Secrets of Affiliate Marketing
If you want to get started quickly and easily in internet marketing, then affiliate marketing is for you. Affiliate marketing means that all you do is sendvisitors 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 keep 50% or more of the sales
These are a some of the benefits
- You can get started really quickly because you don’t have to create a product, set up a website and sales page, design the website, create 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.
- 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 already know that the visitors you send will result in commissions for you.
Looking at these benefits, it’s clear that affiliate marketing is the way to go!
There is one major drawback…
Once you send your visitors to the product sales page, they are gone forever. Most of them will not buy on their first visit, which means you’re losing over 90% of the traffic right off the top. 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?
Simply put, you need to capture the name and email of your visitors *before* sending them to the product sales page. 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’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 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.
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.
- One or more content-rich “warm up” pages
- At least a 5-Part Email Followup Series
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. Then it redirects them to your content pages after they subscribe to your email series.
You 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 even if they don’t buy on the first visit, your email series sends them back to the product sales page again and again to increase your sales.
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. And once it’s set up, it runs automatically – you just send visitors to the squeeze page, instead of the product website.
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 benefit is that it’s much less expensive then you could do it yourself, and it’s instantly set up. 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.
The other route you can take is to hire people on Elance to create and implement the various aspects for you. Either way, it’s an important step that you need to take if you’re going to be serious about your affiliate marketing.