Creating Great Bonuses For Your Affiliate Offers

July 29, 2016

When a new product comes on the market, hundreds and maybe thousands of affiliate marketers rush to promote the offer.

In the internet marketing space, people are more aware of marketing strategies and shop around for the one (or many) things that distinguish one affiliate offer from another.

I’m talking about bonuses. Just sending a potential customer to your affiliate link isn’t enough. It may be enough for products outside of the internet marketing world, but if you’re promoting products or services to other internet marketers, you need to up your game and provide one or more bonuses to incentivize your potential customers.

What Kind of Bonuses Should You Offer?

1. Reports & eBooks

We’ve all come across the bonus offers that promise us a number of “exclusive” ebooks and reports. The poorer these offerings, the more of them are likely to be in the bonus bundle.

They’re often old and outdated products as well.

Offering reports and ebooks is still a good option, but they need to be current and provide real useful information that’s relevant to the offer they’re attached to.

2. WordPress Plugins

Most internet marketers build their sites using WordPress. Some marketers will offer other types of bonus such as WordPress plugins (these are usually bonuses from other affiliate offers or products the marketer has bought resell rights to).

These are more unique but if the product or service you’re promoting has nothing to do with WordPress, then all you’re providing is more stuff to clog up your customers’ hard drive.

4. Software

Another common type of bonus is the software package. These are generally of low quality and each only does one thing (sometimes badly). I’ve seldom come across a software product like this that I’d use myself and feel comfortable giving away.

5. Videos & Extra Training

Others will offer videos of themselves demonstrating some technique or strategy they use with the product on offer or they’ll invite you to a webinar where they provide additional training. These are good as they are very unique bonuses.

6. Access To A Membership Site

Another option I and many others have found effective is to offer access to a membership site as a bonus. Now setting up membership sites can be a time consuming process so is it worth the time and effort to create such a site for a single offer? It may be. Depending on the site, you might be able to use it as a bonus for other offers.

A membership site has additional appeal as it can be used to build your own mailing list. Ordinarily, when someone buys through your affiliate link, you give them access to your bonuses and then that customer is gone. You can add an opt-in form to your download page and capture a percentage of customers that way. But if you provide a membership site bonus that’s of real use, they’re far more likely to sign up to your bonus membership site and your email list will grow faster.

7. Access To A Video Membership Site

A variation on #3 is to offer access to a membership site that’s composed only of videos. These are an excellent option as videos appeal to more people than things they have to read.

But where do you get the videos from?

Well, YouTube is the obvious source. There’s also Vimeo and maybe you have a few video courses you bought resell rights to that you never did anything with?

This is the kind of bonus I now offer.

I use a tool called SmartMember to build my video membership sites. This is a comprehensive membership site tool that makes it easy to add videos to a site.

There’s little work required by me. The software comes with a Chrome extension that allows you to add a video to a site with one click. The video, its description and thumbnail image are added automatically.

So the bulk of my time is spent simply looking for videos to add to a site.

There are other customisation options and you can also create sites that require a paid membership. In fact, you can set up multiple access levels on a site and set who gets access to what. Some parts of a site might be free whereas members have to pay a fee to access premium content.

Once you get people to sign up for free content, that’s half the battle to getting them to the paid content.

I’ll save an in-depth review of SmartMember for a future post, but here are some of the membership sites I use as bonuses that I’ve built with the tool:

http://StarfleetAcademy.SmartMember.com – documentaries, interviews, skits, trailers, fan produced episodes, reviews, etc. about Star Trek (free to join). Videos sourced from YouTube.

http://InvestingInGold.SmartMember.com – with the way the economy is going, investing in gold and silver is a smart move and this membership site shows people why the economy is in the state it’s in and how to protect their wealth. Videos sourced from YouTube.

http://MuscleAndFitness.SmartMember.com – building a buff bod is all the rage these days and this membership site provides a variety of training plans for building muscle. Videos sourced from YouTube.

http://www.NicheSiteInstitute.com – this is my paid membership site which provides a growing number of internet/affiliate marketing training courses. There is some useful free content here too. The majority of videos here are from Vimeo (my preferred host for videos I own the rights to). I also mapped the SmartMember URL to my own domain name in this case.

You can literally build a bonus site in any niche. YouTube is so vast that there will be videos on any topic you can think of.

These membership sites offer curated content, saving your customers and members from searching for these videos themselves (if they even know what to search for). The videos are all in one place, so they’re easy for members to return to.

And you can build a bonus that is absolutely unique, setting you apart from every other marketer pushing the same affiliate offer.

So, To Summarize:

Provide bonuses that are as unique as possible so you distinguish your offer from everyone elses.
Make your bonuses relevant to the affiliate offer. They should enhance it in some way.
Your bonuses should have value to the customer. Not a monetary value but an informational value. If you deliver, or better yet – over deliver – you’ll start to get repeat customers.