Pocket More Affiliate Marketing Cash

3 Tips to Help Pocket More Affiliate Marketing Cash

By Charles L Harmon

Checking for more affiliate marketing cash.

Once you have your niche site or blog setup and getting traffic to it it’s time to think about how you can pocket more affiliate marketing cash from your efforts. How will you make money from your site? There are lots of ways, but one that is relatively easy is to become an affiliate of some product related to whatever your site is about or something your site visitors need or want.

Affiliate marketing is one of the quickest and easiest ways to make money online. That’s because you don’t have to deal with product creation or customer service headaches. You don’t have to have your own product. All you have to do is recommend products to potential buyers. Then you sit back and collect your massive paychecks.

Well it’s not quite so easy. Yes paychecks, but massive paychecks, well that’s a horse of a different color. You have to first get traffic to your website. That in itself can be a problem and/or take some time or cost you money. You could run ads, get links pointing to your sites from other sites or articles. Getting people on the social sites like Facebook, Twitter, or any number of social sites to come to your website, then get them to click on your affiliate link.

You will have to consider all these things and ultimately get enough people to your site and actually click your affiliate links and purchase something before you see any real money. Plus with most affiliate programs, you have to wait until their next billing cycle runs for affiliates and that could be up to 45 days or even longer before you get your affiliate check or direct deposit into your bank account.

In some cases the threshold for payment can be onerous and if your affiliate commissions are too low you could wait months before you get paid. That’s how it is on some of the advertising programs. Be aware of this so you don’t expect to be paid right away if your affiliate sales are low or slow.

But beware: Your affiliate cash can disappear quicker than ice in Death Valley in July if you don’t protect your affiliate commissions. Here are the top three ways to start banking more affiliate cash starting today:

1. Do Not use direct affiliate links.

You probably already know that it’s a good idea to cloak (hide) your affiliate links. Doing so will help ward off the link hijackers who substitute their affiliate ID for yours, and thus steal your commission when they buy the product. It also virtually reduces the number of buyers who “cut off” the affiliate portion of a link and go straight to the sales page (perhaps thinking that doing so will somehow give them a better deal).

But there’s another important reason not to use direct affiliate links: Namely, because you could end up with hundreds of “dead” links all over the Internet.

You see, if you make a blog post, Twitter about an affiliate product or include your direct affiliate link in an eBook, then what will happen if the vendor stops selling that product? You’ll have dead links, maybe hundreds of them or more, depending on how aggressive you were.

If instead you use a redirect link, you can change the redirect link to point from the dead affiliate link to a similar affiliate product in just a minute or two. And in doing so, you could potentially save thousands of dollars in affiliate commissions that otherwise would have been lost.

2. Look for these common sales leaks.

If you don’t verify the sales process thoroughly, you may find that the biggest thief is the product vendor! Sometimes the vendor is just a new marketer who doesn’t know any better. Other times, you may find vendors who are deliberately trying to rip you off.
Here are some things to look for:

• Alternative payment options. Another sneaky way product vendors reach into your pocket is by offering multiple payment options on the affiliate landing page. This is only troublesome IF you don’t get credit if the customer chooses a different option.
  

  Don’t spin your wheels over lost affiliate marketing cash – prevent it from happening.

  For example, if the vendor uses Clickbank for affiliate tracking, then obviously you won’t get a dime if the vendor encourages customers to call their orders in. In a case like that the call has effectively bypassed your affiliate link.

• Google AdSense ads on the sales page. Some marketers don’t realize that a sales page shouldn’t have any distractions, and that the only way to leave a sales page is via a back button or the buy button. Other marketers know exactly what they’re doing – you send them traffic for free, and they get the money every time someone clicks on their ads. Either way, avoid these vendors since they are taking advantage of the traffic you send them.

• Customer service reps that send visitors to a new page. Watch out for this sneaky trick: sometimes when a prospect has a question, the customer service rep (or the vendor) sends the customer to a different sales page. End result? You lose the commission!

3. Discover any loopholes vendor will use to keep your money.

Here’s one last tip: Always read the TOS (terms of service) and affiliate agreement. It is more often than not a long tedious read full of legal terms. Sometimes you’ll find an outrageous payment threshold that allows the vendor to legally keep your money until you reach that threshold! Other times the vendor charges a huge “accounting fee” just to cut you your check.

Then there is another very sneaky one where you have to have a certain number of sales and they have to be on different credit cards and within a short specified period of time. To make it even worse they might start taking money from your affiliate commissions if you don’t keep sending them customers on a regular basis.

There may be other traps out there waiting in order to take some or all the money you earned by sending affiliate sales to them. The only way to counteract this is to read the TOS thoroughly and know beforehand what to expect.

Summary

There you have three things to look out for or to avoid in order to put more affiliate bucks in your pocket. After all you do want to pocket more affiliate marketing cash, you don’t want to work hard to get people to your site and click your affiliate links then see unnecessary money go to someone else or a greedy vendor with tricks up their sleeve.