Advanced Affiliate Marketing Strategies For Bloggers
Affiliate marketing is, and will likely always remain, my favorite method for making money online. At the risk of repeating myself, here’s why every blogger should get into the affiliate marketing game -
- You make a margin per product sale that is often as good or better than the person or company that produces the product
- You don’t have to do any product fulfillment, handle cancellations or any customer service whatsoever
- You have a huge range of products to choose from in most mainstream product categories
- You can enter new niches any time you like with zero switching cost, simply by finding a new product to promote as an affiliate (this is for those of you who like variety)
- If you have a product of your own, one of the best ways to get affiliates to promote your product is to make sales of their product as an affiliate first (this is a big one!)
I could go on, but let’s state the obvious and most important aspect: Affiliate marketing is great because you can make very good money for very little effort.
Don’t get me wrong, it requires effort to get to a situation where you can make money as an affiliate, but once you are there the actual process for making money is very, very simple. It’s as easy as writing a blog post or sending an email.
It’s Like Printing Money
I remember about four years ago reading all those hyped-up sales pages from Internet marketers, and I come across the phrase “it’s like printing money”.
I’ve never been a hater of sales copy, although obvious hype agitates me just like anyone else. I certainly believed that some people were enjoying a situation where they could just send emails and make big money, but I was personally very far away from that. Jealousy mixed with depression about my own results, were the dominant emotions I felt at the time when I read what other people were achieving apparently so easily.
My first attempt at “printing money” as an affiliate was with my blog when it was about six months old. I put in a couple of hours to write a blog post about Perry Marshall’s Definitive Guide To Google AdWords and managed to print about $20 in commissions – one sale.
I was disappointed given it had taken me six months of consistent work on my blog to make that $20, however I was also encouraged. I could see given enough time and energy, that $20 could be $200 and then $2,000 and even $20,000. Today I have the audacity to believe it could be $200,000 one day too.
Fast forward to the year 2009 and the first six month’s of affiliate promotions have gone like this…
Are You Ubiquitous In Your Market?
Do you know what ubiquitous means?
Ubiquitous
“Being or seeming to be everywhere at the same time”
When you apply this term to business, to be ubiquitous means to dominate your niche.
If there is a conversation going on anywhere in the world about the thing that you do, your name comes up. When people ask where to find help with something your name comes up. People talk about you, reference you and discuss your actions. You dominate the conversation, occupy mindspace and are a thought leader.
Do you think that leads to more sales?…Ahh, yes it does.
Today with the Internet it’s much easier to become ubiquitous because of the free flow of information. Thanks in part to Google style algorithms and a conversational blogosphere, in general the cream should rise to the top, so provided what you do has substance and you know how to position yourself, you can become ubiquitous, to a degree at least.
Ubiquitous At What?
How To Launch A Membership Site – Part 1: Build Your Preeminence
This is the first part of a series of articles reviewing the steps to launch your own membership site online. The inspiration for this series comes from my recent experience launching Blog Mastermind. I will recount my journey leading up to the present, approximately one month after the successful release of my blog mentoring program, which uses a membership model.
I’ve been a huge fan of the membership business model because it creates a dependable income stream. I like this for the obvious reason – your cash flow is more consistent – but also because the reliable income lets you invest serious time and energy in your customers, because you are well rewarded on an ongoing basis for doing so.
Compare this to a one time product sale, where your inclination might be to make a big bang, generate the majority of your sales during the first few days – weeks at best – and then watch your income drop to a trickle. Once the income drys up you have little interest in improving your product and most marketers move on to their next product rather than nurture their current customers.
While some commodity or essential products always have demand, when you enter these markets you face intense competition, often based on price, and you don’t want to compete in a market where the lowest price wins, because unless you have the systems of Wal Mart, you don’t make money.
I like the stability, the sense of running a real business and the pleasure of constant interaction with your clients, that comes from managing a membership site. It’s certainly not easy work – I’m definitely working a lot harder now than I was before – but the role is very enjoyable and the intrinsic rewards – the positive feedback and the ongoing relationships – make it a fantastic business to be in.
It’s taken a long time for me to get to this point, with several stalled starts along the way and much learning too, but I’m pleased to say that I feel a great sense of comfort with my current position. Now let me pass on to you what I have learned in the grand tradition of the Entrepreneur’s Journey….
How To Set-Up Your Sales Funnel
In the final chapter of this series on the Sales Funnel we look at how you can begin the process of setting up your own sales funnel based business, in particular an Internet business. I will illustrate using an example of the sales funnel I am currently developing for my own blogging information business.
If you haven’t read the first three parts of this series please do so now.
- The Sales Funnel Explained
- The Sales Funnel Part 2: Generating Leads At The Front End
- The Sales Funnel Part 3: Back End Profits
Find A Profitable Niche
Once you realize the potential of a sales funnel, which I hope you do by now after reading this series of articles, you should consider the possibilities of creating one in your niche.
A sales funnel can only succeed in a market where there is a demand for what you offer and you are capable of delivering services or products to meet that demand. Assuming you are operating in a marketplace and meet those two criteria, then you have a business and can begin the process of planning your sales funnel.
If you are yet to find your market niche then your focus must remain on finding the right business opportunity for you. You can’t build a successful sales funnel if you don’t have a market for the products and services you sell, so make sure you tick that box first.
If you are not sure whether you have a good market for a sales funnel you can test by setting up initial lead capture mechanisms and attempt to make front end product sales. This can be as simple as an email newsletter combined with selling an ebook, or even before creating a product, by performing keyword research and setting up a survey site, just like you do with the ebook business model.
Until you have actually made money you can never be certain the potential for a sales funnel based business is there. I’d place more trust in your conversion rate for actual sales rather than opt-in rates to a free newsletter as indication of a business opportunity. Having a newsletter as a relationship builder is a great first step – just don’t assume people are willing to buy until you sell something.
Planning Your Sales Funnel
The Sales Funnel Part 2: Generating Leads At The Front End
In part one of this series on the Sales Funnel, I related my story of becoming a customer of the Double Your Dating information product business, and how I experienced the sales funnel used by David DeAngelo, to sell his dating products.
The sales funnel is a systematic marketing process where you progressively filter your prospects into customers and further refine them into hyper-responsive customers. Your customer base becomes smaller and your profits increase as you sell higher priced items to your hyper-responsives in the back end of your sales funnel.
Before any of this can happen, at the top of the funnel you need to attract prospects, and it’s at this point where your marketing creativity can really shine.
The Front-End
The front-end is the most dynamic aspect of the sales funnel and the area that requires continuous experimentation. There are literally endless techniques available at the front-end, limited only by your resources and imagination.
