Affiliate Marketing – How to Stand Out from the Rest
There are many people out there that have made a very nice living in Affiliate Marketing. Chances are greater than not that there are a few people that have made enough money to quit their fulltime job and live the life they want promoting the exact same product you are right now. Why did people buy the product or service from that person and not you? It is the same product… isn’t it.
The answer to that question is going to surprise you… because it’s no. Yes you may be promoting the same company product, your banners are identical, the ads you place that have been approved by the company are the same… and if you are with a company that offers their affiliates a webpage then you even have the EXACT same webpage. Confused? The product that all of those people bought from Joe Shmo isn’t the product you are holding… they bought Joe Shmo.
Let me explain. The key to making money in affiliate marketing isn’t in the product you decide to go with. The key to making money in affiliate marketing is to make yourself the product that you are promoting. Yes it helps if you have a product that people want… that works… and that people are going to recommend to other people. But what you are selling to people is you.
Think about it this way. You are driving down the road in new town. You are really hungry, and you want a hamburger. You see, “Joe’s Hamburger,” “The Greasy Spoon, “ “Burger Galore,” and just a little way up the road you see the Golden Arches. Which place are you going to stop at? I would bet that you are going to drive a little way up the road and visit McDonalds. Why? Because you now McDonalds. You have eaten there before, you know what to expect, they have the best fries in the world and really who can beat the Big Mac or the Quarter Pounder with Cheese. Now all of these places have hamburgers, and honestly one of those other places could have better hamburgers… but you KNOW McDonalds.
You are going to get customers and close more sales because people know you, they can depend on you and what you have to offer is reliable. This is what is known as self branding. Why is it so important to your success? The products and services that you have are going to change, you are going to find better products or you are going to offer different services. The only constant in your business is going to be you. This means that people need to know you and they need to trust you.
McDonalds did not make millions off of the Big Mac, it made millions off of the hamburger. The longer McDonalds is in business the more they expand their menu to meet what there is a demand for. But McDonalds never changes.
Neil Bartlett is the founder of MyIMCoach.com. My IM Coach provides aspiring Internet Marketers with Tips and Techniques for getting started and/or improving their marketing skills. To learn more and INSTANTLY grab his FREE report “How To Make It Online” go to http://www.myimcoach.com/specialoffer
Adsense: Theres Got to be a Better Way!
There are also people making a ton of money with adsense and have an empire of sites. There are some good things about adsense, you can get started with limited marketing experience. There’s no sales page and you don’t have to handle customer service.
The problems are this:
So many people got into it, that the high paying keywords got gobbled up. That means that there got to be a tremendous amount competition. It would be a lot harder to get traffic to the websites.
Another problem is that if you are going to focus on the less paying keywords to avoid competition. You need so dang much traffic. If you’re only getting a few cents a click, man that’s tough. Only a small percentage of the traffic will be clicking on the ads, in most cases.
Another problem is that people are starting to tune it out. I know I do. I never click on adsense ads. A lot of people are just on the Internet because they want to get entertained etc. A person knows that the businesses that advertise on those Google Ads, are trying to make money off of them.
What other alternatives are there?
Well, you could affiliate other products. You don’t have to have a product to sell or have a sales page or deal with customer service, but you can make a lot of money doing it.
It gives you some more possiblities. You can find great products or services that may offer a great commission. They might also offer you a recurring commission. Those are really nice because you only have to get one sale and get paid month after month from that.
You can also do more things to get people to the sales pages. You can write a review, you can put a link on a pop-up add, you can use a peel away ad etc. so you have more options.
If you find a hot product to affiliate, you can get a good conversion rate from their sales page. Some products offer a high commission rate and some product or services are expensive. You could get $50 or more from just one sale!
The Best Paying Products to Promote
Let’s face it, the people that don’t make it online don’t make enough money to pay their bills. One of the reasons why they can’t is because they don’t sustain and maintain a steady stream of income.
Income level goes up and down up and down. With recurring income you can pretty much set a bottom level on the low end of your income and set the bottom. From there you can’t go anywhere but up!
What can you do to get recurring income? Well, one great thing that you can do is find products or services to promote that provide a recurring commission and become an affiliate.
Membership sites that provide recurring affiliate commissions are great things to promote. You want to make sure that the membership site is very good and provides good value to it’s members and has a good sales page, but once you find them, they can be a gold mine!
I don’t care what niche market you’re in or what niches you want to pursue. Chances are that there are plenty of paid membership sites and most of them have affiliate programs that you can sign up for.
Other things that you want to target are services that offer recurring commissions. The possibilities are really endless for this. There are so many different niche markets and there are so many different services for each niche.
Paid newsletter’s that send out a newsletter to their subscribers. There are newsletters in all kinds of different niche markets. Think about all of the services that are provided online.
They have online services for pretty much everything now. Everyday more and more things are getting automated. That’s more opportunity to affiliate online services.
Think about it this way. You’re making one sale and potentially getting paid every month for it, for potentially years! That’s a great thing, my friend. You’re making a lot of money doing that and it’s a lot less work to promote because one sale can equal many sales if you’re promoting products or services that pay a one time commission.
Just remember that recurring income is your friend and you should seek it out anytime that you can!
Selecting the Best Affiliate Programs
If you’re going to get all of these refunds, it just isn’t worth it. A sales page that converts is something that can’t be understated. I don’t care how good the product or offer is, they must have a sales page that converts. I’m not going to waste my time sending traffic to a sales page that doesn’t convert.
Another major factor that comes into the equation is how much money that I think that I have to spend promoting it. It isn’t about the amount that I will spend, it is about the amount that I plan on gaining, the net.
I don’t care if I’m making $100 a sale or $5 a sale. It is all about the net gain and how many times that I can replicate that net gain. I’ll give you an example of what I’m talking about.
Say that I’m using pay-per click traffic and I’m using landing pages to get to the affiliate sales page. If the payout is $100 and it costs me $90 to get a sale, I’m only making a $10 net. If the payout is only $25 and I pay $10 to get a sale, the $25 payout is more fruitful.
There are other things that would go into that equation. I may be able to scale up the $100 payout campaign and it doesn’t cost me much more and I can make a lot more sales. The $25 payout may cost me a lot more to scale that campaign up and it may not be as fruitful as the $100 payout, in the end. It is all about testing and variables.
The last thing that goes into picking an affiliate program is my infrastructure in that niche. What I mean by that is how many assets that I already have in that niche market. If I already have a mailing list in that niche, it is pretty obvious. It also helps if I have a website or blog in that niche and if I have promoted a product or service in that niche before.
Promote High Quality Products
The problem with this is if the product or service is crap, you’re going to get a bad reputation. Reputation is so vitally important for any business and especially an online business.
Make no mistake about it. If you’re an Internet Marketer you’re running a business and if you’re running a business you need to have a good reputation as a straight shooter, if you want your business to survive for the long-term.
Think about how you promote products. You promote them on websites, write articles etc. People think that they can only get repeat business from people who buy products from them, not true.
Affiliates can get repeat business too. If your website helps them and the product or services that you promote help them. They will remember that and come back. If you don’t help them, they won’t.
If you become an expert in a certain market and write articles about it and affiliate products. They will remember your name for one of two reasons. You helped them or hurt them, it’s plain and simple. You could get repeat business and good word of mouth publicity or it could work the other way.
I’ll give you an example. When I got into the make money online business I bought into the hype of taking online surveys and thinking I was going to make all of this money online.
Didn’t work that way. You had to be in certain demographics to take most of them and there weren’t that many to take and you had to give your e-mail address and get 100′s of e-mails and they are always asking you to sign up for offers. I made exactly $2 from my online survey experience.
Well, after I found out it was over-hyped and people were peddling it because the products were converting so well. Any website that promoting that stuff or any person that promoted it, I not only avoiding like the plague, I went on and told everyone that would listen about my bad experience with it.
That’s a big reason why you don’t want to promote garbage. They might of got my sale one time, but they certainly won’t get business from me again and I have told countless people about my bad experience and they won’t get their business either.
Is Affiliate Marketing for You?
People get into affiliate marketing for many reasons. They don’t think that they can put together a product or offer. That may or may not be true, but the important thing is that they believe that they can’t. If they can’t, they don’t really fancy having to hire someone to write it or do it for them.
They don’t think that they can create a good sales page. Again, that may or may not be true and they don’t want to shell out the big bucks and hire a professional copywriter. They might not want to handle the customer service.
Affiliate marketing can be a great thing. Anyone can get into it and you can make a ton of money without having a lot of resources, but it can be a lot of work.
There are reasons why people like me create our own products and write our own sales pages and handle customer service or pay the big bucks to outsource them. One of the reasons is that we can get affiliates to do some of the dirty work for us.
As an affiliate you have to realize that you may have to really roll up your sleeves and get to work. It will entail a lot of research. You have to research products that you want to affiliate. You have to see how their sales page converts, how much you can make a sale, what their refund rate is etc.
You also have to research how you’re going to market this product to people or the group of people that you have built relationships with. You have to research how you’re going to stick out from the crowd and the competition and just how you’re going to go about this.
You have to figure out what strategies that you’re going to use to promote the product or offer. A lot of successful article marketers will write between five to ten articles a day.
For most people, that isn’t an easy task. Not with all the distractions that come with the proposition of working from home. I’m not saying this to discourage anyone, but it’s the truth. I don’t care what strategy that you use, you better realize that you’re going to have to put some real time and effort into it, for it to start bearing some real fruit.
How to Make a Fortune Promoting Other People’s Products
By Jimmy D. Brown of “Affiliatenaire”
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In a hurry? Click Here to get the scoop!
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There must be a reason why some affiliates succeed and some fail, a reason why some affiliates profit moderately and some affiliates profit substantially.
There must be a reason.
There is.
And that reason is this: “super” affiliates start, sustain and strengthen relationships with subscribers.
It begins and ends with a list. Even a small one can be a powerful, profitable mechanism if you follow these 7 guidelines…
1. CAPTURE THE OPTIN FIRST.
Instead of sending traffic directly to your affiliate link, send them to YOUR site where you offer some kind of list for them to join. (Hint: Mini-course works best) Once you have them on a list, they become an asset. If you send them directly to an affiliate page and they don’t buy, they’re gone forever. On your list, you can follow-up with them indefinitely.
Note: You can even redirect them to your affiliate link AFTER they join your list, effectively getting them there you wanted them to go in the first place.
2. DIFFERENTIATE THE OFFER.
Instead of sending out the same, tired, lame advertisement that every other affiliate in the world sends out, write your own. Trust me when I say that many people find it OFFENSIVE when they receive two dozens duplicate emails from two dozen list owners all promoting the exact same thing in the exact same way. And even if they don’t find it offensive, it’s not as effective if you simply rinse and repeat what everyone else is doing.
Hint: Here’s how you differentiate…
3. SPEAK FROM EXPERIENCE.
Nothing – nothing – nothing speaks louder than RESULTS. If you want to lose a few pounds, who do you turn to? Someone who is still struggling with their own weight or someone you’ve seen drop 35 pounds? Exactly.
The way you make your mailings / ads different is you speak from your own personal experience. This product or service that you are promoting as an affiliate, how has it been useful to you personally? What results have you personally achieved? When you used it, what happened?
Note: If you haven’t personally used the product, then shame on you for trying to make a quick buck from it hocking it to others!
4. OFFER A COMPELLING INCENTIVE.
Another way to be different – and to dramatically increase your chances of getting a sale as an affiliate – is to offer some kind of compelling incentive if someone buys the offer through YOUR referral link. Whether it’s a special report or access to an audio recording, personalized consultation or advertising, a private training call or existing products and services, this can be a highly effective method of converting fence-setters into paying customers.
In order for it to work well, it must be UNIQUE (I.E. You’re the only one making the offer) and USEFUL (I.E. Something of great perceived value to the reader).
Note: Don’t have anything to offer? Don’t worry! There are many ways to easily obtain extra incentives: conduct an interview, hire a ghostwriter to create articles / reports for you, buy reprint rights to other products, assemble a bunch of free articles and other resources into a private access site, etc.
5. LOOK FOR RESIDUAL OPPORTUNITIES.
Rather than exhaust your efforts on purchases that give you a one-time commission, why not make the most of your marketing by looking firstly for offers that pay out ONGOING monthly commissions for your referred sales?
There are many different residual income generating services such as membership sites (ranging from PT Cruisers to weight loss), stock photos and clipart, hosting, autoresponders, databases (from hiking trails to sermon outlines) online magazines and a variety of other subscription based opportunities that reward you with monthly recurring commissions.
While you definitely want a mix of types of affiliate programs to promote, your priority should be in identifying and promoting those services and programs that will pay you month after month, instead of only one time.
6. BUILD A SALES ARMY.
One of the biggest untapped sources of income in any list is that of “turning subscribers into partners”. In other words, find those on your list who are interested in making money and provide them with training and materials to promote affiliate programs as well.
This has a two-fold advantage for YOU:
* First, if you find 2-tier affiliate programs, you can get your subscribers to join the program through your referral. Anytime they get a sale, you’ll earn a commission as well. You effectively get free commissions from their effort.
* Secondly, you can use their efforts to build your own assets. For example: If you provide them with a 10-page report to give away to promote their affiliate link, you can include a page in the report promoting YOUR list! You effectively get free subscribers from their effort.
7. MONETIZE FOR MULTIPLE STREAMS.
As your own list continues to grow, you certainly want to diversify in your offerings. (Not to the point of bombarding your list with offers every day of course!)
* Promote other affiliate programs.
* Create your own products.
(Even short $10 reports will earn profit!)
* Establish joint ventures.
* Co-author products.
* Cross promote.
* Conduct surveys.
There are MANY ways to make money from you list and keep your list growing, growing, growing!
Remember, it all comes down to: starting, sustaining and strengthening relationships with subscribers.
And that’s how you make a fortune as an affiliate promoting other people’s products.
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Jimmy D. Brown is the author of “Affiliatenaire”, teaching you how to create big-time affiliate commission checks in only 1-3 hours each week. Discover how you can get cash in the bank without a website, experience or even an idea! Visit http://www.nichefacts.com/Affiliatenaire
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