Back in mid March of this year I signed up as a Mariner Software Affiliate and after a couple days Teresa had me all setup and ready to go with my new Affiliate Account and discount code along with some graphics from the internal marketing department. In the beginning, I must confess that I got off to a very slow start and just posted on my personal web site about my discount code and then shared that post on my Google+ account. One of the reasons for my slow start was because I was in the middle of building my house and other obligations that life has set out for us.

So after that first post and share I didn’t do any further work on the program until around mid July, this is when I started to have some additional free time to devote to my back burner affiliate program here. To be honest I was actually a little surprised after asking for my sales numbers from marketing and being told that I had actually racked up 13 sales from that first initial post.

And this got me to thinking, “Geez what would my sales have been if I had been actually continued working on my affiliate program? I could possibly be the Donald’s running mate.” Joke!

So with my current sales in mind and additional time there was but one thing to do, right? Get to work and and see if I couldn’t improve upon my sales even further.

I currently have an account on nearly every social media network as well as a few blog accounts. So to start with, I posted a blog post about Mariner Software products. This way I could then link back or share on my social media accounts. I also started posting in Mac-centric forums and sharing my discount code that was provided to me. This way people interested in purchasing Mariner products could use my coupon code and save 25% off their new purchase. I then also linked those post back to my original web site post.

The reason being is that I want to build a structure so I can facilitate the search engines of each of the social networks and then the broader larger general search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo. That way I would have everything seamlessly going in one general direction with the hopes of sales resulting from a good stable structure. I personally believe building a successful affiliate program is like building a house, we need a strong stable foundation to build upon then have a building plan for the structure itself.

After Googling for a few hours and finding some nice Mariner Software reviews from review sites I posted about those reviews on my own site with links back to the original post. This helps the initial reviewer get additional traffic and SEO benefits but I added in my affiliate code and discount to the bottom of each post, So its a win win for everyone involved. These post were also shared on my social media accounts and after about three weeks I could actually start to see my own SEO payoff.

By The first week of August I checked back with marketing once again to see if my post were effective and if my marketing strategy was starting to pay off and produce sales. Once again I was pleasantly surprised that I had by this time increased my sales to around 5 to 6 sales per week. This is great because it had only been three weeks since I had actually started seriously working on my affiliate program.

This past week was another busy week for me and I didn’t get much accomplished on my Affiliate program. Fortunately, this is one of the really nice benefits of affiliate marketing. We can work on our program with as much or little time as we want without having the stress that’s involved with a hourly or salaried position. Sure a guaranteed paycheck is nice but as a part-time way of making a little extra income, its hard to beat getting payed doing the things we really enjoy in life without any additional stress.

Another good thing about this strategy is that if I’m busy one week, my post from previous weeks are still generating clicks and potential sales. As time goes on and as my post count grows, the residual income becomes a little more secure. It’s like getting payed in the years to come for the lean times now while working on gaining our initial following.

In closing, I hope to see more affiliates in the coming months because there is alot of room on this huge internet for all of us to have fun and earn some extra money while sharing great software with our current and future friends.