Affiliate Marketing 101

Winning Affiliate Marketing Strategies

If you want to get started quickly and easily making money online, then affiliate marketing is for you. Affiliate marketing means that all you do is send visitors 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 can get started right away because you don’t have to make a product, craft a sales letter, design the website, develop marketing materials, or do support, billing and maintenance.
2. It runs on auto-pilot for you because the product owner does all the hard work of support, maintenance and billing.
3. You have nearly zero risk because you already know the product sells, 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!

The downside is…

After all your hard work of generating traffic to the sales page, you will never see any of those visitors again. Less than 10% of the visitors your send will actually buy the product. 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.

How can you avoid this pitfall?

Simply put, you need to capture the name and email of your visitors *before* sending them to the product sales page. 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 really on top of your game, you’ll then send to a content mini-site in between.

Here are the benefits of doing affiliate marketing like this: 

1. By building your own list, you’re creating a renewable resource that you can tap again and again for instant profits.
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.

If you want to create an affiliate marketing system like this, you’ll need the following:

1. A lead capture page, preferably with video
2. At least a few pages of great content
3. At least a 5-Part Email Followup Series

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.

There’s no doubt that it’s worth the effort to put a system like this in place, because doing so will increase your profits by 500% or more. After setting it up, you simply send visitors to your squeeze page instead of the sales page. And the rest runs on auto-pilot.

One option, if you’re not up to the challenge of setting this all up yourself, is to let someone like Affiliate Silver Bullet do it for you. 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. 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.

Another way to accomplish this is to hire “outsourcers” through a website like Elance to build and put your system together for you. The important thing is that you start using affiliate tools like the ones described here right now! Otherwise, you’re wasting your time and money.

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