Affiliate Marketing
Table of Contents
Chapter 1:
What to expect as an Affiliate Marketer – The Lifestyle
• How
Much Does an Affiliate Marketer Make?
• The
Affiliate Marketing Lifestyle: What Does Affiliate Marketing Involve?
• How
to Approach Affiliate Marketing
Chapter 2: How
the Affiliate Marketing Actually Works – The Mechanics
• Types
of Affiliate Program and Choosing the Best Product
• Some
More Tips for Choosing Your Affiliate Product
• Why
do Product Creators on Digital Affiliate Networks Give Away So Much
Profit?
• Your
Beginner Strategy: Don’t Reinvent the Wheel
• Scaling
Up
Chapter 3: Time to Make Sales
• What
is a Sales Page? Creating the Layout
• Writing
Your Sales Script
• Value
Proposition
Chapter 4:
Platforms You Can Use to Make Sales
• Blog
Posts
• Email
Marketing
• Affiliate
Marketing in Person
• Using
Your Existing Routes to Market
•
Influencer Marketing
Chapter 5:
Content Marketing - Marketing Your Email
List, Blogs and Sales Page
• The
Power of Content Marketing
• PPC
Conclusions
Chapter 1:
What to expect as an Affiliate Marketer – The
Lifestyle
If you’re looking to make a ton
of money online, then the best option for the widest selection of people is
undoubtedly affiliate marketing. This is the online business model with the
lowest barriers to entry that anyone can learn and anyone can master. At the
same time, it is potentially one of the most profitable business models you can
use online and certainly much more profitable than blogging for AdSense revenue
or similar.
And this is a point that advertisers on Facebook often
like to labour. Chances are that you’ll have seen plenty of adverts for online
money making schemes and ‘programs’.
And no doubt 9/10 times, they’ll be based
around affiliate marketing.
You’ll know these ads if you see
them. They’re the ones where people talk to you from their private yacht and
tell you how they make a 6-figure salary in just a few hours of work each week.
Likewise, you’ll have probably
have seen the videos of online ‘billionaires’ talking about their money-making
systems while wearing smart suits in very pimped-out offices. They’ve created a
‘digital empire’ all their own using affiliate marketing techniques and now
they’re rich and powerful and you probably want to be them… But is this all
true? Can you really accomplish all that through affiliate marketing? Is it
really that easy? Or is there more to it than that?
How Much Does an Affiliate Marketer Make?
First of all, let’s assess the
claims about earnings. We don’t have to guess at this. During the Affiliate
Summit over 1,800 affiliate marketers answered a survey describing everything
from their methods to their earnings.
How much were they bringing in?
Well, only 46% earned less than
$20K while 8% earned $50K-$100K and 12% earned $100K+. At the very least, this
shows it’s certainly very possible to
earn big money. (The rest were around the middle, but note that 19% elected not
to answer at all.)
What’s also interesting here
though is the sheer spread of earnings.
Affiliate marketing is bringing in from $20K to $100K and beyond, which you
just don’t find in traditional careers.
So what’s making the big difference here?
It’s the skill of the individual.
As an affiliate marketer, you’re
self-employed and working alone. There’s no need to ‘climb the corporate
ladder’ or to compete for promotions. You can get to the top overnight if you
have the right skills because it’s all on
you.
And in this book, we’ll be
looking at the secrets you need to really start earning the big bucks as an
affiliate marketer.
The Affiliate
Marketing Lifestyle: What Does Affiliate Marketing Involve?
Perhaps the biggest draw of
affiliate marketing though is not the money. Instead, for many people the
appeal lies in the fact that this is a completely ‘passive’ business model.
Once you’ve set everything up such as your sales funnel, your affiliate network
account and your blog/sales page, then you can literally be earning money while
you’re sleeping or while you’re on holiday.
But again this can get twisted.
This lifestyle is what you can achieve once you’re at the top of your game as
an affiliate marketer – it doesn’t come overnight.
In fact, affiliate marketing is
likely to initially involve a lot of
work. The idea here is that you put in the work up front so that you can sew
the seeds of your labor further down the line. To begin with, you need to be
willing to put in a lot of hours for very little reward.
Specifically then, what does affiliate
marketing involve?
If you’re reading this book,
then there’s a good chance you have a general idea but we’ll recap in a little
more detail for those who do not.
Essentially, as an affiliate
marketer, you sell products for commission. This means you’ll be finding
products online and promoting them using your own affiliate link. If someone
clicks on your link and then buys the
product, you’ll get a cut of the profit. Often, affiliate marketing involves
selling digital products and you can expect your cut to be as much as 50% all
the way up to 75% of the RRP.
There’s no risk involved for you
because you’re not creating the product and there’s nothing for you to ship or
for you to store. All you have to do is sell but you earn more than the creator.
The hard part though is in doing
that selling. This is where the ‘marketing’ part comes in and your job from
here is to find yourself a large audience through a blog, through an email
campaign, through advertising or through social media; whichever tool you find
the most effective.
This is why there’s no steep
learning curve or barrier for entry for beginners. All you’re literally doing
is making sure people see your affiliate link. There’s no product creation and
no investment. You can get started tomorrow in minutes and it won’t cost you a
penny.
If you’re a big blogger and you
already have an audience of 10,000 readers a day then you’re going to find this
very easy. All you need to do is put some very persuasive text on your website
along with the link and you’ll start driving traffic. If this is your first
attempt at affiliate marketing though, then you may well find this process a
little more complex and little more hard going.
You
now have two options:
Build
your own audience
Advertise
(Actually, there are other
methods and growth hacks you can use which we’ll come to later, but for now
this will suffice.)
Advertising
If you’re going to use the route
of paid marketing, then that means you’re going likely going to be using PPC.
This is ‘Pay Per Click’ and basically means that you pay for every person who
clicks on an ad and thus gets sent to your site. The more you pay, the more
visitors you get.
If you design your site well and
you can really convince people to buy your products, then you should be able to
convert a predictable amount of visitors into buyers. This in turn means you
can work out your precise ROI. So if you pay a certain amount per visitor, and
N percentage of those visitors earn you X amount of money, you can tell whether
or not your strategy is profitable.
The amount you pay per click
will depend on the amount of competition available for your ad. PPC ads work on
a ‘bidding’ system, whereby the advertiser offering the most per click is the
advertiser whose ad is most likely to show.
Meanwhile, even if your website
is very effective at convincing people to buy, you’ll still only get 0.5%-10%
of visitors converting (and more often, you’ll be at the bottom end of that
spectrum). So you’ll need your ad to be seen by about 1,000-2,000 people in
order for you to get a single sale, which means you’ll be paying a relatively
high amount for your ad to be seen 10,000 to 20,000 times for about 100 sales.
This is a formula that takes a
lot of adjusting and you can expect to lose a certain amount of money before
you get it right. With a good set-up,
you can expect to spend $600 a day on PPC to make about $200 profit. That’s
quite a big risk when you’re first starting out and for the first few months
you probably will be operating at a loss (until you learn the right keywords to
target, the right products to sell, the right sales pitch etc.).
Building an Audience
If you don’t have that kind of
money to play around with, then your only other option is to build your
audience naturally over time.
That means creating a blog and
then using it to promote yourself through social media and to build up a
mailing list full of subscribers. Again, you can’t expect your conversion rate
to be all that high and you’re going to need about 10,000 views daily to make
even close to a full time living.
Getting to this point is slow
going. You can expect it to take at least a year before you’re on 600 visitors
a day and while you’ll accumulate exponential growth at this point, it will
still likely be a few years before you’re at 10,000.
Oh and at this point, affiliate
marketing is anything but passive. At
this stage, you’ll be investing huge amounts of time into writing a compelling
blog that people will want to follow, emailing your subscribers and managing
advertising campaigns.
It is very much possible to be highly successful at affiliate marketing.
You definitely can earn hundreds of thousands from it and once you’re all
set up, the money will come in while
you sleep.
But it also requires a big upfront investment of time and/or money,
along with the right knowhow and
strategy. If it didn’t, then everyone would be rich, no one would work for an
employer and the economy would have collapsed.
So it’s a good thing really…
How to Approach Affiliate Marketing
That last paragraph wasn’t
intended to depress you and hopefully you haven’t put the book/tablet down and
abandoned all hope at this point. This is simply a reality check.
All it means, is that you need
to set out with not only the right approach, but also the right expectations.
Don’t go into affiliate marketing thinking you’ll be a millionaire overnight
because you’ll only be sorely disappointed and this will lead to your giving
up. Instead, understand that this is a slow process and that to begin with,
it’s not going to be your sole income.
The way you can get around this
is to make affiliate marketing into a kind of hobby on top of your regular job.
Or you can set up some different,
alternate online business model in order to earn the money you need to invest
into affiliate marketing and in order to find the time necessary to be working
on it.
This might seem like a lot of
work but if you can find the time in the evening to upload three articles per
week and do a little bit of marketing, you should be able to make some steady
progress. If you can invest 3 hours a week, this is likely enough.
And while you won’t be rich, the rewards
for this will still be impressive.
Let’s say you start making one
sale a week at $40 profit. You’re not paying for advertising but rather
building your blog organically.
This now means you’re making an
additional $160 a month. That in turn is an impressive $1,920 on top of your
regular salary. Or in other words, easily enough to enjoy a free holiday. Or to
buy yourself a nice computer and some new clothes.
This will accelerate pretty
fast, earning you $3,000 or $4,000 over the year. Even if you never progress
beyond that point, you’ve now massively increased annual salary and you can now
live a completely different lifestyle.
You’ll have financial security,
a backup in case you ever find yourself unemployed. What’s more, if you’ve
chosen to sell products in a niche you’re interested in, then you’ll be able to
do all this while essentially enjoying learning about a subject you love. And
as you build a big audience, you’ll find it’s highly rewarding becoming an
‘authority’ in that area and having fan mail and a huge captive audience.
Keep it up and eventually you can start earning millions while you sleep.
Just make sure that this isn’t
your initial goal. Initially, your goal should be to earn some nice
supplementary income.
This might sound trivial but it
really isn’t. Starting out with the right expectations and intentions will be
the difference between giving up and enjoying a great career ahead that
eventually sets you free.
That is the first and most important ‘secret’ to affiliate
marketing. But the rest are going to help you accelerate your progress with
growth hacks and other techniques. This way, you won’t have to wait all that long until you start making the
progress you deserve/that likely attracted you to affiliate marketing to begin
with.
Chapter 2:
How the Affiliate Marketing Actually Works – The
Mechanics
We’ve seen how affiliate
marketing works but what we haven’t addressed yet is the precise mechanics and
how understanding this can help you to be more effective at your job.
What happens for example, when someone clicks
on one of your affiliate links?
The answer is ‘cookies’. Cookies
are small files that get saved on the computer and are handled by your browser.
Websites can store cookies and then look for them and they use this to keep you
logged into Facebook, or to show you relevant adverts based on your browsing
history.
When a buyer clicks on your
link, they get sent to the checkout page for a specific product. At the same
time though, a cookie will be stored on their computer which will identify them
as having been referred by you. This then means that when they make a purchase,
the profits can be allocated to you.
Understanding this is important because it introduces a
potential risk – that people will see what you’re selling and navigate there of
their own accord. This is called ‘link bypassing’ and it’s worth your while to
prevent this using link cloaking.
That means using a redirect that sends people to your affiliate link while
hiding the URL from them.
You can do this using a simple bit of
code:
<meta http-quiv=”refresh” content=”0;
url=http://www.example.com/affiliatelink”> Alternatively, you can use
something like TinuUrl or Bit.ly.
It’s also worth doing a little
research into the affiliate scheme that you’re going to be working with. That’s
because the creator of a cookie also gets to set the lifespan. A cookie can
last a few minutes, or it can last until the user actively chooses to delete
their cookies/changes computer.
Of course it’s much better for
you to have an affiliate scheme with cookies that don’t expire at all. Amazon
has a ‘session limited’ cookie scheme for instance that only lasts 24 hours.
That’s actually pretty good in this case though, considering that people
already know about Amazon and you can make money from other things people buy from the site that day.
What’s also key to note is
whether a subsequent affiliate can ‘override’ your cookie. This becomes
relevant if someone should click your affiliate link, not make a purchase, then
click someone else’s affiliate link
and buy. Who gets the money? This depends on whether the affiliate honors the
first click or last click. If you are a ‘lifetime referrer’ then you will always be given credit for the referral
regardless of what else happens subsequently.
Types of Affiliate Program and Choosing the
Best Product
With those technical details out
the way, it’s time to start choosing affiliate products and schemes. The first
step here is going to be in deciding which type
of affiliate scheme you want to join up to. Do you want to sell a digital
product? A physical product? Or a service?
The best answer for most
beginners will be a digital product. This means something like an eBook, a free
report or a digital course. There’s no cost associated with production, storage
or delivery here and as such the product creator gets a much bigger slice of
the profit. What’s more, they have more profit to share with you and that means you can earn up to
50-75% from each sale.
To find these products, you
should look at an affiliate network such as JVZoo, ClickBank, Comission Junction or Warrior Special Offers.
To use one of these sites, all
you need to do is sign up, browse through the available products and then apply
to work as an affiliate for a few. You can see data and information about each
one, such as the number of sales, the cost etc.
From there, you want to choose a
digital product that is making a lot of sales but also offers you a good amount
of cash per sale. Think too about how you’re going to market each of those
products and what ‘angle’ you’ll go with to make it desirable for your
audience.
Trying out the product is a very
good idea, as is finding one that offers free marketing materials that the
product creator designed. Some will come with free landing pages, blog posts,
email autoresponder sequences and more that you can utilize.
Promoting digital products means
you make more money per sale and it means there’s less that can go wrong. It’s
also the preferred method by many digital marketers, which means you’ll find a
lot more advice and help.
Some people though will feel
more comfortable selling physical products which they can do by signing up to Amazon Associates or Shareasale. People like selling
physical products because they still have a much wider audience. It’s a certain
type of person who is willing to spend $50 on an eBook and anyone who is a
technophobe, who wants something physical, or who is savvy enough to know they
can get most information for free will be uninterested.
On the other hand, we all spend money on physical items – from
Grandmas, to jocks to genius coders. This means you have a much larger potential audience. Unfortunately though, physical
products also cost a lot more to produce and to ship and normally they go
through more channels before you get the opportunity to promote them. When you
sell a product through Amazon for instance, the money is going to get split
between you, the product creator, Amazon, the delivery company and possibly
even another reseller.
As such, affiliates on Amazon
tend to get as much as 4-8% per sale as opposed to 5075%. The products will also
often be cheaper and less geared toward getting digital sales. Why would
someone click your link to buy a computer when they can just go to their local
technology store? These are the considerations you’ll need to take into account
when you start trying to sell physical products rather than digital ones. Of
course there’s nothing to stop you from selling both types of product, though then you do risk cannibalizing your
own sales.
Ultimately, it makes more sense
to start with digital products because you can make a bigger earning from fewer
sales. When you’re not yet getting the sheer volume of visitors you need to
make hundreds of sales, selling digital products is still the quicker route to
making more money.
Finally, you can look at selling
services or memberships. These will often provide you with what are known as
‘lifetime commissions’. For instance, if you can get people to sign up to a
gambling site, then you might be able to earn commission from them for the
lifetime of their membership. Get enough of these and you can be set for life –
but of course there are unique challenges here too.
There are far fewer of these
sorts of affiliate schemes for instance (for obvious reasons) and normally the
best way to find them is to visit the sites in person. This means you can end
up with lots of separate accounts and in turn, things can get a little fiddly.
This is more complex and perhaps not a great starting point for complete
beginners.
Some
More Tips for Choosing Your Affiliate Product
Something else to consider when
choosing an affiliate product is whether it’s something you will be able to sell. Not only must it be possible to sell generally, but you also need to be able
to sell it personally. That means
that ideally, it should be on a topic that you find interesting and that you
know how to sell.
When creating a blog or building
a mailing list, you will usually need to write a lot of blog posts and e-mails
on the topic of the product in order to build trust, provide value and offer a
reason for people to come to your website in the first place. If you aren’t
careful and you choose a subject you know nothing about, you’ll quickly find
this tiring and boring and you’ll again be more likely to quit. What’s more, is
that readers might be able to tell that you aren’t in fact an expert on the
subject and this will undermine the points you make and leave your readers less
inclined to trust you.
At the same time, you also need
to think about the advantages that are unique to you, such as any routes to
market you might have. A route to market is any direct link you have with a
potential audience – such as a blog or a magazine. If you already have a blog, then of course you need to
choose a product that your readers will find
interesting.
But you might also have some
additional routes to market. For instance, think about your contacts: do you
have the e-mail address of any top bloggers? Are you friends with the editor of
an industry magazine?
In other words, it basically
boils down to choosing a product that you already know you can sell. Even if you don’t have a direct route to market,
think about what the best routes to market for each product might be and how
you could go about reaching them. Don’t choose a product then think about how
you’ll sell it – choose the product because you know you can sell it. We’ll be talking more about this later in the
book.
Big Niche, Little Niche
Likewise, another consideration
you will have is whether to pick a ‘big niche’ or a ‘little niche’. Of course
every internet marketer knows that your ‘niche’ is your industry which at the
same time will dictate your subject matter.
So if you’re selling an eBook on
getting abs, your niche and your industry are ‘fitness’. On the other hand, if
you’re selling an eBook on making money online, then your niche is online
business.
Making money online is actually
the biggest niche you’ll find when it comes to digital products with affiliate
schemes. In fact, WSOPro (Warrior Forum Special Offers) is entirely dedicated to digital marketing products. Just behind
digital marketing as a niche
meanwhile are the fitness niche and the online dating niche.
This is a good thing because
these are proven niches. People are happy to spend money to make money and
they’ll also spend money to look and feel better or to find love. These are
also subjects that appeal to everyone. So if you’re looking for a product with
a proven track record, it will likely be in these areas.
But there’s also a problem here: that problem is that these areas
are highly competitive and
oversaturated for the same reasons. If you want to reach this audience then
you’re going to need to spend more money on PPC advertising as you’ll be
bidding against more competitors. Likewise, if you want to create a blog,
you’ll be competing with a much larger number of other blogs for the top spot
on Google and for readers.
Conversely if you create a blog
on ‘Super Meat Boy’ then you’ll be among maybe two other fan sites and you’ll
find that you can very quickly get seen by pretty much your entire audience. Likewise, you’ll
probably be able to pay to advertise on Google or Facebook for these terms without spending much money.
The same goes for writing about
a specific job or profession. If you’re selling an eBook on ‘stage lighting
techniques’ then you’ll find it much easier to reach those professionals
without spending vast amounts of money.
But at the same time, the
products will also appeal to a much smaller market. This means that it won’t
take as long to saturate the market and you likely won’t make as many sales
over the long term.
The answer? Often the best
strategy will be to start smaller and then to build your way up to reach the
bigger niches.
Another option is to choose an
affiliate product that aims at a smaller cross section of a much larger niche.
For instance, ‘fitness for the over 50s’ is a much smaller chunk of the larger
‘fitness’ niche. The same goes for ‘digital marketing for students’.
One more consideration though is
who that target demographic is and
specifically how much disposable income they have. In this regard, aiming at
the over fifty makes more sense than aiming students!
Why do Product Creators on Digital Affiliate Networks
Give Away So Much Profit?
Something you might be asking
yourself at this point is why a digital product manufacturer would be willing
to give away 75% of their profits; what’s in it for them?
To understand this, it’s worth
considering the power of scaling up. Sure, they’re only making 25% per sale but
if they have 20 affiliates selling 100 copies of their item a day, they’re
still going to make far more than any
of those individual affiliates. More importantly, they’ll be able to earn much much more than they would selling the
product on their own.
The more commission the
affiliates offer, the more people will come on board (versus other products)
and that means they’ll be able to continually scale up their profits. And
anyway, they’re probably still making money from their own marketing activities
where they’ll be making 100% per sale. The sales they get from you are all on top of their earnings.
Your Beginner Strategy: Don’t Reinvent the
Wheel
The great thing about affiliate
marketing through JVZoo or ClickBank is that you can start earning nearly as
much as the product creator themselves without having to create anything.
There’s really very little reason to spend lots of time and money creating a
product when you could just find one ready made to earn the same amount of
money for you right away.
But saving time and money is
only one big benefit of affiliate marketing. The other is the fact that the
products you’ll be selling will come ‘pre validated’.
What this basically means, is
that you know for sure that there’s
demand out there for the product you’re selling and that people actually want
to buy it.
When you create a product of
your own conversely, there’s a chance that after putting all the time and
effort in to build it, you’ll find that no one actually wants it. In that case,
all the marketing prowess in the world won’t help you and you’ll actually come
out of your affiliate marketing activities worse
off than you started.
With affiliate marketing, you
get to choose a product that is already selling lots of units and in some cases you can use their exact sales
scripts in order to sell it. This is a proven
quantity and as such, there’s nothing that can go wrong. This is literally
a ‘cut and paste’ business and all that’s left to you is to find your own
audience.
Unfortunately, many affiliate
marketers don’t realize this and they instead want to get clever with creating
their own unique business strategy. The same goes for all the people who try
inventing their own new app, or becoming the next massive blogger. That’s all
good and well but 9 times out of 10, they will fail. If you’re really serious
about earning money, you don’t need to re-invent the wheel. Just find what you know works and then use that exact
business model to earn money yourself.
This is the smartest way to
start making lots of money as an affiliate. Find what works and then go with it
– don’t try and be clever. Once you’ve had some initial success and earned some
cash then you can look at creating
your own product or changing the world. For now, settle for earning money in a
tried and tested manner, quickly and efficiently.
Scaling Up
Once you find the right product
and you begin making some money from it, you can continue with this ‘repeat
what works’ strategy in a very simple manner: by repeating it!
In other words, if you are
making money from a certain digital product in a certain niche, then why not
just completely mimic that model and start selling two different digital products? That quickly, you can double income as
well as giving yourself a backup and a more secure model as a result.
Alternatively, you can just
start spending more on your PPC ad campaign to drive more traffic there. Build
mini business models and monitor your conversion rate and then only once you’ve proven that they make
ROI, start spending more money on them to multiply your earnings.
28
Chapter 3:
Time to Make Sales
As mentioned, there will be some
cases where you can find digital products that are selling very well and that
actually provide you with their sales
page and even the e-mails they use. If you can find such a product then go for it. Especially if they share
their conversion rate. This removes variables from your process thereby
allowing you to fine tune your business model all the more quickly.
But that said, not all digital
products will provide these materials meaning that sometimes you’ll still need to create your own sales page and email
sequence. Likewise, there will be
times when you see ways to improve the sales page you’ve received.
That’s where this section comes
in: making things sell. By the end, you should know how to take your
conversions from a measly 1% and boost them to a highly profitable 10%.
What is a Sales Page? Creating the Layout
The first question is: what is a
sales page? The answer is that a sales page is an entire page on a website that
is completely dedicated to selling one product. This means there will be no
external links to other pages and no other products being promoted. The entire
page is designed to draw people to the ‘buy now’ button and to convince them
why they should in fact buy.
Chance are that you will have
visited sales pages in the past and you’ll know them through their design.
These pages are generally very vertical and have a very thin passage of text
that encourages lots of scrolling. This is no accident – the act of scrolling
down the page makes visitors feel as though they’re becoming more ‘committed’
to the product and the further they scroll, the less they will normally want to
then come away empty handed – it feels like a waste.
There will meanwhile be no
navigation and no links to other pages – for precisely the reason that they
distract away from the ‘buy now’ option. Finally, these pages are very often
designed to be either bright red or orange around the edges. There’s a reason
for this too: red and orange are colors that actually cause the heartrate to
increase and make us feel uncomfortable. These colors make us want to act
quickly to leave or to buy which
makes us more impulsive.
If you think of fast food
stores, then you’ll find that often these are red or orange in terms of their
interior design often too. The reason in this case is similar – they want to
increase turnover and get people out
of the store more quickly as that way they can serve more customers and make
more money!
Finally, there’s one more key
thing to consider when creating your landing page and that is trust and
barriers to sale.
When someone lands on your
website and sees you are selling a product, they will very often be suspicious
of you to begin with and worry that it’s a scam. People still don’t like
handing over their details online and so if they think your sales page looks
dodgy, they’ll often just leave.
Your job is to make it as simple
for them to buy as possible and to make them trust in the system you’ve set up
to enable that.
This is one of the big
advantages to selling products via Amazon Associates – here your checkout page
is Amazon itself which makes the buyers much more likely to trust that their
details aren’t going to get stolen. Likely they already use Amazon so they
might even be able to use the ‘buy with one click’ option to save themselves a
ton of time and to really encourage those impulsive buying decisions.
If you use JVZoo or Clickbank,
then the sales page will be built by those sites and this will likely be a
factor to consider when you choose which network to go with. Is their checkout
page professional looking? Would you
be happy to spend your money through it?
But the initial impression you
make on visitors will be down to the landing page itself; so it’s worth making
sure you put the time and effort in to create something that looks highly
professional and trustworthy. One of the easiest and best ways to do this is to
use a tool like Optimize Press. Optimize Press is a WordPress theme which you
can install with a single click to make your WordPress site into a traditional
sales page. When you do this, you’ll be using ready made layouts and images
that have been optimized over thousands of sites and that are constantly being
refined. Then all you have to do is to enter the text.
Remember what we said about not
reinventing the wheel? Why make it more difficult for yourself when you already
have the means to create something professional and proven.
Otherwise, consider using a
third party developer who has a good track record. This is better than attempting
to design the sales page yourself and coming up with something that looks less
than perfectly professional.
Writing Your Sales Script
Really though, a convincing
sales page is all about your sales script. The text you use to sell your
product is going to be the single biggest determining factor when it comes to
your conversion rates and this is something that is highly worth taking the time to learn.
There’s a lot to this though, so
bear with me while I explain the ins and outs of good persuasive writing.
Grabbing Attention
The first and biggest challenge
when it comes to making sales will be to grab the attention of your visitors
and to communicate that there’s something here worth reading and that they
shouldn’t navigate away from the site.
The unfortunate reality these
days, is that most people are in a rush all the time, have lots of work to do
and don’t have time to read through
large amounts of text. That means you can’t expect your audience to stick
around unless you give them a very good reason. You need to grab them with a
hook right away and then reel them in.
One of the best ways to do this
is to give your sales page a narrative structure. This means you need to turn
your pitch into a story that your audience can relate to. The reason this is so
effective is that we always want to know how stories end. Have you ever started
watching a trashy program late at night that you don’t care about, only to find
yourself unable to look away until the very end? In such scenarios you’ll often
watch for hours even though you aren’t enjoying it! This is the power of
narrative and it’s a very human impulse that you can use to your advantage.
Another advantage of using a
narrative is that it makes the situation more relatable. By telling people that
you used to be in the same position as them, you can get them interested and at
the same time you’ll be much more convincing.
This in fact is the basic
structure of many a successful sales page: introduce a problem and then offer a
solution. If you’re selling a book on abs, then the ‘problem’ is a lack of
fitness or inability to lose weight. The solution of course is your eBook and
you’re going to frame all this in a first person narrative where you discuss
how you were once overweight until
you found this incredible strategy that they can read about in your eBook.
Obesity, tiredness and
sluggishness are one type of ‘problem’. This is an emotional and abstract
problem that you can make anyone to relate to.
The other type of problem is
something specific and simple. For instance, if you are selling a book on stage
lighting (as we discussed earlier) then you would look for a very specific and
simple problem in this niche. Perhaps people struggle to afford the stage
lighting equipment they need. Maybe the lights keep falling over… I’m not an
expert in this field and that’s why it’s not a niche I would choose (remember we discussed picking a field you were
familiar with?).
Anyway, the point is that
selling a product that answers a very specific need is always a good strategy
as it simplifies your job to finding people who have that problem. This should
come into play when you pick your product: find a product that solves a clear
and easily defined problem.
Other things that grab attention
are bold statements and rhetorical questions. Rhetorical questions work well
because they force the reader to think and reflect. This means they can’t just
glance over the text and not take it in, but now have to actually engage with
it and think about what it means for them.
Bold statements meanwhile grab
attention simply through their brazenness. This could mean that you open up
with an unbelievable figure, or with a controversial claim. You can later
explain yourself but initially this is a great way to get people to stop what
they’re doing and to read.
Flow and Break Points
Just as you need to quickly grab
attention, you also need to make sure that you hold it and don’t let go – even
for a minute.
This is where flow comes in and
it’s very important to make sure that your text flows smoothly and without
obvious breaks. The text should be so compelling that it pulls the reader from
one line to the next without giving them the time to think to leave.
This is another reason for the
long narrow design that so many sales pages use – it naturally encourages flow.
The same is true with short
sentences and lots of space. Ideally you want to make your content as ‘skim
friendly as possible’, especially considering that most web users skim and
don’t read.
You do this by spacing out your
text but also by using lots of headers. In fact, it’s generally considered good
practice to write your headers so that the entire narrative of the text can be
discerned simply by reading the headings.
This is also a reason that sales pages
will often underline and bold sections.
A massive, dense block of text
will always be off putting and hard to read for someone in a hurry.
On the other hand though…
Imagine a text that spaces out its
sentences…
That uses lots of bold
statements…
And that engages the user with a strong
narrative.
And rhetorical questions.
How much more
effective might that be?
See the difference?
Another consideration when it
comes to flow is maintaining the interest of your audience and ensuring that
your content is never dull or boring. If you start repeating yourself, or if
the quality of your writing drops, you can lose your readers. A good solution
here then is to read the text through yourself and get other people to and then
identify the points where you occasionally lose interest. Once you do, just fix
that section by spacing it out more or using more interesting language.
Finally, you can also make sure
you hold attention by directly addressing any concerns of the reader. The big
problem you’re contending with here is people saying ‘yeah, but’. If they have
heard your pitch before then they’ll be cynical and they won’t engage with what
you’re saying. That’s why it’s your job to anticipate the problems they’ll have
and then answer them before they become an issue.
That’s why you’ll often encounter the ‘I
know what you’re thinking’ line:
‘I know what you’re thinking –
this is just another training program that you’ll never complete! You’ve tried
countless just like it right? What makes this one any different? I had the same
exact though but see that’s where Brutal
Ab Training is so effective. Because it works so quickly and because it’s
such a fun challenge, it incredibly
easy to stick to!’
Appealing to
Authority and Statistics
The above paragraph would be
very effective at convincing people that your product isn’t just like every other. But if you want to take it one step further,
you can also reference statistics or
authority figures. While we all know that statistics are remarkably easy to
manipulate, this doesn’t at all prevent them from being very effective tools
for persuasion.
Follow that last statement up
with a statistic then and you make it much more believable and convincing. For
instance:
‘Because it works so quickly and
because it’s such a fun challenge, it incredibly
easy to stick to! Maybe that’s why the program has a success rate of 95% across
over 3,000 users!’
Equally effective would be to
quote an authority in your field as this can similarly lend weight and credence
to your statements. Even just quoting a user can be effective – especially as
social influence plays such a big role in decision making. If you have quotes
from a bunch of people singing the praises of your program, then it not only
makes the program sound effective, it also makes it sound like something that’s
new and exciting that ‘everyone is trying’. In turn, that greatly increases the
desirability associated with it.
Value Proposition
Most important of all though
when it comes to your sales page is to keep in mind your value proposition. A
value proposition is essentially the thing that you are promising to do for
your buyer via the product. This is
what gives the product its value.
This should be at the forefront
of your sales pitch because it is what will give the product you’re selling its
emotional hook – and most things we buy are based on emotion rather than logic.
The old saying goes that you
don’t sell a hat, you sell a warm head. It’s much easier to sell a warm head because a cold head is a problem – and a
warm head is something that will make people happier and make people comfier.
Likewise, if you’re selling an
eBook on fitness then you aren’t selling a book.
Instead, you’re selling fitness, you’re selling confidence and you’re selling a
better love life – these are all the valuable things that having abs provides
you with. Selling a book on making money online? Then you’re really selling financial freedom and
you’re really selling freedom from debt or money problems. You can charge a lot
more for great abs and a great love life than you can for a PDF!
This is incredibly important as
it is ultimately what is going to get your readers to really want your products rather than just
being interested. This creates the emotion that will then lead to the snap
decision to buy – as long as you’ve made your sales page look professional and
you’ve provided lots of opportunities for people to click your CTA button (Call
To Action button).
Creating Urgency
When you get people reading your
sales page, you’re really trying to stir up a nice little ‘neurochemical
cocktail’ in their brain. You want to get them to focus with your bold
statements, your narrative structure and the problem you’ve outlined that needs
to be solved.
You’ve then focused on the value
proposition and you’ve got them imagining what life would be like with those
abs, or all that money. This then creates a real sense of desire and makes the
reader feel as though they must have
the item that you’re promoting.
Finally, you’re going to create
anxiety. The anxiety comes from the thought that the product won’t be around
forever and that it’s going to disappear/go up in price. You actually have no
control over whether that’s true as an affiliate but that doesn’t mean your
sales page can’t vaguely allude to the idea that the product won’t be in stock
forever, or that the price will likely go up in the near future. This creates
‘urgency’ and that in turn prevents the user from wanting to leave the site and
‘think about it’. You need to make sure they act now rather than later. You can do this by offering a limited time
discount (some affiliate schemes give you flexibility over the pricing), or by
saying there’s only limited stock and thereby creating scarcity (this also
makes the product seem more popular).
Now you’ll get that knee jerk sale you’re
looking for.
Removing Risk
Finally, you should also try to
remove any risk associated with the product. This is important because human
beings are naturally ‘loss averse’. This means that we are more motivated by avoiding loss than we are by achieving gain. So if you let someone
play a game where they had a 75% change of earning $100 and a 25% chance of
losing $20, they may still not play.
When we’re buying, this comes
into play if we think the product might be low quality or if we think that it
could be a scam. This is why you should always
offer a ‘100% money back guarantee’. Better yet, consider offering a ‘try
before you buy’. All the big affiliate networks offer the former while there
may be ways you can provide the latter (giving away the first chapter, after
checking with the product creator).
Either way, this will help you remove any
reason that the reader has not to
buy.
1
Chapter 4:
Platforms You Can Use to Make Sales
Of course your sales page is
only one place where you can promote and sell affiliate products. One other
place for instance is within the body of your articles yourself, which will be
a more passive approach.
Blog Posts
So for instance, if you’re
running a blog and using this to create a big audience that you can drive to
your sales page, you can also use
those blog posts to make your sales. All you have to do to do this, is to embed
URLs within the body of those posts. Here, you might just mention how ‘X
product’ is really good for whatever you’re writing about and then leave the
link there for a reader to click. If they’re really interested in your content
and you’re doing a great job of demonstrating your knowledge and making it
exciting, this can lead to a few extra clicks.
This is actually an especially
good strategy to use when selling physical products as an Amazon affiliate and
here you can even leverage the reader’s curiosity.
So for instance, you might write
an article on certain dating and mention how some people will even use
pheromones or oxytocin sprays in order to make themselves more appealing (and here’s a great
product to check out). Clearly, this is something people might click
on just out of sheer curiosity even
if they don’t intend to buy. But because Amazon has a 24 hour cookie, you can
then make commission on anything that they might subsequently decide to buy on
the site – even if they come back later of their own accord!
Likewise, you can use links to
physical products in blog posts and then actively
sell them. A lot of bloggers make their main income from reviewing Amazon
products and linking to them. Many people will read reviews of laptops for
instance before they buy and if they follow your link out of sheer convenience
after reading your comments, this can result in a big chunk of cash!
Email Marketing
Something else that lends itself very nicely to affiliate marketing is
email marketing.
Simply build a large mailing list from
your blog and then pitch products to them.
Of course you’ll need to create
a compelling blog and give your readers a good reason to subscribe in order to
build this list large enough. Once you’ve done that though, you’ll then have
direct access to a huge audience of people who trust you and who actively gave
you permission to contact them.
You can now carry out your sales
copy over the course of several emails. While also providing value via tips,
entertainment or general information, you can begin building interest and
anticipation for a product. The great thing about this is that your audience
will have to wait before you send them the call to action before they know how
to buy. People always want what they
can’t have, so if you do this well then you can build excitement for a product
to fever pitch before making your move.
Affiliate Marketing in Person
Believe it or not, you can even
use affiliate marketing in person.
Alternatively, you can do it by posting flyers just as you might if you were
selling a product or service on commission as an employee.
Here you just need a simple URL
that people can type into their browser. This could be achieved using link
cloaking or using a sales page of your own creation. From there, you can then
add the link to the flier and hand it out to people in the street, post it
through people’s doors. You can even do a pitch in person to explain why the
product is so good.
This is a strategy that works
particularly well for lifetime membership programs. For instance, if you can
find a bingo site with an affiliate program, print off some fliers, and then
hand them out in an area with a large elderly population, you can quickly get
some people to sign up who will subsequently earn you an income for the entire
time they are members.
Notice how different strategies
work better for different types of affiliate product and for different
demographics? Once again, the key here is to have synergy between your product
selection, your own blog and your routes to market. Think of everything before
committing to your chosen first product!
Using Your Existing Routes to Market
As mentioned, there’s a good
chance that whoever you are, you will
have at least one good route to market – often it’s just a matter of thinking
hard enough.
For instance, it might be that
among your friends, you know someone who runs a magazine on gardening with a
readership of 5,000. This is a fantastically easy route to market for you,
especially as there’s probably a website with a forum involved too. Just ask
nicely and see if they will cover your story.
Another example might be your
old college paper. If you’re alumni from a university with a particularly big
fashion department, then this could be the perfect place to sell your eBook on
‘getting into the fashion industry’.
Essentially this is a form of
influencer marketing, with the only difference being that you’re aiming for an
influencer you already know versus trying desperately to find one. Influencer
Marketing Plan B?
Try desperately to find one!
Another great way to accomplish
the same thing as the above is simply to find an influencer that you can work
with and reach out to them. You can either pay them to give you a shoutout or
you can do something in return as a favor.
A great example is to write a
guest post for a blog. This is a strategy commonly used to build links to a
website, but it can actually be just as effective when used as a way to get
direct sales. Find a blog that accepts contributions from other writers, then
offer to write them an article for free that they can publish on their site, in
exchange for including a link to your website (which is just a landing page
with your affiliate product). If you can get on a blog with hundreds of
thousands of people reading, then you can potentially get your link seen by
thousands overnight which can be
enough to fix you up for life! Yes, sometimes it really does come down to that one link on that one key site.
How do you reach these big influencers
who are leading your niche?
There
are two strategies that actually work:
a) Interact with them in person – Go to networking events or even hire
their services.
Either way, create an actual relationship in person.
b) Build your way up – Don’t approach Tony
Robbins when you have a readership
of one. Instead, aim for someone much smaller and then gradually look for
bigger and bigger affiliates. This way you should always be ‘on a level’ with
the person you’re asking
for help which means there’s more likely
to be something in it for them as well as you. It also means you’re less likely
to get laughed out of their inbox… 8
49
Chapter 5:
Content Marketing
- Marketing Your Email List, Blogs and Sales Page
The above strategies are what
are known in the industry as ‘growth hacks’. That is to say that they’re
techniques you can use to quickly increase your exposure to a much wider
audience, rather than to grow slowly using the normal trajectory.
More often though, you’ll find
yourself taking a more straightforward approach of gradually rising through the
ranks via SEO (search engine optimization), social media and content marketing.
The Power of Content Marketing
The key here is the content
marketing. Content marketing means simply creating lots of value on your
website by writing high quality blog posts, articles and features.
The objective here is to give
people a reason to visit your site –
and content is the main reason we visit any website on the net. At the same
time though, your content is what’s going to demonstrate your knowledge and
you’re know-how. You can use this in order to build trust and authority such
that any products you recommend will be more likely to be taken seriously by
your audience.
This is also what will encourage
people to sign up to your mailing list and what will make affiliates want to
work with you. Generally, this is what will help you to go from 0 viewers a day
to 10,000 viewers a day. Make sure that your content is long enough to offer
real value (around 1,800 words according to research) and that it is unique and
engaging. You can’t write articles that are derivative and old hat and expect
people to rush to subscribe to your mailing list!
Another tip is to make sure that
you are putting in the time and effort to create as much content as possible.
The key here is that in order to make a full time living from a blog, you need
to treat it like a full time living
in terms of the work you put in.
Be on every social media site as
well and make sure that you provide value on here as well so that you’re giving
people an actual reason to want to follow you.
Do this consistently and you’ll gradually build an audience that trusts you
and that you can sell to time and time again.
PPC
In terms of PPC (pay per click)
advertising, there are two main networks you will likely choose from. These are
Google AdWords and Facebook Ads. The former lets you place your adverts
alongside specific searches right on the SERPs (‘Search Engine Results Pages’),
the latter allows you to show ads on users’ home feeds.
The great thing about both these
types of advertising, other than their pay per click nature, is the fact that
they let you carefully target a very specific type of visitor. Seeing as you pay
for each click then, your objective is not to get as many people as possible to
go to your website but rather to make sure that only the people most likely to buy from you see the ads and click
on them.
On Google AdWords, you
accomplish this by targeting phrases that only your potential buyers would
search for. So if you’re selling a book on getting abs, you might target
phrases like ‘how to get abs’ but use Google’s ‘negative keywords’ tool to filter anyone who uses the term ‘free’
(seeing as they’re not looking to buy anything). You would then put the price
of your eBook right in the description alongside your ad so that only people
who are likely to buy from you will consider clicking it – thereby improving
your ROI.
On Facebook you can do something
similar by targeting your readers based on their age, their sex, their
location, their job, their hobbies etc. This means that if you’re selling an
eBook on wedding planning, you can target specifically women who are engaged.
Again, this greatly reduces the number of people who will click your ads who won’t be a potentially relevant
customer.
Once more, your key to success
is to think of all this when you choose
your product. Ask yourself: how easily can you target your visitors?
3
Conclusions
So there you have it: everything
you need to know to be much more
effective at affiliate marketing than about 90% of people who get into it.
We’ve covered a lot of
information and a ton of secrets but all in a rather dense manner. To finish
then, let’s highlight just a few of the biggest and most important tips that
we’ve gone over:
Affiliate Marketing Takes Time
To be successful at affiliate
marketing you need to approach it with the right expectations and intentions.
To start with, aim to earn some money
on the side. Don’t think you’ll be a millionaire overnight – but that’s okay.
Aim to supplement your income doing something you love and in time you’ll start making your riches.
Copy and Paste Your Business
Don’t reinvent the wheel – keep
it simple as much as possible. Choose a digital product that has lots of proven
sales and use the exact business model as far as possible to benefit from that
proven success.
To scale, just rinse and repeat.
Start Small and Climb the Ranks
If you don’t have lots of money
to invest in PPC, then aim for a smaller niche to begin with. If you can find
an affiliate product aimed at a particular industry that solves a specific
problem for example, this will often be a great place to start.
Then you can reinvest the money
you make here once you’ve saturated that smaller market.
Think About How You’ll Market Before You Choose
Your Product
Don’t pick a product and then worry about how to reach an
audience. Instead, pick a product with an idea of how you’re going to sell it.
What
is the value proposition?
What
routes to market do you already have?
How
easy is it to target the specific demographic?
Use these strategies, be
consistent and you will find that affiliate marketing really can make you rich and allow you to earn
an entirely passive income. Stick with it, enjoy it and it will happen!
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