affiliate program – Nicole Munoz Consulting

By following the tips and advice in this article, you’ll be ahead of the game and on your way to becoming a successful affiliate. Remember to provide quality content and information and once you do that you can concentrate on making product recommendations. As your business grows, you’ll find other tips and strategies which work best for you and you can start experimenting a little more.

Here are the 6 steps:

1. Make the affiliate programs that you select really relevant to your niche subject to keep the credibility of your site and entice your members into purchasing the products they need. It goes without saying, but if you have a site about babies and parenting babies, it’s not a good idea to promote pet related products as these aren’t relevant to your target market.
2. Set up your own domain or blog. You can’t do this for every affiliate program, but if you find a product which has really helped you and offers a generous commission, you can set up a blog and speak about your experience using this product. Make regular posts and comments about how the product is helping you and your experiences with it and link to the product throughout your blog. You can also set up your own domain name to promote a product. This looks much more professional than an affiliate link and will be easier to remember too. It’s great for using when writing articles and content as well.
3. Try to find affiliate programs that offer ‘lifetime cookies’ or ‘lifetime customers’. This means that when you send a member to the affiliate site your affiliate link is tracked in their system and even if the member doesn’t purchase the product right away, you’ll still get paid if the person returns and buys from that affiliate program at a later date.
4. Write honest product reviews. Write informative and honest product reviews. This is a great way to give your unbiased opinion on a product and to build trust with your subscribers. And if a product is faulty in some way you can add that as a note, your subscribers will trust you more if they know your recommendations are honest and sincere.
5. Find the correct placement for affiliate links. As mentioned above, affiliate banners and graphics don’t usually work as well as providing informative content and weaving affiliate links where appropriate throughout that content. For example, you can write a quality article about helping your baby recover from colic and in that article you can link out to resources which will help the parents remedy this problem.
6. Redirect your affiliate links through your own domain. There are many benefits to redirecting your affiliate links. It’s easier to track and remember your links when you need them. If a program changes their links it’s easy to go back and change your links. You’ll also present a more professional image; many affiliate links are long and look like garbly goop; your visitors may be suspicious of these links. Redirecting your affiliate links solves all these problems.

Get your book reviewed by review clubs. Each book store (E.g. Kindle store, Nook store, iBookstore,) has an active community of people who’re happy to review books for one another.

Get bloggers to review your book. Pay them to review the book if necessary. (Note: This isn’t a bribe, as you’re only paying for the review, regardless of what the review actually says. However, they should disclose the fact that they’ve received a free copy.)
Get on the radio. Buy an ad in the Radio Television Interview Report (RTIR) to promote yourself as an expert.
Contact podcasts and offer to be interviewed. Send them a free copy of your eBook first so they can make sure they like what you have to say. You may be asked for a sample of you on audio so they know you sound good when recorded. Look at PodcastDirectory.com for some ideas.

Do a search for your competitors’ books. Look at who’s promoting them and contact those websites. Offer a generous affiliate payout if you’re selling on Clickbank, or try to find some other “in” with them.
Tap into a pre-existing community. For instance, if you’re selling a fishing eBook, get involved with online fishing forums. Build a reputation for yourself, then promote your book.
Try to push your eBook to the top of your category, if you’re on an eReader platform. Have all your readers buy your book on one day and give them a bonus if they do so. This can send your book skyrocketing into the top charts, which gets you even more visibility.
Start your book cheap. Start your book at $0.99 cents, even if you eventually plan on selling it for $4.99. Starting it off cheap lets you get a bunch of reviews and initial traction right off the bat.
Buy ads on reader-oriented websites like Goodreads. This gets you in front of people active book lovers who’re already in the habit of buying books all the time.

Guest post on other blogs in your industry. Contact bloggers you know and ask if you can write a free article for them. If you don’t know many bloggers, write a brief line about yourself and what makes you credible and offer to do a free content piece for them.

Create a compelling affiliate program for your book. Be unusually generous. For example, offer a 100% payout for the first 3 books, or offer a $50 bonus to anyone who sells ten books. This can attract a lot of new affiliate talent towards your book.
Comb your LinkedIn and Facebook network. Look for people you know that have audiences, host events or have a large online presence. See if they’d be willing to promote your book. Make sure to phrase it as a win for them as well by offering to help them in some way.
Send your first chapter to BookDaily. This site gives avid readers one free chapter every day, on books topics they’re interested in. If you wrote a business book for instance, your first chapter can be sent out to everyone who’s interested in business.

Lookup conventions and conferences in your industry. Go to all of them. Meet other influencers in your niche and see if you can work together to promote one another. Who knows? You might also sell a few book copies.
Head to Twitter and search for questions that someone who needs your book might ask. For example, if you have a book about making your computer faster, you might type in “computer so slow” or “why is my computer slow” and so on in Twitter. Find people who recently asked relevant questions and shoot them a message.

Keep publishing! Publish lead-in books. If your main book is a $6.99 book, consider publishing a slew of $0.99 or free books just to get more traction and to build more of a brand. All of those sales will feed into the sales of your larger book.
If you’re publishing the book on Clickbank, try driving some traffic from Google AdWords and from Bing. Paid traffic can convert extremely well. This works much better for Clickbank than Kindle, because Clickbank books tend to sell for a lot more money.
As a long term strategy, create a blog. Post high quality content to that blog every week. Get ranked in the search engines and build a loyal following. This is a great way to sell books on a recurring basis, as well as a great way to launch new books.
Create a competition. The competition should be related to content within your book. Prizes can include free consultations with you, ten copies of your book, your help on their next project, a personalized plan for their project, etc.
Use Google Alerts to keep tabs on your topic. If someone writes a new blog post about something related to your book, be one of the very first people to respond to the post. Link to your Kindle book from your “name” and “website” field.