When you are promoting other products online through affiliate sales channels, you will be joining a large group of individuals who are doing the same thing. Estimates by Internet Usage World States indicate that there are over 1.4 billion Internet users worldwide. One would think that it would be easy to earn affiliate commissions from such a large market; and it may be easy but not simple.

People are bombarded by advertisements every day! They see them on billboards, on their television, in magazines, when they eat, and even on their cell phones. The last thing you want to do is to market your products or services like everybody else. As much as you may hate to be a recipient of invasive advertising, in order to succeed online these days, it just seems like you will get "into the face" of your target audience. But there is another way.

When you sell memberships, web hosting services, email auto-responder services and other products, you absolutely cannot adopt a "me too" type of marketing. To increase your affiliate commissions, you can include inexpensive marketing promotions that relate to the product or service you are selling. Your promotional items must carry high perceived values, and at the same time, complement, not compete with the product or service your are selling. I usually discuss these in more details at my marketing blog.

You will immediately recognize the rising use of marketing promotions if you find yourself on the mailing list of some of the so-called Internet marketing gurus. Every software or service launch brings out a plethora of offers, counter-offers, gifts, and promotions each one trying to get you to buy from their link.

If you are about to start a home based business, online promotions will be an important consideration, if only because you will have a lot of competition in almost any area that you choose to promote.

If you are not blessed with a huge mailing list however, there are other things you can do to create relevant online promotions that will help you to earn bigger affiliate commissions. For starters, you can use your blog, your lens, or even your hub article, to make reference to your promotional items. Another way to earn good commissions without a mailing list is to set up large search portals the cater to varying lifestyles. An example of this is my new search portal.

If you were promoting an auto-responder service for example, you may want to go over to a plr (private label rights) website and grab a good ready-made autoresponder series of emails that you can give away to your customers. This would be a relevant promotional item that has a good value, and complements the product your are offering.

The beauty of offering these inexpensive gifts to your customers is that you do not have to create email offers for them. You simply have to create it one time, and leave it on your website, blog, or lens, for anyone to see. It will always be there. Each offer must include a way to verify that the person requesting it has in fact purchased the product or service from your link, and then you can send them the gift right away.

If you want to take your marketing promotion to the next level, you can create your own membership site with password access. Store all your gifts inside this site and only offer your password to the people who purchase from you. Everyone loves free, and your customers will love you for over-delivering to them, not just on special occasions but every day of the year!

To get great ideas for creating your own membership sites, or even build your own Internet empire, you can check out my website at: affiliate training made simple