Something else to avoid is any mention that you might benefit financially from just an opt-in – the problem there is disclosure, and as more and more launches include a pre-launch opt-in competition with prizes, especially in the internet marketing niche, affiliate program managers are going to specifically have to allow, and encourage disclosure.

Bonus Delivery Hurdles to Overcome

• You are rarely notified about an opt-in – there is a feature in Infusionsoft to allow notifications of opt-in, but most affiliate program managers switch this notification off. Even if you have selected it as on, there doesn’t seem to be a way to control it within the Infusionsoft affiliate interface, and preferably send the email to a different email address than other notifications and mailings.
• Forget about manual processing – as your business scales, manual processing of an opt-in to give a bonus just isn’t possible.
• Circumvention - if you are offering something of value, you don’t want it to be delivered on a directly accessible thank-you page that is indexed, or could be passed on
• Excessive friction – you want if at all possible to avoid adding any process that could go wrong, cause support questions, frustration, etc.
• Lock-in – Preferably if you do this, you want to do it with a marketer who in some ways offers a lock-in of leads that are sent – currently you can’t do anything for back-end promotions of 3rd party products effectively (well unless it is Clickbank), but at least you want them to use that email address for it’s primary intention… to sell your lead their products, so you make money.

Benefits Of Bonus Delivery

Higher opt-in rates – if you can give something of suitable vale, preferably complementary, there is a good chance your readers might opt-in to someone else’s list to get it.

Complementary – what you offer could be complementary to their launch materials, improving the sales process, magnifying “results in advance” and giving you a reason why you are mailing… you really do care about the success of your readers, don’t you?

Tracking & Automation – for slightly more advanced users, if you can get someone to take action, even if it is signing up to a list belonging to an affiliate partner, that is valuable information that can be processed using the automation rules of various autoresponders – business intelligence allows you to segment your lists more accurately, better determine offer choice, or can even steer product development.

Can be turned into a JV bonanza – with smart rebranding or cross-marketing of bonus products, you could potentially gain additional subscribers, covert others to make promotion materials on your behalf, and make more money from multiple streams of income.

Live Example

Over the last week or so, I put together a demonstration system that took relatively little coding and provides me with simple interfaces to automate bonus delivery.

At the same time Howie Schwartz was in the middle of a launch and I knew I could create a fantastic bonus that would complement his launch, so I have been burning the midnight oil.

IM Remarkable Bonus

Some Key Features

• The report isn’t your normal affiliate freebie – it is 50 pages, and was a significant time investment.
• The system isn’t dumb – you are required to submit the correct key
• The whole system can be rebranded – a JV partner could send traffic to my site, and gain 100% referrals to Howie – great excuse to send an additional email, plus help people more.
• The Twitter “tweet” links later in the process are rebranded as well so any viral effect, JV partners can gain a benefit.
• It would take me about 2 minutes to add additional unadvertised bonuses to the backend
• I haven’t asked/forced an opt-in – I didn’t want to add a negative element for JVs
• I didn’t ask for a password to retweet about the site

It is simplistic, there are still some holes, but it is something that anyone could set up.

Originally published at andybeard.eu