Most of us at some point will try and promote affiliate products and earn an income as it is portrayed as easy. Just cut and paste some link code or banners, add them to your site and sit back and wait for the cash to roll in.

Sorry but real, successful affiliates will put a bit more work in than that.

Here are 5 tips to really improve your Affiliate Income.

1. Write Your Own Adverts For Affiliate Products

There could be thousands of other people promoting the same product as you. Most of them will be lazy and use the copy given to them by the product owner. While this is a quick and easy way to add links to promote the product, you could be leaving lots of money on the table. Spend a short amount of time writing your own adverts.

WARNING : If you are promoting UK Finance or Insurance related products and you are NOT regulated to give financial or investment advice you can’t publish your own adverts or if you do want to make sure you get them checked by the product provider first to make sure they are legally compliant!

2. Multiple Promotion Strategies!

Just adding banner to your website or adding a text link on your site to promote an affiliate program is really not going to cut the mustard. You need to think wider. Here are some thoughts:

3. Bundle It!

Lots of super affiliates (Professional Affiliates to you and me) add EXTRA vlule to a product by offering additional incentives that, if you by a product via them, they will give you extras. These can be in the form of Reports, Videos, Audio, a free membership or a discount voucher. Just think about offering something complementary. This could set you apart from your competition and attract more buyers to you rather than someone else just offering the basic product.

4. Cloak Your Affiliate Links!

Just using the affilate link you are given - most people when they mouse over the link will see that it is an affiliate link and may not click on it. Or they will see the link and just go direct cutting you out of your commission. Hide the link by redirecting automatically from a page or link on your own site.

Then when your promote your link you would use www.mywebsite.com/recommends/page.htm which looks nicer than www.myaffiliatelink.com?myaffiliateid=heresmyaffiliateid

If you want to build your own redirect pages or you use Wordpress for your websites try this article:

http://patchlog.com/wordpress/hidden-affiliate-links/

5. Buy The Product Or Service Yourself

In this way you can write a REAL honest review of the product and then recommend it, safe in the knowledge that you are providing a valuable review. Provide proof of what you have done with it. “Product X made me £250 extra commission this month” sounds a bit cheesy but back it up with maybe a whole story of how you used the product. Really provide some detail so your site visitors will want to do what you have done. Everyone loves to buy into a proven, tried and tested model. If the product owner doesn’t provide one then provide your own!

If it is an expensive product that you have bought and want to promote it then have your photo taken holding it or using it! Then use that in your adverts, on on your Review. This adds credibility that you actually have it and use it!

Good luck! Just adding one or two of these techniques will boost your click through rates and then sales. Yes there is more work involved but it is definately worthwhile spending an extra bit of time to add these techniques to set you apart from the herd.