After a month away from the IM scene, I figured I’d slowly work my way back in with a blog post aimed at those of you who are using my Dominating Amazon system.

The run up to Christmas is already on. It seems to get earlier every year, but without a doubt there’s a lot of early birds out there starting to buy presents which means online powerhouses like Amazon are starting to take more orders. And that’s great news for us affiliate marketers.

At the moment I’m looking at what new games and gadgets will be released around early December. There’s often a flurry of new products to hit the market just in time for Christmas, and many, many people get in on the act early to ensure that if stock runs out they’ll still get their high-demand product delivered to them in time for the big day.

Now, most affiliate marketers get to the scene too late and find that the cost-per-click is too high to make much of a profit. But if you get in on it now then your costs will be lower due to less competition (the keywords are extremely important) and you can get out of the market in early December if needs be and leave the rest to struggle to turn a profit.

So start looking around now. Browse online stores and look at their soon-to-be-released products. Read magazines and see what’s just around the corner. And when you have a great list of products, get your Amazon affiliate links and start promoting… before the rest of the market jump on it in about 6 weeks time and make it a real chore to turn a profit.

Something you see more and more these days is marketers giving away bonuses in return for buying a product through their affiliate link.

Is it worth it? Well of course it is, or it wouldn’t be done. However, it’s not the be-all-and-end-all.

During one particular product launch last year, I made $6,000 in 24 hours without offering a single bonus. I realise that’s not huge money (and who knows… I might have made more should I had actually offered an incentive) but the fact that it took me about 20 minutes to write 5 emails which pulled in that money meant I didn’t have to spend days crafting an offer and getting everything into place to make it work.

I sent out one email 10 days before launch, another 3 days before launch, another a few hours before launch, another at the launch and another about 12 hours into the launch.

The emails were short and to the point. Not hyped, and certainly not ’salesy’. They simply pointed out what the product was all about and stressed the benefits of it.

There were a lot of marketers promoting this launch (I’m careful with what I push) but I still got my slice of the pie. Why? Because of my relationship with the list I was promoting it to.

Amazingly, I pushed this product to just 600 people, and it’s my relationship with this list of people that made it work so well. In short, I’ve offered them tremendous value in the past and have helped them a great deal for free.

They trust me and I value them. If they need help they know I’m here and in return they know I will only recommend products I have seen, used and believe offer them great value, hence me having such great conversion rates with this small list.

Without a doubt bonuses are one of the best ways to get people to buy through your affiliate links, but you need to build a relationship with those customers and treat them like gold. After all, they are the ones who decide if you’ll make it or not.