Internet Marketing

Affiliate Marketing Secrets

Affiliate marketing is by far the fastest way to get started earning a living online. Affiliate marketing means that all you do is sendtraffic to someone else’s website, they do all the hard work of developing the product, making the sale, delivering the product and supporting the customer, and you earn at least a 50% commission

The benefits of this are

1. You can start instantly with no up-front costs and no need to make a product, craft a sales letter, develop the website, create marketing materials, or do support, billing and maintenance.
2. There’s zero time investment on your part because the product owner does all the hard work of support, maintenance and billing.
3. You have nearly zero risk because you already know the product sells, because the product owner has already done all the research , development and testing. So you know that your traffic will result in sales.

There’s no denying that these benefits make affiliate marketing the best thing going!

There is one major drawback…

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. 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.

How can you avoid this pitfall?

What you need to do is capture the contact info of your visitors before sending them to the product website. This way you can follow up with them and keep sending them back to the sales page to increase your chances of making the sale. 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:

1. By building your own list, you’re creating a renewable resource that you can tap again and again for instant profits.
2. 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.

Here’s what you’ll need to create affiliate tools like this:

1. A lead capture page, preferably with video
2. At least a few pages of great content
3. A multi-part email series with at least 5 emails in it

The video squeeze page is where you’ll direct your traffic instead of directly to the product sales page. 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. Then it redirects them to your content pages after they subscribe to your email series. The content pages provide valuable information for your visitors and make them more receptive to the sales message that you’ll link to from inside the content. While they’re reading the content you’ve provided, your email system is already following up with them to send them back to the product website again and again. 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 after you get it all set up, it runs on total auto-pilot. You just refer people to your lead capture page, instead of the product sales page. 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. The major benefit of using a service like this is that you can get started right away, and for a whole lot less than it would cost to do it all yourself. The downside is that other people will be using the same affiliate tools as you. But the internet is pretty big, so this isn’t much of a concern. 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.  

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.