Winning Affiliate Marketing Strategies
One of the easiest and fastest way to earn a living online is through affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing means that all you do is send traffic 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 get a percentage of the sale price as your commission (usually 50% or more for digital products).
The Benefits of Affiliate Marketing are
- You can get started almost immediately because you don’t have to develop a product, write the sales page, design the website, develop marketing materials, or set up the ordering, billing & delivery system.
- There’s no time required on your part because the product owner does all the hard work of support, maintenance and billing.
- Your efforts are risk-free, because the product owner has already made sure the product sells. So if you send visitors you will get paid.
Looking at these benefits, it’s clear that affiliate marketing is the way to go!
The downside is…
After all your hard work of generating traffic to the sales page, you will never see any of those visitors again. Less than 10% of the visitors your send will actually buy the product. The 10% or less that make a purchase now belong to the product owner. She can sell them additional products, but you can never sell to them again.
What’s the solution?
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:
- By building your own list, you’re creating a renewable resource that you can tap again and again for instant profits.
- 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.
If you want to create an affiliate marketing system like this, you’ll need the following:
- A squeeze page, and even better a Video squeeze page.
- At least a few pages of great content
- At least a 5-Part Email Followup Series
Instead of sending visitors directly to the product sales page, you’ll send them to your lead capture page first. It captures the name and email of your visitors and puts them into your autoresponder, which then begins sending out the 5-part email series. After subscribing them to your email list, it redirects them to your content mini-site.
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.
All of this together increases your chances of making the sale by up to 500% so it’s well worth the effort of setting it up. After setting it up, you simply send visitors to your squeeze page instead of the sales page. And the rest runs on auto-pilot.
One option, if you’re not up to the challenge of setting this all up yourself, is to let someone like Affiliate Silver Bullet do it for you. 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 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 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.
