So let’s start off with a quote
“Being a great affiliate is NOT about selling... It’s about PREselling”

1. Maximizing Profit

The goal of any business, including your affiliate business, is to maximize PROFITS.
As an affiliate, there are exactly two ways to increase your INCOME (i.e., the amount of money your business makes).

1) Refer more visitors to the merchants that you represent.

2) Increase the Conversion Rate (i.e., the percent of visitors that you refer to your merchant… visitors who deliver the response for which the merchant pays, whether that’s a sale, or a lead, etc.).

For example: Simple formula, right? If you refer 100 visitors per day to a merchant and 1% buy, you get paid for that one purchase. But if you send 1,000 visitors per day and 3% buy, you get paid for 30 purchases.

Yes, thirty times more! So it’s pretty clear how to maximize affiliate INCOME!

In order to maximize income, we need to build traffic to the merchant web-site. SO how much will these cost us? Let us look at the following:-

1. What does it cost to build traffic to your merchants’ sites?

Traffic-building, no matter how you cut it, will cost you... in terms of both time and money. Spending dollars is optional, but spending time is not.

Build your own Theme-Based Content Site -- one that is loaded with high info value Keyword-Focused Content Pages that rank well with the Search Engines and that get the click through to your merchants’ sites.

Let’s break that down for closer examination. For your affiliate Web site to generate targeted traffic to your merchants, it must do two things well...

1) Rank well at the Search Engines so that it pulls in lots of targeted traffic. So far, though, that traffic is still on your site. Therefore, it’s not generating income yet. Your visitors are just “looking around.” So...

2) Get those visitors to click through to your merchants. (Some affiliate program models can actually place merchant offerings on your Web site. In this case, your traffic does not actually visit your merchant’s site. But you still have to “get the click” to generate income.) It makes sense, of course, that a Web site is the way to go.

2. What does it cost to maximize Conversion Rates?

Good news! Maximizing your Conversion Rate (CR) is simply a question of doing things right. There is no extra dollar or time cost to boosting Conversion Rates at your merchants’ sites.

Your primary goals are...

1) Maximize targeted traffic to your merchants, spending only dollars and time that maximize profits.

2) Maximize Conversion Rates. Do things right (no expense). Don’t do just one. Do both. Why? Because, as you saw above, your payment is determined by traffic multiplied by the Conversion Rate... not “added.” Your profits grow geometrically when you concentrate on maximizing both traffic and Conversion Rates.


As I reviewed many of these affiliate sites (those who are getting sales but have CRs under 2%), I realized that almost half were basically one big sales letter.

Which means that these affiliates are SELLING (with sales copy) when they should be PRE-selling (with great, and related, content that is of value to the reader).

There’s really not much point in straight selling off your site -- that's what your merchant’s site needs to do. Picture this...
A visitor arrives at an affiliate’s site that is really just one, big sales site. Yes, I know that the words are sincere. But put yourself in these visitors’ shoes for a moment. They don’t see inspiring, editorial content. They see a sales effort.

Instead, warm your visitor up for your merchants by PRE-selling them with great content that they values and respects. They’ll click-through with pleasure, arriving at your merchants’ sites in an open-to-buy mindset.
It’s your PRE-selling effort that will boost your traffic-to-merchants and Conversion Rate, which in turn maximizes your income.