If you’re promoting affiliate products on your blog, you’re always trying to think of ways to bump up those commission checks. Most people believe the fastest way to increase revenue is to get more visitors or to increase your conversion rate per visitor. But while those two things are very important to your bottom line, they take time. There’s a much easier way to increase your profit margin by up to 50% or more. And it hinges on your relationship with your affiliate manager.

Let’s look at how to join an affiliate program and set the stage for increasing your blog revenue.

To participate in an affiliate program, you have to apply on an advertiser’s website or through an affiliate marketplace like Commission Junction. When you apply, you’ll quickly learn that most applications are rejected immediately.Sometimes, you get rejected. The reason advertising companies do this is to filter out the spammers.

But there is no need to be discouraged by a rejection. It’s easy to get accepted, you just need to send a brief email to the affiliate manager and explain why you’d be a good fit. A follow-up email is also a great opportunity to establish a relationship with your affiliate manager.

You want to start corresponding with your affiliate manager as early as possible. They hold the key to your financial success. So treat them with respect and consider them a business partner. To find contact details for an affiliate manager just look through the program details and you’ll usually find a contact listed.

Why is this relationship important? Because an affiliate manager can help by:

• providing you with content to help sell their products
• promoting your website in social media
• providing you with expert feedback on your site to help you raise your conversion rate.
• raising your commission structure. Which leads me to…

The fastest way to increase your blog revenue is not to get more readers or increase your conversion rate. It’s to raise your commission rate!

And the easiest way to raise your commission rate is to ask! Politely and tactfully of course. In fact, if you start out on the right foot with your affiliate manager you may not even have to ask.

Most affiliate managers are paid based on results, so their goals are very similar to yours. They’ll typically have a wide range of payouts they can offer publishers (for example $4-12/lead). They reserve the highest payouts in that range for publishers who generate the most transactions. However, if you make a call and negotiate a bump from just $4 to $5 per lead that’s an increase in profits of 25%…. in a single phone call. How long would it take you to drive 25% more traffic to your site or increase your conversion rate by 25%? It takes a lot of work. If you normally make $2000/month in profit, you’re now making $2500.

Once you have a relationship with your affiliate manager you’ll want to show him some results. When you start increasing your volume, he’ll have more flexibility to pay you higher commission rates. However, if you participate in multiple affiliate programs within the same niche, your volume in each program will be lower.

For example, say you promoted auto insurance and sent 50 transactions to Geico and 50 transactions to AllState in a given month. If you had only promoted Geico, you might have be able to send them all 100 transactions. If you want to get approved for a higher commission rate, you’re better off with all of your transactions in a single program. Higher volume can also help you get bonuses. And some affiliate programs will offer bonus payments for as little as 10 transactions in a month.

Of course it’s still a good idea to be approved for several related affiliate programs. You just don’t have to promote all of them. Companies frequently discontinue programs or change their terms, so it’s good to have a fallback advertiser just in case.

/Daily Blog Tips/