Secrets of Affiliate Marketing
If you’re looking for a way to make money online, you probably have heard of the term ‘affiliate marketing’. In short, affiliate marketing means promoting someone else’s products. It is easy and inexpensive to get started. You don’t have to worry about creating your own product. You also
You simply direct customers to the owner’s product website via a unique affiliate link that identify sales generated by you and get paid accordingly.
The benefits of affiliate marketing
You are able to start immediately with mostly zero or very little investment required. It is typical that you
- don’t have to worry about creating your own product
- don’t have to craft a sales page
- don’t need to create a website with some affiliate programs – as a replica of the main website is given to you),
- don’t have to develop marketing material
- don’t deal with customers,
- don’t deal with billing, handling or shipping issues
- don’t deal with customer support issues.
Affiliate marketing can, when done right, be very worthwhile. Don’t be fooled, there is a learning curve and some affiliates keep struggling for some time. By following a proven system, success can be achieved within a very short time. It is very obvious that affiliate marketing is the ideal gateway to internet marketing success – these benefits make it a clear winner!
OK, but it’s not all rosy…
You work hard to send the traffic to the product owner’s website, but once you do that you will never see those visitors again. Unfortunately, the majority of those visitors (at least 90%) will not buy on their first visit. The 10% or less that make a purchase now belong to the product owner. The product owner can sell them additional products, but you can never sell to them again.
How can you avoid this pitfall?
Simply put, you need to capture the name and email of your visitors *before* sending them to the product sales page of the product owner. If you do that, you will be building your own list of subscribers and can contact them again and again. This will increase the number of sales you make. And if you’re really on top of your game, you’ll then build a relationship with your subscribers by sending them newsletters and sell to them related or similar products in-between. It is therefore beneficial to have a website of your own.
Here’s what these affiliate marketing strategies will do for you:
- By building your own list, you’re creating a renewable resource that you can tap in again and again for instant profits.
- By providing great content without a sales pitch, you put them in a buying mood. So when you do send them to the product website, they’re much more likely to buy.
In order to set a system like this up, you will need the following affiliate marketing tools:
- A lead capture page, preferably with video
- At least a few pages of great content
- An email series with at least 5 high-quality content emails
You’ll use the squeeze page as the place to send your visitors instead of using the product website. This page is where you collect your visitors’ contact info and add them to your autoresponder, which in turn starts sending them the multi-part email series. Once your visitors have been subscribed to your email series, they are sent to your content pages.
Your content mini-site builds the good will, so that when you send them to the product sales page, they are in a buying mood. And at the same time, the email series begins following up with them to get them back to the sales page, in case they don’t buy on the first visit.
There’s no doubt that it’s worth the effort to put a system like this in place, because doing so will increase your profits by 500% or more. After setting it up, you simply send visitors to your squeeze page instead of the sales page. And the rest runs on auto-pilot.
If you don’t have the time or expertise to set it all up yourself, you can use something like Affiliate Silver Bullet. With a service like that, you don’t have to do anything. They make the video, build the squeeze page, write the email series, develop the content mini-site, etc. And then just give you a finished package. On the plus side, you’ll save a some time and money vs. trying to build this yourself. Plus you can get started instantly. One negative aspect is that there will be other people using this same affiliate marketing system. However, the odds of you and them both finding the same visitors are so small, that it doesn’t really matter.
Alternatively, you can use a service like Elance to “outsource” each of these components. Whichever way you decided to go, it’s critical to get an affiliate marketing system like this in place, if you’re at all serious about your business.
