make sales without having to come up with content on your own. Now you’re set to rake in some big commission checks!

This is a proven system for dominating any field and boosting your affiliate commissions. When you give people valuable information for free, cloak your links and build a list then you’re practicing true high performance affiliate marketing. You can now make a living selling other peoples’ products!