It can be quite difficult to earn a living through affiliate marketing. Despite the plethora of books and seminars that claim "autopilot profits" or that you can "earn money while you sleep", affiliate marketing is hard work. You have to find products to sell, find a way to promote them to the public, and then persuade them to purchase the product. If you succeed at that, you'll get a commission. The entire process usually involves the creation of one or more Websites, the creation and administration of mailing lists, and constant research to find new products to sell.



What if you're making a reasonable amount of money but want to make more? How can you do that? The usual response might be that you should do more of what you are already doing. If you have one Website, then build another one, or even ten other ones. If you are promoting one product, perhaps you can make more money by promoting five products instead.

Those are certainly options, but they may or may not help you earn more money. Not only that, but creating new Websites costs more money and takes a lot of time. Is there a way to increase affiliate profits without spending a lot of extra money? Yes, there is. The secret is to optimize what you are already doing.

There are several ways to optimize the sales process:

Improve your Website - Take a look at your Website and see if it is "doing all it can." Is the headline good? Is vital information "above the fold" where visitors can see it at a glance? Is the text easy to read, with high-contrast colors, or are you using bright colors instead? Having a Website isn't enough in itself; you have to have an effective one. It may be necessary to create more than one version of your home page and test them in order to find one that works well. A few simple changes, such as changing a headline, may increase the performance of the site dramatically.

Test your advertising - Many people use pay per click advertising to draw visitors to their Website without adequately testing the keywords they are using in the ads. Some words may be expensive and yet not effective, while other, inexpensive words may be drawing a lot of traffic. There are numerous tools available to help test the effectiveness of pay per click advertising; using them may result in lower costs or improved clickthrough rates.

Cloak your affiliate links - Consumers are particular about the sorts of links they will click. A link such as http:www.blahblahblah?230842057/lgopiusg09u28725.htm may not inspire confidence in your would-be customers. There are a number of ways to cloak or change affiliate links in order to increase the likelihood that a Website visitor will click on them.

Sometimes a few simple changes here and there in your overall marketing process can produce dramatic gains in traffic and sales. Given that the cost of making these changes is often minimal, doing so is generally quite cost effective.