17 Affiliate Marketing Secrets That Will Make You More Money

Last Updated on 2nd April 2024

Want to learn the secrets of making a lot of money as an affiliate marketer?

Here in this article, I walk you through 17 affiliate marketing secrets you can use to get more traffic and skyrocket your income.

These are the techniques and tactics used by affiliate pros. I recommend bookmarking this article so you can refer back to it as a guide.

Let’s get to it!

Create Good Content

Creating good content is at the heart of most affiliate marketing strategies.

Whether you’re running a blog, publishing videos on YouTube, or creating content for social media, you need to make sure you’re only publishing good content, otherwise, you’ll find it difficult to engage your audience.

Take a look at what your competitors are publishing. This will give you an idea of the standard you need to aim for. However, you don’t just want to be like everyone else, and you certainly don’t want to rip off the work others have done.

Instead, use your competitor’s content for ideas on how you can produce something even better. For example, are there sections that the competition hasn’t covered? Could you explain things in a better way? Can you make your content more impactful?

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Need Training? Our Top Rated Affiliate Courses

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Use Multiple Traffic Sources

Many affiliates, especially beginners, focus on a single traffic source. While it’s necessary to build one traffic source at a time, once it’s established you should look to build a new stream of traffic.

Using multiple traffic sources will, of course, bring you more traffic, but it will also serve you well in protecting against platform changes.

For example, if you’re primarily a blogger, then you’ll need to contend with frequent Google updates. Google is constantly moving the goal posts. If a new update doesn’t go in your favor, it can really hurt your business if your business is 100% reliant on traffic from Google.

It’s not just Google that likes to mix things up. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and Amazon have all made changes to their terms of service over the years. Unfortunately, some of these changes have not been good for affiliates and online business owners.

The key to protecting ourselves here is to aim to establish 3-5 (but at the very least, 2) traffic sources.

In the beginning, you should start with one. Pick your favorite. Then, once it’s established (typically 6-12 months depending on the traffic source), look to add a new stream of traffic to your business.

Get Solid Affiliate Training

Affiliate marketing can be hard if you don’t know what you’re doing. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Unfortunately, a lot of affiliate marketing newbies try to figure things out themselves, and end up either getting into some sort of difficulty and then eventually quitting.

However, with the right training, anyone can have success as an affiliate if they apply what they learn and stay consistent.

There are a lot of good courses out there, but there are also a lot of scammers too. Unfortunately, there are some people in the space selling courses that don’t actually make money with affiliate marketing – they make money from selling their courses.

Stay away from those people.

When it comes to choosing a good course, I recommend learning from someone who actually practices what they preach, can back up their results, and has a lot of good testimonials from students.

Spencer Mecham is one such person. He’s a 7-figure affiliate with a great track record, is respected in the industry, and is transparent about his methods and tactics.

I bought Spencer’s course Affiliate Secrets 3.0, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. It teaches you everything you need to know to start and build a successful affiliate business to 7-figures.

If you want an in-depth look at the course and my full feedback as a student, see my review of the Affiliate Secrets 3.0 course here.

Find Discount and Coupon Offers

Some affiliate program managers provide unique discounts and coupon codes to affiliates.

Check the affiliate resources area of each product you’re promoting to see if there are any available. Using these can often be the tipping point in pushing potential customers over the edge to make a purchase.

If there are no discounts or coupon codes available in the affiliate area, it’s worth reaching out directly to your affiliate manager. Sometimes they will set you up with your own unique code to help you promote.

Promote a Trial or Free Sample

Promoting a free trial or sample product is a great way to attract new customers. It’s a hell of a lot easier to promote something that’s essentially free versus a product that costs thousands of dollars.

Once you’ve got a few customers in the door with a free trial, you’ll earn a commission once they continue with a paid subscription. Having said that, some affiliate programs pay a very small commission of a few dollars just for a trial sign-up.

There are tons of good affiliate products out there that offer a free trial. One I’ve done particularly well with myself is ClickFunnels.

ClickFunnels don’t pay you anything for a free trial sign-up, but once the 14-day trial period has passed they pay up to 40% recurring monthly commissions. You get $38.80 per month for anyone you refer who takes the Standard plan, or $118.20 per month on all Platinum users you sign up for through your affiliate link.

You can join the ClickFunnels affiliate program here.

GrooveFunnels is another good example of this. Groove offers a free account, but you’ll get up to 40% each month when your referrals move onto a paid plan

And then, if those referrals go on to also promote GrooveFunnels, you’ll receive an additional 10% per month on all the new accounts they refer too! That’s called a tier-2 affiliate program, in case you’re wondering, and there are several good ones out there that you can add to your ecosystem of affiliate products to promote.

You can join the GrooveFunnels affiliate program here.

Promote Products With a Recurring Commission

My next affiliate marketing secret tip is to promote products that will pay you again and again.

Promoting affiliate programs that pay a recurring commission is another affiliate hack that will make a huge difference in your business.

Promoting recurring commission products will help you to build up steady, reliable passive income. In time, this can amount to a large sum of money in your pocket each month.

Personally, I love promoting these kinds of products as I like the long-term stability they can bring. It’s also great to know that you’ll still get paid even if you decide to take a month or two off!

Promote High-Ticket Products

When I first got started as an affiliate marketer, I promoted only low to mid-ticket products for far too long.

That was a big mistake.

It doesn’t take much extra work to promote a high-ticket product as it does a low-ticket offer, so you may as well add one or two high-ticket offers into the mix.

There are products out there that will pay you as much as $1,000 or even $5,000 for a single sale.

So, if you want to make an extra $1,000 per month you can look at it this way:

• Sell a low ticket product that pays you $10 per sale = make 100 sales per month
• Sell a high ticket product that pays you $1,000 per sale = make 1 sale per month

You won’t likely get much traction though just by writing a few blog posts or uploading some YouTube videos. You need to hone in specifically on your target audience, and then build rapport and trust with your audience first to sell these kinds of products.

Don’t worry, it’s not actually that hard once you know-how.

If you want to make high-ticket products a part of your business then you’ll need to follow a specific blueprint that’s designed for selling high-ticket items.

This free video explains one of the best blueprints in the industry to make high-ticket sales as an affiliate.

Find Similar Products of Competitors

As an affiliate, you want to build up a stable of relevant products that you can promote to your audience.

A great way to find more products to add to your offering is to do some competitive research to discover what your competitors are promoting.

Scrolling through your competitor’s YouTube videos is one of the easiest ways to find out what they’re promoting. And if they happen to have created a lot of content on a particular product, then chances are that product is selling well for them.

The same goes for competitors who are leveraging other social media channels like Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, and Pinterest.

Sometimes you’ll even need to click your competitor’s referral links and sign up to their mailing list to uncover the goods.

And if you’re a blogger, a great way to spy on your competition is by using a tool like SEMRush or Ahrefs. These tools will help you top quickly see topics your competitors are writing about, which articles are bringing them the most traffic, what keywords they target, etc.

Be Honest About Products

All too often you see affiliates out there raving about how good this product or that product is without giving much insight into the negative sides of a product.

Of course, you want to make the sale, but if you’re only emphasizing the good points, and not being transparent about what’s not so great about the product then you’ll lose trust with your audience.

Pretty much every product out there has good and bad points. People know that.

If you’re not being completely honest then most people will see through your efforts.

Only Promote Good Products

There are loads of great products out there. There’s also a lot of crap too.

Reputation is everything when it comes to making money with affiliate marketing. If you promote crap to your audience then you’ll lose trust and those people won’t buy from you again.

Wherever possible, promote products that you use yourself, or ones you have tried and tested. If that’s not possible, then do your research into the company first before promoting them.

You want to make sure the product is of good quality, the company has a good reputation and decent customer support in place, and overall customer reviews are good.

Focus on Mobile Conversions

As of 2021, around 90% of internet users are accessing the net via a mobile device. That’s a staggeringly high number!

In 2020 an average of 55.4% of online sales made came from a mobile device. This percentage is expected to increase over the coming years.

So, it’s safe to say that it’s extremely important to focus on mobile traffic and sales.

On top of this, you also gotta consider how long it’s taking for your pages to load. Whether you’re using a WordPress website or a dedicated landing page builder, make sure it’s optimized to the max and loading quickly. Doing so can increase your conversions by as much as 27%, according to QuickSprout.

As far as landing page and funnel builders go, GrooveFunnels is the fastest loading.

If your site is built on WordPress, then make sure you have a mobile-optimized, responsive theme. Ditch heavy page builders like Thrive Architect and Divi, and use a pro caching plugin like WP Rocket.

Build an Email List

Email marketing is still one of the most, if not, the most effective marketing strategy used online. All kinds of businesses use email marketing, including affiliates.

There are lots of reasons why you should build an email list, but here are the most important reasons:

• An email list will help you build trust and rapport with your audience
• You will have the opportunity to sell to the same people again
• Once a person has bought from you, they are much more likely to buy from you again
• An email list is a good fail-safe in case you temporarily or permanently lose traffic

As important as it is to build a list, there are a lot of affiliates out there who are leaving a lot of money on the table by missing out on this step.

As an affiliate, the easiest way to start list building is to offer your audience a free lead magnet (something for free) in exchange for their email address. Once subscribed, your audience will begin to receive your automated newsletter, some emails of which will also pitch a product.

It’s important to know that some email automation platforms are not affiliate-friendly. That’s why I recommend using GetResponse for newbies, and they also have a completely free plan too up to your first 500 subscribers.

Use an Affiliate Bridge Page Funnel

An affiliate bridge page is a simple 2-page funnel. The landing page (page 1) is the page where you offer your audience a freebie (your lead magnet) in exchange for their email address.

Once people opt-in to receive your lead magnet, they will automatically be subscribed to your email list and start to receive your follow-up emails. They will also be redirected to the bridge page (page 2).

A bridge page is usually a simple page with just a few elements. Typically, it will contain a headline, a short 1-2 minute video of you introducing a product (ie, bridging the gap between where your prospect is right now and the product you want to introduce them to), and a ‘buy now button.

An affiliate bridge page funnel is a great way for you to make some extra money upfront while building your list at the same time.

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Ask For Custom Commission

Some affiliate managers are open to negotiating higher commission payouts. However, they will usually want something in return.

There are quite a few things you can offer to entice a higher commission out of your manager. Here are a few ideas:

• Prime position in a round-up review
• A site-wide feature spot on every page of your website
• Regular mentions to your email list or social media following
• Rent your Facebook pixel to your affiliate program manager

Use Exit Intent Popups

Some websites, particularly blogs, can have a bounce rate as high as 90%. This means people are hitting the back button before they navigate to any other page on your website.

That’s why exit-intent popups are so effective. Once set up, they trigger as soon as it detects the person is about to leave your site or landing page.

On average, exit-intent popups can increase your conversions by as much as 10-15%, which can make a big difference to your bottom line.

You can use an exit-intent popup to collect an email or to sell a product directly. If you’re using a popup builder like ThriveLeads then you can even use it to create an affiliate bridge page funnel to collect leads and sell a product at the same time.

Offer Bonuses

One highly effective tactic you should consider using in our affiliate business is to incentivize people to purchase products through your link by offering bonuses.

This is a clever tactic that a lot of the super affiliates use to boost sales.

if you’re gonna use this tactic then you want to offer a bonus (or bonuses) that compliment the product you’re trying to sell.

For example, if you’re trying to get people to use ClickFunnels through your link, then think about all the issues a new user might face once they’ve signed up for ClickFunnels. As a result of this kind of thinking you might come up with a list of bonuses that look something like this:

• A quick-start video course on how to use ClickFunnels
• A short eBook on 5 ways you can make money using ClickFunnels
• Done-for-you funnel templates
• Etc

Of all the affiliate marketing tips, this one can make a huge difference to your income.

Leverage AI

Artificial intelligence is certainly the hot topic at the moment. It seems like everyone and their cat is talking about it, and in particular, ChatGPT.

ChatGPT seems to have come out of nowhere, and people all over the world are using it in various ways to make money. And yes, you can even use ChatGPT to improve your productivity and money making as an affiliate marketer.

For example, as an affiliate you can use ChatGPT to help you create content for blog posts, eBooks, YouTube video scripts, Quora answers, email marketing, and more.

If you want more detailed info, then you can read my article here on how to leverage ChatGPT for affiliate marketing.

Affiliate Marketing Secrets – Final Thoughts

There you have it, 17 affiliate marketing secrets to help you scale your income online.

I recommend you apply all of the above tactics over time as they will help you on your journey to becoming a successful affiliate marketer.