Back when I ran Bradford & Reed, Commission Junction, a leading affiliate network, put me on their homepage and talked me up as the guy they paid $1 million in annual commissions. Then Lisa Riolo, who was in charge of bringing in revenue at CJ, invited me to Commission Junction University to teach how I did it.

Today, Lisa came to Mixergy to teach you how affiliate programs can help grow your company.

The FULL program

Video EXCERPTS on Affiliate Marketing

About Lisa Riolo

Lisa Riolo is a marketing and business consultant. She used to be the SVP Business Development at Commission Junction.

Affiliate marketing basics

Definition: You probably know this already, but in case you don’t, according to Wikipedia, “Affiliate Marketing is an Internet-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate’s marketing efforts.”

More coverage: We talked about affiliate marketing on Mixergy with Jeremy “Shoemoney” Shoemaker, who taught some of his tricks, and with Josh Mullineaux, who created a theme to help generate affiliate revenue.

Excerpts from this program: Tips on affiliate marketing

The new affiliate arbitrage opportunities

Andrew’s note: Lisa talked about how affiliates are starting to buy ads offline to send clicks to online affiliate programs. She said it’s similar to the way affiliates used to buy ads on Google and send the traffic to affiliate programs where they could earn more money.

Lisa’s example: There’s a company called Bargain Networks here in the Santa Barbara area. Bargain Networks for years ran ads about products that were related to listings for really inexpensive automobiles. They tested it all over, and they found out that in some of the rural or smaller communities, [classified ads were lucrative]. That’s where people were consuming their media, so they were running inexpensive classified ads for auto sales. They were making money on those products on a referral basis.

How super-affiliates have unfair earned advantages

Andrew’s note: I suggested to Lisa that super-affiliates have an unfair advantage over the little guys because the affiliate networks tip them off to what’s working for other affiliates. She conceded that there’s some advantage, but called it “earned.”

Lisa said: [Super-affiliates who have] been successful, I do believe, are going to get information about what’s trending, what starting to take off, what’s the best opportunity and what seems to be really hot right now.

I do believe that that known, successful affiliates who have relationships with account managers or folks within the networks, are going to get more more information about how to continue to drive successes.

How an ugly page with misspellings can be lucrative

Andrew’s note: This section came from our conversation about testing.

Lisa’s example: I did a little bit of consulting work with Eben Pagan, who some people know as David DeAngelo. It was for landing pages and he was actually the merchant in this example. But I looked at these landing pages and I am like, “This is horrendous. This is just the worst looking landing page I have ever seen. You have got misspellings on here.” I was like, “This is crap!”

He was said, “Yeah OK. Every single person who ever comes from the Internet marketing space comes in and tells me the exact same thing.” He says, “But you know what? I have years, and years, and years of testing and I am telling you right now that this is the highest converting page.”

And he says, “And it knocks the socks off of the beautiful, awesome, creative, high-level marketing, branding approach.”

And I really got a huge lesson in that.

How affiliates should ask for higher commissions

Lisa said: I would phrase the question, “what do I need to do to make more more money.” I wouldn’t ask a merchant, “can I get an increased commission?” Ask, “What can I do to earn a higher payout?”

And really build that relationship. They may ask you to do some things like they may say, “I want you to hit a certain volume.”

How smaller affiliates can earn more

Lisa said: There are a ton of guys out there that drive massive volume, but when advertisers start really investigating the quality of those customers or those leads they’ll learn that it’s pretty low quality.

[If you're small, but you have quality traffic, you] can turn around as an affiliate, come back to that advertiser and say “Hey, I’m really high quality. I don’t have the volume but I’m not giving you that headache of fraud, and I would love to make more money. Let’s test and see how good the lifetime value of my results are.”

The full program includes

• The advantages that bigger affiliates get and how you can get them too.

• The new arbitrage opportunities you can use to buy off-line ads from dying newspapers and earn revenue from online affiliates.

• When you should go around affiliate networks and when you should absolutely not go around them.

Suggested comments

• Was it helpful to hear me talk about my experiences with affiliate networks? Should I do more of that?

• I have other interviews schedule on affiliate marketing. What more do you want to learn?

• What can YOU teach Mixergy readers about affiliate programs?