You have thousands of other affiliates that are promoting the same product or service, targeting the same market, and using the same ads as you. Traditionally a real good associate program would provide you with tested and proven ads to maximize your click-throughs. Today you just can't put a link on your web site and use the ads they provide you. You have thousands of other affiliates out there competing with you using the same ads you are, which makes it even more difficult to make money.

At this point you need to ask yourself, why should my visitor buy it from me, when they can buy it from thousands of other affiliates? How can I increase my click-throughs to boost my affiliate sales?

These are some of the issues we are going to cover in this article. It's bad enough that most affiliates struggle to make their first sale, let alone make a commission every month. But if you want to make real money promoting your associate program you need to work smarter, not harder.

If you want people to buy it from you then you need to come up with your own ads, that will give you an advantage over the rest of your affiliates.

Personal Recommendation

A personal recommendation is a very powerful tool and can skyrocket your affiliate click-through rates. Writing a personal recommendation for a product or service that you are promoting is a way to tell the world that you have evaluated the product's or service's quality and approve it. You should also discuss any experiences that you've had with the product or service, people want to hear your testimonial, so give it to them in your own words.

I need to warn you though, if you start recommending anything and everything, eventually your personal recommendations will lose face value. Not only that, if you start recommending poor products or services, your recommendation will reflect on your credibility.

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Just to give you an example, I am very stringent about my recommendations. The only time I recommend a product or service is if I use it everyday or have used it in the past. I don't recommend any product or service that I have not been in indirect experience with.

Write A Teaser

Instead of using the same ads that other affiliates use, be different and get creative by writing a teaser. Writing your own teaser is another way to boost your affiliate click-through rate.

Teasers set the stage for your affiliate product or service, by accelerating your visitor's impulse. This enables them to have a sneak peek at what they can expect from the product or service you are promoting before they even realize that you're selling them something. Using the teaser approach is a sure way to boost your marketing efforts and increase your affiliate revenue.

When writing a teaser don't try to sell it, or reveal any prices, that's the sales copy's job. You need to keep in mind that the teaser's job is only to motivate your visitor to click through your advertisement.

Screen Your Visitors

Screening your visitors is a technique that is used in copywriting that enables you to control and screen the serious individuals from the test pilots. When applying this technique to a sales copy, it will eliminate the amount of refunds you may recieve. In this case, you need to be specific about the product or service without giving too many details, this will eliminate unnecessary click-throughs.

This technique is perfect, if you are using any type of pay per click advertising. By screening people in advance you will improve your click-through rate and save yourself a lot of money in your pay-per-click advertising campaign.

Mask Your Affiliate Urls

These days people are very leery about clicking through affiliate urls, because they know when they see it that you are trying to sell them something. If you want to really boost your affiliate sales then you should mask your affiliate urls. By masking your url, your visitor will never see your affiliate url in the browser window making it more invitable to them, more click- throughs means more sales. You will see a significant increase in your click-throughs when you mask the url.

For those who don't know how to mask their affiliate url, here is what you need:

<a href="[affiliate_url]" target="_blank" onmouseover="window.status='click here to view';return true" onmouseout="window.status=''">

To mask your affiliate urls there are two areas we need to address, one is [affiliate_url], replace it with your affiliate url. The second is "click here to view", which is what will appear in your visitor's browser window. If you want to display something different in the browser's window, then change the "click here to view" to what you want to display.

These were just some of the ways to improve your click-through rate. After you have applied these techniques you will notice a substantial increase in click-throughs and sales.

Rich Hamilton, Jr is the CEO/President of http://www.ElitesMarketing.com and the Author of "Inside Internet Marketing". Unlock the absolute truth to promoting your web site without ever paying a cent for advertising. http://www.InsideNetMarketing.com