If you're having trouble making money from affiliate programs, or are looking for ways to increase your existing income from them, here is a quick list to get you going:
1. Learn how to PRE-sell your visitors instead of hard-selling them. Using this technique will put your visitors in the right frame of mind to visit the merchant's website and have a look at the product offerings.
2. Focus on one or two products and put all of your your effort into promoting them. Your visitors aren't looking for a shopping mall, but rather a website that has great information on their area of interest.
3. Purchase the products you are promoting. This will enable you to know first-hand if the product is of high-enough quality to deserve your efforts, and will give you the ability to provide an honest recommendation based on your own experience with the product.
4. Create an email course and include your affiliate link in each email with a recommendation on how that product will help your visitors. You will need an autoresponder for this idea, and I recommend you use one of these: http://www.aweber.com http://www.getresponse.com http://www.autorespondercentral.com
5. Write articles and submit them to newsletter authors and article directories. You can either include a recommendation for the product within the article, or at the end in your author's resource box.
6. Add a few lines promoting an affiliate product in your signature that goes out in all of your emails.
Every email you send will have your advertisement with your affiliate link in it.
7. Purchase a domain name strictly for the purpose of promoting your favorite affiliate program. You can get more information on this at: http://www.shorterlinks.com
8. Create a mini site that focuses on only one affiliate program. Spend your time promoting this site through search engine positioning, pay-per-click search engines, ezine ads, etc.
9. Create an ebook with useful information on your chosen topic and give it away. In your ebook you will have links to different affiliate products and if any sales are made through them you will get the commissions. Make sure you let other webmasters know they are free to give away your ebook as well so you can get as many copies as possible out there.
10. And last but not least is to create your OWN product! Satisfied customers will gladly purchase from you again in the future. If you don't have other products to sell them, make recommendations of products that you can earn a commission from through affiliate programs.
This is definitely not intended to be a comprehensive list, but if you apply these techniques you can quickly start to see an increase in your affiliate commissions!
About the Author
Chuck McCullough shows you exactly how to make serious money through affiliate programs in his new ebook titled: "Affiliate Mistakes: Maximizing Your Profits From Affiliate Programs!" Click here to learn more: http://www.affiliatemistakes.com