One of the most powerful ways to promote your affiliate programs is to make your own free e-mail courses.

Providing a free e-mail course on your site enables you to successfully follow up with your visitors, gain trust and credibility with your readers, and can substantially increase your profit promoting affiliate programs.

Your free e-mail course will give you a new and unique promotional item that you can use to continuously promote your affiliate programs without any extra work on your part.

To help you create your own profitable e-mail courses that will increase your commissions, I've listed the following tips and techniques:

1. Begin your course with an introduction that tells your readers what your course will cover and highlights the benefits your readers will get for taking your course.

2. Choose an autoresponder that lets you personalize your e-mail course with your readers' name.

This will allow you to easily draw your readers' attention to the parts of your course you want them to focus on.

3. Use information that is already available to you for your course's content.

Many affiliate programs will provide you with articles that you can publish in your e-zine or on your website, and these articles can be used to form different parts of your course or even your whole course.

4. When using another person's article or articles as content for your course, introduce that writer to your readers by telling them who that person is, why that person is an expert at what they are talking about (i.e., they are the author of the award winning manual...) and recommend their product or service with a link to your affiliate URL.

5. If you already write articles, you can use your own articles to form the basis of your course, and turn your articles into another powerful marketing tool.

One major advantage to using your own articles as content for your course is that you will be able to establish *yourself* as the expert at what your course deals with which will build even more trust and credibility between you and your readers.

6. Rewrite or edit your articles for inclusion in your free e-mail course.

This will give you the added advantage of being able to recommend and link to your affiliate programs within your course's content instead of just promoting your affiliate program in your resource box.

7. Use an aside -- a break in the information that tells your readers how the product you are promoting can help them -- to direct your readers' attention to your affiliate program.

Your aside can be a free bonus or a special benefit your readers will get for purchasing the product.

8. Set your aside off with a separator such as ******* and personalize your aside with your reader's name.

9. End your aside with a call to action that tells your readers what you want them to do such as learn more now at http://yourreferralurl.com or get the details now at http://yourreferralurl.com.

10. End each part of your course with a conclusion that tells your readers about the next part of your course and a personalized PS that tells your readers again about the service or product you wish to promote.

Your PS can be a recommendation, an added benefit for purchasing the product you are promoting, or a combination of both.

11. End your PS with a call to action.

12. Continue to follow up with your readers periodically after your readers have taken your course.

Remind your subscribers about the product or products you are promoting, tell them of new specials or bonuses for purchasing the product, or invite them to take new free e-mail courses or to subscribe to your e-zine.