Affiliate Marketing Secrets

Winning Affiliate Marketing Strategies

If you want to get started quickly and easily making money online, then affiliate marketing is for you. What “affiliate marketing” means is that you just send traffic to someone else’s website, they do all the hard work of making the sale and supporting the customer, and you get a percentage of the sale price as your commission, which for digital products can be 50% of more.

The benefits of this are

  1. You can start instantly with no up-front costs and no need to develop a product, craft a sales letter, design the website, create marketing materials, or do support, billing and maintenance.
  2. It runs on auto-pilotfor you because the product owner does all the hard work of support, maintenance and billing.
  3. Your efforts are risk-free, because the product owner has already done all the research , development and testing. So you know that your traffic will result in sales.

Obviously affiliate marketing makes sense – these benefits make it a clear winner!

The downside is…

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. 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. 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 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. You’ll be building your own list of potential customers that you can market to again and again.
  2. 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.

In order to set a system like this up, you will need the following affiliate marketing tools:

  1. A lead capture page, preferably with video
  2. Several high-quality content pages
  3. A multi-part email series with at least 5 emails in it

You’ll use the squeeze page as the place to send your visitors instead of using the product website. Your squeeze page adds your visitors to you autoresponder. This is how you start building your list, and at the same time begin sending them useful information. 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. 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.

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. One negative is that there will be other people using this same affiliate marketing system. However, the odds of you and them both finding the same visitor are so small, that it doesn’t really matter.

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.