Winning Affiliate Marketing Strategies
Affiliate marketing is by far the fastest way to get started making money online. Affiliate marketing means that all you do is sendvisitors to someone else’s website, they handle the sales, support and billing, and you earn at least a 50% commission
The benefits of this are
- You can start almost instantly with no up-front costs and no need to develop a product, set up a website and sales page, develop the website, create marketing materials, or set up the ordering, billing & delivery system.
- It runs on auto-pilotfor you 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.
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. That’s fine for the product owner because she can sell to them again and again, but you can’t.
Is there are way around this?
What you need to do is capture the contact info of your visitors before sending them to the product website. 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’re really on top of your game, you’ll then send to a content mini-site in between.
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.
Here’s what you’ll need to create affiliate tools like this:
- A lead capture page, preferably with video
- One or more content-rich “warm up” pages
- 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. Once your visitors have been subscribed to your email series, they are sent to your content pages.
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. 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.
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. 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 drawback is that you won’t be the only one using these affiliate tools. But the internet is huge, so this shouldn’t really affect you.
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.