Winning Affiliate Marketing Strategies
Affiliate marketing is by far the fastest way to get started making money online. This is when you refer traffic to someone else’s product sales page, they handle the sales, support and billing, and you get a percentage of the sale price as your commission (usually 50% or more for digital products).
These are a some of the benefits
- You can start right now with no up-front costs and no need to make a product, set up a website and sales page, develop the website, develop marketing materials, or do support, billing and maintenance.
- You have basically zero investment of your time because you don’t have to do the customer support or deal with billing or technical issues.
- There’s no risk for you, because the product owner has already made sure the product sells. So you already know that the visitors you send will result in commissions for you.
Obviously affiliate marketing makes sense – these benefits make it a clear winner!
There is one major drawback…
Once you send your visitors to the product sales page, they are gone forever. Less than 10% of the visitors your send will actually buy the product. And of the 10% or less that do buy, the product owner will be able to sell to them again, but you will not.
What’s the solution?
Simply put, you need to capture the name and email of your visitors *before* sending them to the product sales page. By getting their contact info, you can follow up increase your odds of making the sale by sending them back to the product owner’s website multiple times. And if you want to do it like a pro, you’ll give them some great content before sending them to the sales page.
Here are the benefits of doing affiliate marketing like this:
- Owning a list of potential buyers gives you the ability to market additional products at the push of a button.
- You’ll be warming them up by providing valuable information and then casually linking to the product sales page in the context of this information.
In order to set a system like this up, you will need the following affiliate marketing tools:
- A Video Squeeze Page (with video)
- One or more content-rich “warm up” pages
- 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. Your squeeze page adds your visitors to you autoresponder. This is how you start building your list, and at the same time begin sending them useful information. Once your visitors have been subscribed to your email series, they are sent to your content pages.
These high-quality content pages provide value and build good will. This way your visitor is more likely to buy when they get to the product owner’s website. 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.
Putting all of these pieces together will increase your sales by 500% or more, so it’s obviously worth the time and energy to do it. And once it’s set up, it runs automatically – you just send visitors to the squeeze page, instead of the product website.
Setting it all up yourself requires some skill, and if you’re not up to it, you can use a service like Affiliate Silver Bullet. These kinds of services will build the whole system for you and then just give you a video squeeze page (with video), pre-written emails, content pages, etc. The benefit is that it’s much less expensive then you could do it yourself, and it’s instantly set up. One negative is that there will be other people using this same affiliate marketing system. However, the odds of you and them both finding the same visitor are so small, that it doesn’t really matter.
Alternatively, you can use a service like Elance to “outsource” each of these compnents. 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.