How to Double Your Affiliate Commissions in 30 Days or Less
Is it possible to double your affiliate commissions in only 30 days? You bet it is! And it’s probably a lot easier than you think it is. Today, I share 10 ways to double your affiliate earnings!
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate Guy
15-biggest-affiliate-program-challenges-and-how-to-solve-them
10 Lessons I Learned Launching a Bestselling Book
Listener Q&A: Finding Affiliates, What’s Working in Affiliate Recruiting, Email Templates, and More
How to Create Recurring Affiliate Revenue Promoting Membership Sites
How to Double Your Affiliate Commissions in 30 Days or Less
Is it possible to double your affiliate commissions in only 30 days? You bet it is. And it’s probably a lot easier than you think. Today, I share ten ways to double your affiliate earnings.
Okay, so is it really possible, like, really possible to double your affiliate commissions in only 30 days? Well, this episode comes from a lot of questions I’ve been asked recently. And when I kind of added all of the questions up and put them into one, it was basically this how do I double my commissions?
How do I make twice as much money from affiliate marketing? And how do I do it in a way that I’m going to feel good about? I could easily just be like, you know what, double and a little bit more than double your affiliate promotions.
That would double your affiliate commissions. Burn your list for 90 days and you’ll double your commissions. Do unethical things.
You will double your commissions. We’re not talking about that. So when I did this, I was thinking, okay, there’s not one way.
There is not one way to double your affiliate commissions. There are actually ten ways. And all of these really are all like, no one of them is going to increase your affiliate commissions by more than about 25%.
And none of them are really less than about 5%. They’re all kind of in that five to 1020 5% range. You add them up.
As you’ll see, the math adds up. If you do all ten, you’ll actually be significantly over double. So let’s jump right in with how you can do these.
What are those ten ways you can add up to more than double your affiliate commissions? Well, the first thing you can do is negotiate higher commissions. Here’s the math on this.
If your average commission is 20% and you get a 5% commission increase, that’s not a 5% increase in the amount you earn. If you go from 20% to 25%, that’s actually a 25% increase in revenue to you. So if you’re promoting something $100 and you normally make $20, you’re now making $25.
That’s a 25% increase. Think about it. You’re one-fourth of the way to now making double, which is $40.
Even from a ten to a 12% increase is a 20% increase. Only 2%. That company is only giving up 2% more, but you’re making 20% more.
That’s really cool. So how do we do this? How do we negotiate a higher affiliate commission? Let me tell you the number one thing you got to do. You got to ask. You’ve got to ask.
No one has ever gotten a higher affiliate commission without asking. Well, occasionally they might run a contest where we offer it and you got it and didn’t ask, but 99% of the time, it’s because somebody asked. I advise our clients all the time, to build in the wiggle room so we can offer higher commissions.
Now, are you going to get a higher affiliate commission out of the gate when you’ve not proven yourself? No. Are you going to get a higher affiliate commission if you’re six months into promoting something and you made one sale?
No. But if you’ve done a little bit to prove yourself, you can ask for a higher commission and there are three keys here. I call it the ask formula. I apply this to affiliate recruiting. I’ve done an episode on that.
I apply it if you’re asking people to be on your email list in the early stages, we’ll talk about email list growth here in a little bit. I apply this to anything where you got to ask somebody for something. So it forms an acronym, and that acronym is ASK assuming a positive response.
So when you’re asking for a higher commission, assume that you’re going to get it. It’s going to affect the words you use. I’m assuming you’re going to ask in an email, but ask with the expectation that you’re going to get a yes reply, and that’s going to trigger or impact some of the words that you use in that instead of kind of asking like, well, could you maybe no big deal if you don’t.
No, you ask assuming a positive response. Number two, the S. You show them the benefit.
You have to show them the benefit of giving you a higher commission. Hey, I would love to promote you more. In the past quarter, I’ve made 20 sales, and I really barely only scratch the service.
I would love to double my efforts in promoting you. I just need to make a little bit more money. So right now, looks like I’m making 20%, which is an average of $40 per sale.
Can we bump that up to 25% so I can make $50 a sale? Eight times out of ten, you’ll get a yes. And then the K is you got to know their needs.
You got to know what did they need, what is it they were looking for? So I will often my response as an affiliate manager will say, you know what, I looked at your stats over the last three months. You were averaging 20 sales a month.
Here’s what I’ll do if you get to X. Now, let’s solve for X here. I got to go. Okay. If they only get to 25 sales, is it worth paying an extra 5% a sale? Probably.
It’s right around the point where I’d say no. So if I say, okay, the goal is to get to 30 per sale, here’s what I’ll do. I’m going to keep you at 20.
If you hit 30 sales, let’s just say it’s a $100 product, I’m going to bump you to 25% right away. And I’m going to pay you a $150 bonus because that’s an extra $5 per sale times the 30 sales. So I’m going to give you a 30% basically for the whole month.
Now, I need you to stay above 25 sales. If you dip below 25 sales, I’m going to knock you back down to 20%. So I’ll find a way to incentivize them.
So for you affiliate managers out there, that’s how you do that. So number one way to double your affiliate commissions is to negotiate roughly a 20% to 25% increase in your affiliate commissions. Even a 10% increase when you add up.
All these others will definitely add up to well over double. All right, number two, the way to double your affiliate commissions is just to add one additional affiliate promo per quarter. Now, if you’re only doing one affiliate promo per quarter, this could be pretty darn close double your affiliate commissions by itself.
But for most people, the average we find is roughly in the neighborhood of ten to 15 per year. And adding one a quarter is not going to double your commissions in and of itself, but it could increase by 20% to 25%. Long term, I want you to increase just one additional one per quarter.
Very simple formula. More promos equals more money. The other way you could do this is by increasing the amount that you do completely evergreen in your automation and things like that.
What happens when somebody’s on your list and you’re at a point in their journey where you want to promote things as an affiliate? Adding affiliate offers to your website every time you quote a book, make sure you link to it on Amazon. Is that going to double your commissions?
Of course not. But could you make an extra $100 a month? Sure.
But if you’re making $10,000 a month right now, well, that’s a 1% increase right there. Just adding some Amazon links, it’s a pretty simple way to make a little bit more money. Adding links to products when you’re talking about products, things like that.
When you mention people, when you quote people, linking to something that leads to an affiliate sale can definitely make you money over time. Again, all of these things add up. Number three, grow your list by 10%, not double your list.
That’s a pretty easy way to almost double your affiliate commissions. But the thing is, newer subscribers are more likely to be in need of what you have to offer, and they’re more likely to buy. So if you grow your list by 10% in the next 30 to 60 days, you’re going to grow your affiliate commissions by a minimum of 10%.
Probably more like twelve to 14%. So follow what I teach in step four and turn your passions into profits. My book, right?
I talk about this in step four, how to grow your list, and how to create a lead magnet that leads people to We’ll talk about lead magnets in number four, too. But how to create a lead magnet that grows your list and then you got to get out there and actually do the things to grow your list.
So get my book, Turn Your Passions Into Profits. If you go to TurnYourPassionsIntoProfits. com, we’ll put that link in the show notes, you’re going to get the book and over $500 in bonuses there. The other thing is, check out Listlaunchchallenge.
You go to Listaunchchallenge.com, and I’ve got a perfect program to help you. For most of you listening, you will grow your list by more than 10%.
Now, List Launch Challenge is not the how do you grow your list from 25,000 to 30,000 people. That’s not what this is. So if you’ve already got more than 5000 people, I do not recommend List Launch Challenge.
All right? But if you’re sitting there at 100 people, 1000 people, or 500 people under that 2000 3000 people range, List Launch Challenge is perfect for you. So go get it, listlaunchchallenge.com. Make sure you sign up there. So again, grow your list by 10%. You will increase your revenue, your affiliate revenue, by roughly 13% to 16% probably is my best guess there.
Number four, create a toolkit, and lead magnet. Now we just talked about lead magnets, right? And what I’m about to share with you is directly from the book, specifically a toolkit.
So the reason why I love Toolkits is it ties into what we just talked about. When people sign up for your list, they are the most likely to buy. And a toolkit answers the question of what so and so use to accomplish such and such.
So whatever it is that your avatar wants to accomplish, what tools do they need to accomplish that? And the cool thing about it is in this toolkit you can use affiliate links. So if you run a photography blog and you recommend certain lighting kits and cameras and this thing and that thing and all the stuff you need to be a photographer, well, you recommend those things.
Somebody goes and spends a couple of might make $200 and that’s right away. It’s a great lead magnet because they want to know these things. What are the things I need?
But it’s also a great monetization tool. So this in and of itself, if you create a toolkit, this can literally grow your list. We have one called the Ultimate Email List Building Toolkit and it’s got tons of things in there.
This can grow your list 5% 10%. So it’s a double impact there and you make an additional 510 15% in affiliate revenue. So it compounds, you add those two up, and all of a sudden you’re 2020 5%.
Right. So creating a toolkit lead magnet is a great way to grow your affiliate revenue. Now I talk about it in the book.
I’m going to give you kind of a quick overview here. How do you do this? Number one, just write down a piece of paper, and list all the products, services, the tools that you use that you recommend to other people, does not need to be something that you use.
Does not need to be something that you use currently in your journey. Like I recommend MailChimp as an email tool for us because I don’t use MailChimp. We used to use it, but I don’t, I haven’t used it in years.
It may suck now, but I recommend it because it’s free to get started and you’re not going to pay anything up to like 2000 subscribers. So for somebody starting out on a shoestring budget, it’s a great tool. Versus ConvertKit, which I do recommend and I do use, it’s not free for very long.
So you’re going to be paying right away. And if somebody’s on a really tight budget, I don’t recommend it until they’re ready, until they have at least a few hundred subscribers. Then you just organize them by category.
For instance, in our Ultimate Email List Building Toolkit, we’ve got email marketing services, we’ve got graphics and design, we’ve got conversion tools, and we’ve got tutorials and courses. So we’ve made it really easy to know exactly where to go in that toolkit. And then we create pretty links around them.
So we have like Macwames. com ConvertKit rather than this ugly URL, right?
And then we just list like, we put the name of the product, then a logo, then a quick two to four-sentence paragraph about why I like it and why I recommend it, and then the pretty link. And so these toolkits are super easy to create. I mean, we’re talking a couple of hours at the most.
So again, number one, negotiate higher commissions. Number two, add an additional promo each quarter. Number three, grow your list by 10%.
Number four, part of growing that list is creating a toolkit. Lead magnet. Number five, leverage ads.
Now this is like, thank you, Captain Obvious. Spend more money to make more money. I mean, spending a little bit more money to make a lot more money.
All right? Spending next to nothing doing this profitably, like retargeting is what we’re going to talk about. And so if you do this right, you can get ten to 20% growth only spending like one to 2% more.
So a net of say, 8% to 15, 20% growth. Very easy way to do it. Number one, retargeting people who click on an offer.
So if they click in your email system, they click to a sales page, retargeting them in your ads. Number two, if they registered for a webinar, they register for a challenge. They register for any type of workshop.
Retargeting those people to sell to them. And then thirdly, retarget your buyers to buy other products. A buyer is a buyer, Dan Kennedy said.
And so when we target these audiences, they’re very cheap clicks that convert pretty well. And so the ROI is really high. So that’s how you leverage ads profitably?
Yes. Are there ways to do ads in other ways that you could increase your sales over time? Sure, but I’m talking about a way like it’d be really easy for me to say, yeah, spend an extra $10,000 a month in ads, you’ll go make an extra 20.
Woohoo. You could do that over time, but I’m talking about spending an extra hundred to make an extra thousand. That’s good math there.
And then you can scale that. Number six, warm up your audience better before promotions. Warm up your audience better.
If you do nothing but warm up your audience better, you absolutely can get an additional 10% to 20% in sales, no doubt about it. So, six ways to warm up your audience. Number one, keep your audience engaged.
Keep your audience engaged with great content. You cannot sell something until you have given it a great value. Like, don’t try to sell something until you are giving value.
So make sure you’re consistently providing your audience with valuable content. Keep in touch with them regularly. Post often.
Make sure they are warmed up. Mention the product that you’re promoting a week before promoting it. Just mention it, just talk about it.
Maybe quote the creator of the product. If you’re promoting Jeff Walker. What is some cool Jeff Walker quotes?
Like, I’ve got some on the back of my laptop. Scrappy is the new perfect. Things like that, sharing their content, linking to if you’re promoting an affiliate offer, linking to that person’s or that brand’s content in the week leading up to a promotion is a great way to warm your audience up, getting them familiar with that name and that product and just the idea in general.
I touched on this, but talking about the concept, just the ideas of the product, of the service, whatever it is that you’re going to be promoting. So, again, if you’re talking about Jeff Walker with PLF, for example, talking about starting your own business or sales psychology, funnels, and things like that, just talking about those in the weeks leading up to promotion will increase your sales 1020 30% because it warms up your audience interviewing a user of the product.
I did this years ago. Speaking of PLF, I was promoting PLF, and I interviewed a couple of PLF owners who’d been through the course. And one of them, her name is Timby Becca. She’s a female from Zimbabwe. So, okay, number one, she’s not a dude, so she’s different. Number two, she’s black.
So again, she’s different than me. Number three, she’s from Zimbabwe, so she has a cool accent. And so we did this promo, and I love Timby, and I’m thinking when I said, what advice would you have to somebody who’s on the fence?
I’m thinking, she’s going to give this, like, heartfelt, passionate plea for why they should join PLF. That’s better than anything I could have said. And she just goes I would just tell them to buy the course.
Just stop waiting and buy it. And I’m kind of going, in my mind, I’m going, that’s awesome. And, wow, that was not what I expected, but I thought about it later.
She can say that as a female from Africa with a cool accent. She can say that versus me being a dude from America. If I’m like, yeah, buy the course. Like, what are you waiting for? But just buy it. I kind of sound like a jerk.
She doesn’t. So it works when you interview somebody else and bring somebody else on, they can help you sell. And not only sell, but it also warms your audience up.
If you just interview somebody who’s using the product, kind of gets them warmed up to thinking about that product. And then lastly, create a mini course or something like that. Is there any pre-work that your audience needs to do to be ready for the product that you’re promoting?
Create a mini course about it. So, again, going back to PLF, if I were promoting PLF, maybe I’d do a quick course on building their email list or the psychology of sales, funnels things like that, right? Doesn’t need to be big or complicated.
It could just be something that you give away a quick five-minute video series, three five-minute videos before a launch, or before a promotion. And you do that, and people are now warmed up because they’ve done the pre-work. They’ve done the pre-work, and that’s important.
So, number six, you got to warm up your audience better. That will increase your sales ten to 20%, maybe a little bit more even right there. The 7th way is to add affiliate offers to your funnels.
If you already have sales funnels in your sales funnel, so they opt-in, and then they go through a funnel. What happens if they don’t buy? Or how many products do you have that are a good fit for a particular funnel?
Maybe you only have one product that’s a good fit or two. Could you offer something as an affiliate at the end of that? Could you offer it to people who don’t buy, basically with the message of, you didn’t buy my stuff?
Do you want to buy this? It’s not really exactly that, but this stuff works. Hey, you didn’t buy my course on how to build your email list.
Maybe you just need a system to use for email. Go sign up for ConvertKit. Oh, you didn’t buy my course on how to grow your affiliate program. Maybe you just need really good software to track all of your affiliates. Here’s my recommendation.
Right there. Five to 10% growth just adding affiliate offers at the end after they buy, or if they don’t buy, or wherever you feel is appropriate in the funnel. Number eight, create a Resources page and tell your audience about it.
All right, create a Resources page, and then you actually have to tell your audience about it. You actually have to start using it. When people ask about a tool or a recommendation, point them to your Resources page.
Very simple. If you go to mattmcwilliams.com/toolbox, you can see my Resources page, right? You can see my Resources page. That page right there is responsible for roughly 78% of my affiliate revenue in any given quarter.
Probably over the year, it’s about 78%. It’s the easiest way because I don’t have to do anything. I haven’t touched that page in six months.
I have a guide if you want to learn how to create one mattmcwilliams.com/resourcespage. I will link to that in the Show Notes mattmcwilliams.com/resourcespage. You can download the guide on how to create a Resources page. Things bring in thousands of dollars a month.
When I first started, it took a couple of hours to create the pages. No doubt, just like any page on the Internet, it takes a while to create. I spent maybe an hour over the last six years updating those pages.
The last time I tested it, as I said, was about six months ago. And I say in the guide that you need to update it when it’s appropriate. It should not go three years without being updated.
You probably are not in an industry where the tools change only every three years. But the tools that we recommend, I’ve gone six months without recommending a new product, and easily it still brings in a few thousand dollars a month most months. Sometimes it’s upwards of even $10,000 in some months.
So again, totally passive, long-term. So create a resources page, get the guide on how to create one, and then follow what I teach there. Number nine, another simple one, promote more on social media.
Specifically, promote more free entry points. So promote webinars, workshops, free downloads, and lots of different offers. This allows you to diversify your promotions.
Think of what your audience needs, think of those outlier products. So if you’re in the productivity niche, obviously things that you’re going to recommend that make the most sense are tools and project management software and things like that. But what are some of those things that are on the periphery, like goal-setting courses and maybe it’s like a music site like Brain FM and things like that, and see what works?
Test things out on social media and go, wow, I’m getting five buyers a month for this one thing, just promoting it on Twitter and Facebook. Then take those good ones, the ones that convert really well, and then start promoting them heavily promote them via email. So short term, promoting more on social media, you probably only going to see a 510 percent increase, but long term, you can see a ten to 25% increase in sales long term.
So commit to promoting more on social media. We use Meetgar and it’s mattmcwilliams.com/toolbox. If you want to go through my affiliate link, we highly recommend Meet Edgar. We use it and we just set those promos in there for affiliate promotions, and we kind of set them like the old Ronco Rotisserie cooker.
We set it and forget it. And so I’ll send out two to three social media messages a day throughout the day, spread out just every day promoting different affiliate products. And really, it doesn’t clog up my social feed.
Like I said, I’m going to forget them. As I said, we’ll load 1000 messages promoting product A, and they’ll go out once every four days and last a long time, 4000 days. We got like ten years’ worth of Tweets loaded, for example.
All right, number ten, way to double your affiliate commissions in the next 30 days. Segment your audience. Segment your audience.
When you segment your audience, it means you can promote more because you can promote the right things to the right people. So we’ve been doing a lot of this lately, a lot more. And so what we’re doing is every single email, we are using it to segment in the simplest possible way.
One of the things we have is we have an opt-out on almost every single email we send. So if it’s a podcast about this, we’re talking about affiliate marketing, and you’re not interested in anything related to affiliate marketing. I don’t know why you’d be on my list, because even if you’re just an affiliate manager, you should be listening to the affiliate marketing ones, by the way.
So this would be a weird one. We’re probably not going to remove you from anything, but if we do an affiliate management one and you’re not ready for affiliate management stuff yet, you can opt out of the affiliate management lessons. So now that tells me something about you.
You’re not interested in those things. You don’t need affiliate tracking. We’re not going to do any affiliate management tracking. We’re not going to promote that to you. If you buy the List Launch challenge, we know where you’re at. We know you don’t have a list of 10,000-plus people.
I just told you not to sign up. If you have a list of more than 5000 even, don’t sign up for List Launch Challenge. So if you sign up for List Launch Challenge, we know you have a smaller list.
So we know things that you’re interested in and things that you’re not. And so everybody on our list is segmented in some way. At the very least, they are segmented based on what they opted in for, and we know something about them.
So segment each email so that you can promote more. Because what this allows us to do is instead of only promoting, say, twelve things a year to everybody, five of those things are of no interest to certain people. No, instead we promote twelve things a year actually really more.
We probably promote 14 to 15 because now we know they’re all, everybody’s interested in that thing, but it only goes to 40% of the audience. And so we’re able to promote more, which means we make more money. This alone, if you segment right, easily, could increase your affiliate commissions by 40% to 100% in and of itself.
Probably more toward the 40 sides. But if it’s done right, yeah, you’re looking at 50, 60, 70% by itself. So segment your audience.
Start at the very least by just segmenting them into buyers and non-buyers, beginners and advanced, and then you can get more granular from there as we have now. That’s ten ways to double your affiliate commissions. Number one, negotiate higher commissions.
Number two, add one additional affiliate promo every quarter. Number three, grow your list by 10%. Get a list launch challenge or get the book.
Turn your passes into profit links to both are in the show notes there. Create a toolkit lead magnet to leverage ads by targeting very, very profitably. Number six, warm up your audience better before promos.
Number seven, add affiliate offers to your funnels. Number eight, create a resources page. Get that guide at mattmcwilliams.com/resourcespage. Number nine, promote more on social media. Check out MeetEdgar on our toolbox page.
And number ten, segment your audience. Now, I have one bonus for you that will not help you within 30 days, but it will help you tremendously long term, and that is to create product reviews. Creating product reviews is one of the easiest, most passive ways to just increase.
You can make a couple of months from a single product review. There are some actually we make more than $5,000 a month from, and it’s every month it comes in. Some of them we do for launches.
So we only make it like once you’ll make like $30,000 in a month, and then we don’t make anything the rest of the year. Some of them we make fifty dollars to one hundred dollars a month from, but it’s $50 to $100 every single month. That adds up when it’s just over and over and over again.
And we’re doing very little to keep up with those posts. So if you want a guide on how to do that, go to mattmcwilliams.com/reviewpost. Download our guide on how to write a review post that ranks and converts mattmcwilliams.com/Reviewposts. Go grab the guide, all right. So you can learn how to do that.
If you got any questions about any of the eleven tips I shared today, or anything else at all, just text me anytime at 260-217-4619. I’d also love to hear your biggest takeaway. Which of the ten?
Because number eleven yeah, I know you’re all going to do that and that’s a long-term thing. Which of these ten are you going to implement right now? Which one are you going to do first?
Are you going to focus on the next 30 days, the next seven days, are you going to focus on which of these ten? Growing your email list, maybe creating a toolkit? A lead magnet, promoting more on social media, maybe a resources page?
Warming up your audience better? Are you going to negotiate a couple of commissions? Whatever it is, which one are you going to do in the next seven days?
Text me at 260-217-4619 and let me know. Lastly, make sure you hit subscribe so you don’t miss our next episode. I got Igor coming on, Igor Kheifets.
We are going to be talking about email marketing versus social media advertising, which is more effective? He’s going to share some of his insights into that.
The answer is going to dictate, I think, what you’re going to do over the next 90 days to focus on in your business and it’s a really powerful episode, so you don’t want to miss it. Make sure you hit subscribe. I’ll see you then.