By Steven Wagenheim

In this installment of my inside the mind of a top affiliate series, I’m going to show you my thinking process when it comes to choosing a bonus to offer with the product that I’m selling as an affiliate. This is a step that a lot of marketers get wrong because they don’t really put the thought into it. Hopefully, after reading this, you’ll be able to pick just the right bonus for that affiliate product you’re promoting.

It is absolutely critical that you FIRST understand the product that you’re promoting inside and out. You need to be able to identify its strengths as well as its weaknesses. No product is 100%, especially a digital information product. There is always something that has either been left out or could have been explained a little bit better. This is where you have to make notes to yourself.

After you’ve gone through the product, the next step is to look through your bonuses to see which one best compliments the product. This is where most affiliates make their biggest mistake. They figure that any old product, as long as it has value, will be good enough to offer in order to get the prospect to buy the initial product. For example, somebody selling a book on SEO might offer a book on article marketing as a bonus. Now, while the book on article marketing has value in its own right, it really doesn’t fit with the book on SEO. What if the person has no interest in learning article marketing?

However, what if you had a piece of software that made the SEO process a lot easier? Now THAT would be a bonus that would really get the prospect excited about getting the book on SEO. Heck, for that matter, they prospect may want the software more than the book and only buy the book to get the software. It happens more than you know. Look at some of the biggest product launches. Many prospects buy from the person who offers the best bonus.

This is the process I go through whenever I think of a bonus to offer with the product I’m selling. If you simply take the time to go through this same process, you’ll find that you’ll sell more of that product than you did previously.