Affiliate Marketing Secrets

Posted on | August 12, 2010 | No Comments

Secrets of Affiliate Marketing

One of the easiest and fastest way to generate income online is through affiliate marketing. This is when you send visitors to someone else’s product sales page, they make the sale and deliver the product, and you get a percentage of the sale price as your commission, which for digital products can be 50% or more.

These are a some of the benefits

You can get started very quickly because you don’t have to create a product, write the sales page, design the website, create marketing materials, or set up the ordering, billing & delivery system.
There is no time requirement on your part because the product owner does all the hard work: a. support, b. maintenance, and c. 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.

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

OK, but it’s not all rosy…

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. 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 a super star affiliate, you’ll provide high-quality content before sending them to the product website.

Here’s what these affiliate marketing strategies will do for you:

You’ll be building your own list of potential customers that you can market to again and again.
You’re generating good will by giving them high-quality content. This way, they are much more likely to make a purchase when you send them to the sales page.

If you want to create an affiliate marketing system like this, you’ll need the following:

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

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. Then it redirects them to your content pages after they subscribe to your email series.

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 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.

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. 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 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.