Are you looking for ways to improve your affiliate income? Raising your profile is one of the easiest ways to get started as an affiliate, but you can only do so much with link building. In order to gain credibility with visitors that might not stick around for long, it’s important to brand yourself as an expert in a memorable way.
That’s why special reports are a great way to share information with prospects and convince them that you know what you’re talking about. A 5 to 10 page report on the topic of your affiliate website can bring you commissions month after month after month, long after you’ve written it! Let’s talk about the benefits of this awesome affiliate tool.
Retain Your Commissions
Once you finished your report, you'll need to distribute it. Give it away as an incentive for people to subscribe to your mailing list. Make sure you convince them that this report is unique and worth owning – more and more marketers are giving away small e-books, so you need to stand out. Tell them what they're getting and how it can benefit them.
Once they've signed up, deliver this by a link or an attachment in your welcome message. This helps you to retain your commissions because visitors who leave your website without buying anything right now will read your report and interact with it far into the future. And wherever that report goes, your affiliate link will go with it.
If that were the only thing a report could do for you, it would be a great tool. But it helps in other ways, too.
What are some of these other benefits?
Viral Potential
Well written reports aren’t just read – they’re shared with others. Create an engaging report and encourage your subscribers to give it away. If you heavily rely on your list for affiliate income, then rebrand the book and distribute it on every free e-book site you can find. The more people that see your information – and your affiliate link – the better.
Be An Expert
It's no surprise that many new affiliates, groomed by a business environment that demands “qualifications” over talent, are often worried about being qualified to sell a product as an affiliate. In the online world, authority doesn't come from passing a set of tests – it comes from demonstrating and promoting your knowledge. Having a high quality report is a good way to show off your expertise. It lets everyone know your depth of knowledge on the topic. And if you don't have a depth of knowledge, the process of writing the report will probably give you more expertise than the average person.
This also works as a sort of “digital handshake” for other marketers, and off-line contacts. It's a way to show your expertise with a single file. You can even use it to convince people in the press of your expertise. You may or may not want to remove the affiliate links from reports you've made for these purposes, however.
Special reports are a financially efficient way to net and retain more commissions and convince others of your expertise. The most important person you might convince is yourself. Start writing one now – you'll be surprised at how much you already know.