Are you giving your leads away?

I keep noticing this from people who have been online for ten years or more, so it is not something only beginners run into. You write the post and you answer her question, and she gets to the point where she is ready to buy. She clicks your affiliate link, and from there the company gets the sale and her email address while you get a commission and nothing else. You did the finding and the convincing, and one click moved all of that into somebody else's account. I learned this the hard way somewhere else. I worked with a company for over eleven years, and the first thing they told me when I left was that I could not download my list of customers. What they did not know was that I had been collecting those names on my own side the whole time, so there was nothing I needed to download at the last minute. Everybody I had found and helped was already mine to keep. The setup that fixes it on a blog takes about twenty minutes to build. You put a plain opt in page of your own in front of the affiliate link, with one line about what she is getting, an email field, and then a redirect that sends her on to the offer. The page does not have to look impressive, because the commission is identical either way and the only real difference is that two things happen now instead of one. What matters is what comes after that click. A commission arrives one time and then it is finished, while a reader on your list is somebody you can help again next month and the month after that, and you can put other things in front of her without paying to find her all over again. Almost every sale after the first one comes out of that list, and if you send her straight out to the offer, the affiliate company is the one building it instead of you. If you have links up right now, this is worth twenty minutes of your week. Open your blog, find every live affiliate link you have, click each one and ask yourself where her email address ends up. When the answer is their account rather than yours, that link is doing full price work for a single payment, so start with whichever link gets the most traffic and decide what should sit in front of it. Do you route your affiliate links through a page of your own first, or do you send people straight to the offer?