Secrets of Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is by far the fastest way to get started making money online. Affiliate marketing means that all you do is send hits to someone else’s website, they do everything else (make the product, design the sale page, handle the billing and support, etc.), and you get a percentage of the sale price as your commission (usually 50% or more for digital products).

Here’s just a few benefits

1. You’re able to start almost instantly without having to make a product, write the sales page, design the website, create marketing materials, or set up the ordering, billing & delivery system.
2. It runs on auto-pilot for you because you don’t have to do the customer support or deal with billing or technical issues.
3. There’s no risk for you, 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.

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

There is one major drawback…

Once you send your visitors to the product sales page, they are gone forever. Unfortunately, the majority of those visitors (at least 90%) will not buy on their first visit. That’s fine for the product owner because she can sell to them again and again, but you can’t.

How can you avoid this pitfall?

What you need to do is capture the contact info of your visitors before sending them to the product website. 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’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:

1. Owning a list of potential buyers gives you the ability to market additional products at the push of a button.
2. 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.

Here’s what you’ll need to create affiliate tools like this:

1. A squeeze page, and even better, a video squeeze page.
2. One or more content-rich “warm up” pages
3. An email series with at least 5 high-quality content emails

The video squeeze page is where you’ll direct your traffic instead of directly to the product sales page. 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.

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. 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 it’s worth the effort to put a system like this in place, because doing so will increase your profits by 500% or more.  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. On the plus side, you’ll save a ton of time and money vs. trying to build this yourself. Plus you can get started instantly. 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 you need to take if you’re going to be serious about your affiliate marketing.

Sometimes it’s more about the package than the content. And sometimes a presentation sells a product more effectively than describing it, no matter how great it might be.

Here’s what I mean:

I’ve been lucky to experience some extraordinary things in my life, and you can read about it by exploring the About tab at the top of this page. But if you want to be exhilarated, just run over to
Gil’s page. You’ll be wowed out of your socks — not because he’s 39 and he’d rather go to the beach than a pool, but because of the way he tells it.

Gil’s “25 things about me” entry is nothing less than a great example of a natural talent to tell a story in a way that propels the ordinary to “wow.”

He makes you want to know more, without leaving you exhausted (or bored or revealing too much about himself) by just reading about his exploits.

I’m not psychic, but I could get away with claiming it, because my prediction for his future is going to be right: His future is going to be bright!