As an aside, if you do discover one of these gems, and it's obvious that the sale page is not working, you may even want to offer to buy the rights to the product from the owner. You know that he's not making much money, and you know how to fix the problem! Buy the business, fix the website and then resell the business at a profit.

My friend Dr. Mike Woo-Ming, and his copywriter, have the rewriting of terrible sales letters down to such a science that they run a membership site where they pass along revised sales letters to their members. That's how important the sales letter is and how impactful it can be to rewrite "sucky" web pages. You can check out what Dr. Mike is doing at: http://WillieCrawford.com/DrMikesSecret.html

Getting back to using a promotional domain, if you are a serious affiliate marketer, it's often a non-decision. A domain costs you less than $9 per year. Just one sale of an affiliate product more than pays for the domain for a year. If you sell big ticket items, as I do, the commission on a single sale is often $700 or more. Just one extra sale covers the cost of 80 - 90 promotional domains for a year (I buy my domains wholesale).

If using a promotional domain means that 20% more of your email gets through, since it's not mentioning a domain that may be blacklisted, you've just increased your sales by 20% (all things being equal). If that's just one or two extra sales paying you a few hundred dollars extra commission, it's certainly worth it.

I buy my domains through a domain name reseller account that I have. I pay $90 per year for this account, but earn a commission every time that I sell a domain. I also save every time that I buy or renew a domain. You can check out the service that I use at: http://875PerYearDomains.com If you click the link at the top of that page labeled "Become A Domain Reseller" it tells you how to get setup as I am (so that you can buy your own domains at wholesale).

By now you should be convinced that you really should be using promotional domains. However, let me give you two additional reasons.

Many online communities, and discussion forums, have stopped allowing you to post affiliate url’s in your signature file. They've done this largely because many affiliate program managers were teaching their affiliates to post to some of the more popular forums and then leave a link. Many inexperienced affiliate marketers were making a lot of "spammy" posts that really said "nothing," just to leave a link. Forum and community owners noticed this and thus the backlash was a prohibition against posting affiliate links.

At the same time, many of these forum owners have said that it's ok to post links pointing to your own domains where you then mention affiliate products. So, in those forums, you would post links to your own domains. On your domains you have pages that pre-sell the product, or perhaps even offer a bonus for buying the product, and THEN you have them click through to the affiliate site. This is the PERFECT place to explain your bonuses if you are offering some extra inducement for them to buy through your affiliate link rather than your competitors'.

A second and final reason for using a promotional domain is that it looks better to ezine publishers and owners of article directories. These publishers want to offer their visitors and readers professional looking material, and frankly... affiliate url’s with all kinds of strange characters don't look very professional. Articles with those obvious affiliate links scream "He wrote this article to sell me something!" Articles with less obvious affiliate links allow your readers to "lower their shields" and be less defensive. They are more open to your marketing message, so you will make many more sales... and isn't that what it's all about?

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