If you are like us, you get email from many people. When there’s a major product launch, we usually get 40 or more emails from affiliates who want us to buy from their affiliate link, so they can earn the commission.

Once, when we were having a conversation with Russell Brunson, he commented that he had found that many buyers chose the affiliate they bought through based on the bonuses they offered.

That makes sense. When you part with your money, you want to make sure you get the best return on that investment.

Looking at this from the affiliate’s point of view, it makes sense to offer the best possible bonuses so you will get a bigger share of the sales.

Consider these three tips for growing your affiliate business (and read to the end to see something neat):

■ Build your reputation as an Authority

People are looking for a leader in the niche. If you are perceived as an expert, you will gather more followers and your advice and suggestions will be important to those who follow you.

IM NewsWatch has earned its expert position through 10 years of delivering solid, dependable content.

To earn a similar level of respect, you need to use your expertise to supply good, helpful information to your followers. This way, you can position yourself as an authority in your niche.

In addition, you may get guest author and speaking spots. The ones who are being interviewed on webinars or even on blogs are the ones who are perceived as experts.

This can cause a major increase in your visibility. Your reputation will grow as a result. You can pursue this strategy by submitting proposals to talk radio, podcasts, and blogs in your niche.

Also, remember that people are often judged by the company they keep. Associate with others who are perceived as experts. When you create products or do webinars with other experts in your niche, you’ll be seen as an authority, as well.

■ Build a Responsive List, a list of people who take action on your suggestions

Nearly every affiliate knows to build a list, but very few know how to create a responsive list, filled with engaged subscribers. Here are some ideas that may help increase the responsiveness of your list.

1. Set expectations for those who join your list. Your squeeze page and your first autoresponder emails should make it clear how you will interact with your list. Show subscribers why they should be opening every email you send. If they know what to expect before they sign up, they will be more likely to open your emails and respond to the offers you present.

2. Stay in touch regularly and frequently. It’s hard to build a relationship by sending an email once a month. You should be sending emails on a weekly basis at a minimum. As you probably know, IM NewsWatch sends its newsletter 5 times each week.

3. Give away your best content. This kind of generosity leads people to look forward to your emails and take action when they arrive. Give them the same quality of content that others keep for paid products.

4. Edutain people. Boring content, even if it’s useful, is not going to get read. Entertaining material that isn’t actually helpful may get an initial reading, but not a sustained readership. There are thousands of places people can be entertained.

So “edutain” them, entertain while you educate. Use a light, conversational tone. Inject humor when it doesn’t get in the way of your message.

5. Interact with your audience. Encourage your subscribers to click through to your blog or social media pages to interact with you, discuss the issues you are teaching about and ask questions.

■ When you promote a product as an affiliate, offer your own bonus

Adding value to an offer can boost your conversion rate. This is particularly true when you offer a bonus that other affiliates can’t or don’t offer. This strategy increases your sales; sometimes by as much as five times more sales than not offering a bonus. (Keep reading and see us practice what we preach.)

If it’s true even for big names who have a lot of other things going for them, it’s especially true for lesser known affiliates. It can be the difference; it is something you can tout, even if you don’t yet have a big reputation.

But this bonus strategy takes a lot of time. You need a web page to display your bonuses, for example. So you need some way of creating one.

If you know how to code HTML and PHP, and if you have a designer’s sense of what looks good, this is no big problem. But if you don’t, you have to spend a fair amount of money to get other people to do it for you.

However, there is an inexpensive solution created by Simon Hodgkinson and Jeremy Gislason. It’s called Commission Gorilla.

This is an app designed by two super affiliates who wanted to build their own high-impact bonus pages without hiring a designer and programmer for each promotion. They also knew that speed is the critical in affiliate marketing, especially during a product launch.

Some people buy from the first or second affiliate they get a message from. You want to be early to the game.

Using Commission Gorilla, you can create bonus pages in just a few minutes. The manual way with programmers and designers can take several days.

With this new software, you don’t need designers or coders. You don’t even need your own website.

Here’s the point: with Commission Gorilla, you will be able to create attractive bonus pages every time you promote.

Here’s something neat. We are taking our own advice and offering bonuses to our readers who buy this new software. We bought Commission Gorilla and used it to create our own bonus page, the IM NewsWatch Bonus for Commission Gorilla, itself. So you can click this link to see our bonuses and to see how this new software works.

This way you can see it in action. This is the kind of page you can create.

This is web-based software. Get your own account and get started here: Commission Gorilla.

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