How to 10x Your Affiliate Marketing Sales with Bonuses
Reading Time: 12 minutes 
Are you interested to learn how to 10x your affiliate marketing sales with bonuses?
Usually, a goal for all affiliate marketers is to make more money with their affiliate offers. And the bonus package strategy I share in this article will show you exactly how to do just that.
You may have heard before – give to receive. This is exactly what we’ll talk about today; give more in the form of bonuses and receive more in the form of sales.
In this guide, we’ll detail how to 10x your affiliate marketing sales with bonuses and persuasive incentive strategies.
As an affiliate partner of various brands and sponsored content, HerPaperRoute may earn commission on qualifying purchases. Disclaimer | Advertise With Us
How to 10x Your Affiliate Marketing Sales with Bonuses
Creating high-value bonus packages for your product can result in a huge boost to sales.
Bonuses are simply some kind of extra gift that customers receive when they enroll in your course, or buy products from your affiliate links.
The tough part is putting the right bonus package together. There is a key strategy to what things should be included in a bonus package – and what things should be left out.
Often affiliate marketers will just throw everything and the kitchen sink together.
This is bad, and will usually result in fewer sales because too many things for thing’s sake will only confuse and overwhelm potential buyers.
Your bonuses need to directly relate to the main offer, and specifically support the success of the buyer on their journey.
A bonus package has to be relevant, valuable, and different from the rest.
A quality bonus stack increases the perceived value of an offer, while making it look like an incredibly good deal for the buyer.
While at the same time, it can’t be SUCH a good deal that it causes you to lose money or tax your time.
At the end of the day, we’re in the affiliate marketing business to make money.
Why Use Bonuses To 10x Your Affiliate Marketing Sales?
Affiliate marketing is a popular way to make money online. The industry is worth $17 billion and is growing year after year.
If you want to 10x your affiliate marketing sales it’s important to make your offer stand out from the crowd by getting a potential customer excited.
Think about it, if you’ve ever been tempted by any training or free offer before, this is likely a great piece of marketing put together by a savvy affiliate marketer.
Often a bonus stack can seem so irresistible, you just can’t say no – this is what you’re aiming for!
When you take a step back and look at the entire funnel that you are building for your offer, you will consider several elements.
- The freebies and lead magnets
- The right, valuable bonus package
- The upsells and downsells
- The main or core product (in this example, this would be the brand’s product that you are an affiliate for. But you could also sell your own digital products.)
All of that ^ is known as “An Irresistible Offer.”
It’s all a big, cohesive part of affiliate and course creator success that separates professional creators from an average hobbyist.
I teach this stuff in more detail inside The Blog Flipping Society. In the training, you’ll be led hand by hand and shown how to create your own bonus packages, build out your offer and create your own high-converting funnel.
What Makes Bonuses So Effective?
If you have an awesome product, it will likely still make some sales on its own.
The thing is, there may be many other people promoting the same product as you.
But to really 10x your affiliate marketing sales, you’ll need to make your product stand out from the rest.
- An irresistible bonus will make someone buy now, especially if it is time-restricted. Many people will need a little push to get over the finish line and a valuable bonus that has to be purchased by a certain date can make it happen. Indecision is a sales killer and can make a potential customer bounce from your site onto another that is giving away an awesome bonus package.
- It makes people feel better about parting with cash. This is especially true if you’re selling a high ticket offer. Even if you promote the best product in the world, a $1,000 outlay at one time can be a big investment for some. Add on a super valuable bonus package and this can ease the woes some may have about investing a large sum of cash.
- Your product will stand out from the rest. If you promote a popular product, a unique bonus package will make you stand out. This is especially important if you’re up against other prolific marketers with huge social media followers.
When To Start Leveraging Bonuses In Your Affiliate Marketing Funnel?
Bonuses can be given away at any time, but if you are giving a bonus in the form of a discount, this should only be leveraged at the right time.
Too early and people may not trust you, too late and you may have missed the boat.
The tough part is deciding what to give away for your bonus package.
You don’t just want to give anything away. Work out a strategy and even do a bit of market research to see what bonuses your target market would actually benefit from.
Remember, you don’t have to break the bank giving so much away that you don’t even make a profit.
There are multiple ways you can put together cost-effective bonuses cheaply or even for free.
Here’s an example of some of the bonuses I include in my Profit Planning Retreat bundle:
Who wouldn’t want all this?!
How Do I Create Bonus Packages To Give Away?
Here are some tips to put together a bonus package that is effective and affordable.
1. Make Your Bonus Compliment The Main Offer
If you are selling in the fitness niche, giving a bonus ‘’how to become an SEO expert’’ course away, doesn’t really fit.
A compliment to a fitness product like a diet plan, could be a video series to tone abs, or the best 5 exercises for fat burning for example.
If you are selling a course to help someone become a writer, a great bonus could be – a cheatsheet full of the highest paying companies for writers, plus access to a software that will increase writing productivity.
2. Make It Worth 50-200% of The Value Of The Product
According to statistics, 50-200% is the sweet spot for ROI value for bonuses.
If you go any higher, it may just make it seem unbelievable and make someone trust you less.
3. Use What You Have Or Create Your Own
One good thing is; you can actually use or re-use content that you own already.
For example; have you already created an EBook, a valuable cheatsheet or swipe files that relate to the product and will actually benefit someone who buys it?
If not, you can create these pretty easily yourself and re-use them over and over. Other free options could be;
- Access to your mastermind or secret group
- Extra coaching sessions with you
- Purchase E-books or digital content you can give away
- Partner with other entrepreneurs in your niche and create podcasts, videos or interviews you can give away
- Discount codes
4. Leverage Ai To Create Bonus Content
There are many ai writing tools that you can use, that will actually write ebooks and digital products for you.
With tools like ChatGPT, WordHero, and even Tailwind’s ai writing tool, you can leverage artificial intelligence to build your offer.
No matter what ai writing tool you use, just make sure you proofread the output you get, ensuring it’s high quality and factual.
As, even the best ai tools still need a human editor, and you don’t want to hurt your reputation by giving away crap.
5. Stack Your Bonuses And Show The Monetary Value
Your potential customers need to see the value of your bonuses and products all stacked together.
Do make sure you show realistic numbers though, as people are not silly. Hyping this up too much could turn people away from you!
When customers can see the true value of what they’ll get for their investment, it can make a huge difference.
6. Check Out What Competitors Are Giving Away As Bonuses
Learning how to 10x your affiliate marketing sales with bonuses will need a little research.
A good idea is to take a look at your competitors and see what they’re offering. This can;
- Give you ideas for your bonuses
- See what you have to compete with
- Present you with clarity to build a better offer!
This information will be invaluable, rather than putting a bonus stack together and waiting around to see what happens.
And, not realizing someone else is offering something 100 times better.
If you are part of an affiliate marketing network, research the leaders for the affiliate sales of a certain product.
It’s likely they will have set the bar high with crazy valuable bonuses!
Another way to research is to find your product through Google and opt in to competitor’s funnels.
Take a look at their sales and landing pages and write notes on their bonus stacks.
Don’t worry if you can’t compete with huge players who have a lot of money. You can still offer a valuable bonus stack by offering your time and knowledge.
It’s all about packaging your offer in the right way that talks to your niche.
A must-read for affiliate marketers who are serious about upping their game is to read Expert Secrets. Which you can get for free here.
Core Bonuses vs. Time-Sensitive Bonuses
The key to creating bonuses that sell online courses is being strategic. Now that you understand the five types of bonuses you can create, let’s talk about the two main categories of bonuses and how they help you actually sell online courses.
Bonuses should be things that you think your audience will find really enticing and valuable. There are really two categories here: core bonuses or time-sensitive bonuses.
Ideally, you want to have both core and time-sensitive bonuses attached to your course.
That means you create a nice set of core bonuses that all of your students receive. But also create a couple of time-sensitive bonuses sprinkled in throughout your launch to make things more exciting. This combination really helps boost your signups and your sales!
What Is A Core Bonus?
A core bonus is included with your course, no matter when your student signs up. It doesn’t matter if they sign up today, at the end of the launch, or during the next round of enrollment.
Core bonuses generally always stay the same.
Something like a Facebook group usually would be a great core bonus—no matter when somebody signs up, they get access to that bonus.
What Is A Time-Sensitive Bonus?
On the other hand, we have time-sensitive bonuses. You can think of these as your launch bonuses—students receive these when they sign up within a certain time frame. That means there’s always some kind of deadline involved.
Try creating launch day bonuses and last day bonuses, meaning if somebody signs up on the first or last day of the launch, they get a specific bonus. Other options are a 24-hour bonus, 48-hour bonus, or 72-hour bonus framed around your launch emails!
There are lots of ways to go about this.
But basically, any time there is a deadline or a timeframe involved, that’s a time-sensitive bonus.
How Do You Decide Which Bonuses Should Be Core vs. Time-Sensitive? Now, let’s talk about how to decide what your core bonuses and time-sensitive bonuses should be.
Here’s the general rule you should follow. If your student needs a particular bonus in order to succeed and achieve the results that you’re promising with your course, then obviously it should be a core bonus.
Everyone deserves those bonuses across the board. On the flip side, if it’s more of a “nice-to-have” bonus, but not necessarily a “need to have” bonus, then you can make it a time-sensitive bonus.
How To Choose Bonuses That Actually Help You Sell More
So, how do you choose bonuses that people will actually want so that you can easily sell more?
This is my golden rule when it comes to bonuses: a good bonus will accelerate either the process you’re teaching in your course or the results that your students will achieve.
Or, a good bonus just makes it easier and quicker for your students to implement what you’re teaching.
When you create bonuses, think about quicker, easier implementation of what you’re teaching in the course.
Another important thing to consider is that your bonuses must be super relevant. Avoid throwing in a bunch of random bonuses in the hopes that you’ll sell online courses. Filling up your sales page with the content isn’t the goal!
Having a few carefully curated, super valuable bonuses is so much better than a dozen random, thrown-together ones.
Bring In A Guest Expert As A Bonus
Next, consider bringing in some kind of guest expert as a bonus to your course or offer.
For example, if you have a Facebook group for your course, you’d bring in a guest to do a live training in that group.
Or, you could have your guest expert pre-record some kind of masterclass or workshop.
It’s totally up to you how you actually set up this type of bonus, but it is super enticing and helps you boost conversions!
How Many Bonuses Should You Have?
Speaking of that, how many bonuses should you create for your online course? The main thing to remember is that quality matters much more than quantity.
There are no hard and fast rules for how many bonuses you should have.
Instead, focus on curating the best, most enticing bonuses if you really want to sell online courses effectively.
Can You Position Course Content as a Bonus?
You might be feeling overwhelmed by the thought of having to create even more content for your online course. Here’s a little secret tip for you.
You can absolutely take some of the content you were planning to include, wrap it up with a bow, and position it as a bonus. In this case, it will be a core bonus that everyone receives.
This is a great strategy that I actually highly recommend. Instead of just including specific pieces of content, like monthly Q&A calls or a Facebook group, with the course.
Why not shift the positioning a little bit and make it sound more valuable by positioning it as a bonus?
These tips will help you create enticing, value-packed, relevant bonuses that truly help you sell online courses.
Creating sales-boosting bonuses helps you enroll more students in your courses and create more hype and excitement during your launches! Building great bonus stacks can take a little time and error.
Don’t worry if you don’t get it perfect straight away as many marketers have had campaigns fail before you.
Always take a step back from what you’re offering and ask yourself; ‘’would this get me excited?’’ You can ask friends also to get a bit of customer feedback.
How to 10x Your Affiliate Marketing Sales with A Bonus Package – Conclusion
Building great bonus stacks can take a little time and error. Don’t worry if you don’t get it perfect straight away as many marketers have had campaigns fail before you.
Always take a step back from what you’re offering and ask yourself; ‘’would this get me excited?’’ You can ask friends also to get a bit of customer feedback.
One of my mentors once built a bonus stack where he offered to build a free website for buyers among other things.
He asked his team at the time what they thought and one commented; ‘’you’re crazy, that’s way too much value to give away!’’
He said he knew he was on the right track and his next product launch was going to make him a fortune.
It did.
If you want to learn more about building an awesome offer that will have people falling over themselves to buy from you, join the Blog Flipping Society.
And before you go, make sure you read how to create upsells that increase your cart value.
