Growing Your Affiliate Income

Growing your affiliate Income every month is the key to success but its also the hardest thing to do

Affiliate marketing is a funny old game
Some days are great! The sales keep rolling in and the commisions just keep coming.
Other days nobody seems to want to spend their money and you don’t make a sausage.

There is not much you can do about that really. You will have some good days and some bad days no matter what you do to improve the way you do things. Thats just the way it goes no matter how good you get a running your campaigns.

Now what comes with experience of being an affiliate after a while, is that you realise you have to take the ‘rough with the smooth’ – You should be looking at your performance over a longer period of time. To see a clearer picture, you should be looking at your commision total over a monthly time scale.
After several months of promoting your affiliate programs you will have a good rough idea of what money you should be earning from one month to the next.

One of the hardest things to do is to increase your profits without having to invest more of your money or time into affiliate marketing.
Most affiliate programs have a set cookie length, normally between 30 or 90 days. ( some are longer )
So when your cookie expires you will no longer earn any commission from that customer and 100% of all money goes into the merchants pocket for any more transactions for the life of the account.
This is generally how most affiliate programs work and alot of affiliates still make good money from this system.

Assuming you have been sending a steady stream of visitors each month, what you should start to notice is that after the initial cookie period has ended – you will have reached your peak of your sales performance.
In other words the cookie cycle is now complete and your income from this program will generally flatline from then on month on month. ( roughly speaking )

This is the point most affiliates hit a brick wall, I know I did.
I didn’t really want to increase my spending too much each month as I didn’t have a huge budget to spend.
Nor did i want to spend even more hours a day adding endless content to my websites to increase my visitors. I was spending too much time in front of the computer screen already.

I soon realised the problem lay in the way most affiliate programs are set-up
You see, affiliate programs are designed to keep growing the merchants profits every month.
Every new customer a merchant gains, remains their customer for life.
What the cookie cycle does in effect is cap an affiliates revenue so that the merchant receives more money in the short/medium term and ensures the affiliates are hungry to keep driving traffic continually – to carry on making any money in the long term.
Its a great business model if you are a merchant but doesn’t work as well as it should do in my opinion for us affiliates.

So I started to look for affiliate programs that were more in my favour and I’m happy to say I found a few.

Now its commonly known that you will find several retailers on various networks that offer really long cookie lengths.
For example e2save ( Mobile Phones ) offer a 999 day cookie and Buyagift.co.uk ( Gifts ) even have a 9999 day period on their programs which can be subscribed to on affiliate window + there are quite a few other programs that offer the same sort of thing on AW along with the other networks.
This is certainly a move in the right direction and I actively welcome and participate in some programs like these.

The slight downside is that in reality it is unlikely a cookie will survive for these lengths of time as they may be deleted from a users computer or overwritten by another affiliates tracking id – so they don’t actually give the continued flow of affiliate cash that they should ultimately do.

Another step up the ladder from these are lifetime revenue commission programs which are usually only seen in the gaming/gambling sector. These will pay you for the life of the players casino or poker account.
These do perform well as obviously you keep making money as long as the player keeps playing which is nice
However its worth pointing out that some have certain terms and conditions you should be aware of.
For example some merchants will only pay out if a player has deposited a set amount. ( ie £50 )

You may be suprised if I tell you that there other program structures that wipe the floor with all of the above.
After discovering these new models of affiliate programs I have gone through my wall in growing my affiliate marketing business and my income is now always increasing every month without the need to increase my investment or working hours.

If your still awake and interested I’ll tell you about them in my next post

Thanks for reading
Mike