When it comes to making money online, affiliate marketing is one of the most appealing
business models there is. Why? Simply because it allows you to potentially make a large
amount of money from home without having to trade your time for cash.
Affiliate marketing is not easy and anyone who thinks otherwise is in for an unpleasant
surprise. Likewise, it isn’t a ‘get rich quick scheme’ and it does involve a lot of work.
That said though, once you’re set up with your affiliate marketing business model, you
can earn a steady stream of passive income – potentially indefinitely. Passive income
simply means that you’ll be earning money while you sleep and while you go on holiday.
While the initial set-up may have involved a fair amount of work then, it eventually
becomes self-perpetuating to the point where you can stop working and continue to sow
the seeds of your labor for years to come.
And while affiliate marketing isn’t easy, it certainly is easier than a lot of other business
models. That is to say it is easier to understand, easy to get started with and easier to
execute. While it might involve some trial and error, the initial stages often actually
amount to little more than copying and pasting existing businesses!
Affiliate marketing can be the answer that you’re looking for then. The only caveat is
that you need to go into it with realistic expectations and you need to be smart about
how you approach it. With the right know-how and with access to the best marketing
‘secrets’, you can hack this setup and start earning a lot of money very quickly. That’s
where this book comes in: read on and we’ll examine the powerful strategies you can use
to get the most from affiliate marketing.
The Basics
Before we go any further, let’s quickly recap on what affiliate marketing is. There a good
chance that those reading this eBook/report will already have a good understanding of
the concept but for those who don’t, this basic explanation of the business model will tell
you everything you need to know…
The Set-Up
Being an affiliate marketer is like being a salesman on commission. In other words, you
get paid some of the profit from a product as an incentive to help the product creator to
sell it. This is the same method that a door-to-door salesman would use but the main
difference is that you’ll be selling your products over the web. This essentially gives you
the potential to reach a far greater audience of buyers and to sell a far bigger amount of
products. So instead of selling Sky TV to three people a day, you’re now able to sell an
eBook to 10, 20, 100 or 1,000 people daily depending on how good you are.
At the same time, selling digital products like eBooks (which affiliate marketing often
revolves around) means that there are no overheads for the product creator. There are
no associated manufacturing costs, no storage requirements, no packaging, no
delivery… and that means that you’re getting almost 100% profit from the sale price to
split between you.
Better yet, because digital product manufacturers are able to scale their operations so
easily, they’re often willing to offer 40, 60 or even 75 percent of their profits for each
sale. Sometimes they even offer their marketers to use the marketing materials they’ve
already created: things like e-mails, blog posts, landing pages and more. They’re happy
to do this because any win for you is also a win for them. This is how it’s possible to
create an online business by simply ‘copying and pasting’ someone else’s business!
As an affiliate marketer then, your job will be to find products you can sell – probably
these will be found on affiliate networks such as JVZoo and Clickbank. After that, you’ll
then be given a referral link that you can use to recommend the product to people. If
someone buys the product through that link, they’ll go through a redirect that will store
cookies on their computer and the sale will be logged as having come from you. You can
then withdraw your cash at your leisure.
The skill of an affiliate marketer then and what ultimately will allow you to thrive, is the
ability to reach the right audience and to make the product sound desirable. This will
ultimately be achieved through a combination of PPC (pay per click advertising), SEO
(search engine optimization), email marketing, social media marketing and other
similar techniques.
What to Expect From Affiliate Marketing
The first and most important consideration before you get started with affiliate
marketing is to know what you want to get out of it. This may sound like the ‘boring
stuff’ and perhaps you just want to get stuck in as quickly as possible; in fact though, not
knowing your goals or having the wrong expectations can be a huge setback if you don’t
take the time to think this through. It’s no exaggeration to say that this is a big part of
why a lot of people fail at affiliate marketing.
Largely responsible for this issue, are all the adverts that flood Facebook telling you that
you can earn thousands of dollars a day by just posting a few ads. Then there are people
like Tai Lopez, telling you that you can earn millions like them and be a genius
billionaire by following their course.
This sets up unrealistic expectations and leads to people going into affiliate marketing
underprepared and with a lot of false hope. It also leads to some serious mistakes.
In theory, you can make money as an affiliate marketer by following four very easy
steps:
Find an affiliate product to market on JVZoo or Clickbank
Create a landing page flaunting the benefits of said product and including your
link
Pay for highly targeted PPC ads through Facebook
Profit!
Easy right?
Facebook ads are PPC which means that you only pay if someone clicks them. So if you
set-up an advertising campaign that’s entirely ineffective and everyone ignores… it won’t
cost you anything! If your landing page is very good then you can expect to convert a fair
amount of visitors into buyers and with a decent digital product, you should be able to
earn about $30-$50 per purchase. Considering that you’ll only be paying a few cents for
each customer – who has already shown an interest in your product – that means that
you can almost guarantee a decent ROI from those advertising campaigns. The longer
the ad runs, the more you can earn and the more you can reinvest to scale your
products.
What’s more, you can target the ads to show to precisely the right people using the
information available on Facebook. Got a book on how to plan a cheap wedding? Great:
just target your book toward people who are engaged on Facebook!
Meanwhile, you can build up your own direct audience through a website and through a
mailing list so that eventually you won’t even need to pay from advertising and you can
sell over and over again to your list that puts their trust in everything you say and
recommend.
This is the promise of affiliate marketing and it sounds like a simple, fool-proof way to
make money. But there are some catches that very often get overlooked by the people
selling the online courses and the eBooks for $1,000.
One of these catches is that there are hundreds of other people trying to sell eBooks on
making money. And there are hundreds of other people competing for the advertising
space on Facebook. Facebook ads show based on who has the larger advertising budget
and the result is determined by an automated ‘bidding process’. In other words, you
need a fairly large budget in order for your ads to be seen, meaning that you can actually
end up spending 50cents to several dollars for your ads to get clicked.
This now means that you can still profit, but in order to do so, you need the perfect
landing page and the perfect product for the ideal audience. These are a lot of factors
that you’re frankly unlikely to get right the very first time. As a result, it’s not
uncommon to end up sinking huge amounts of money into PPC before you land on a
good set-up with the right targeting, the right ad text, the right product etc.
As for building your own audience, this can often take years before you’re at a point
where you don’t need PPC. If you thought you’d be the top blogger in your niche within
months, then you unfortunately need a reality check. Rather, you can expect it to take
you a year or more to get to this point. And far from doing nothing, this will have to
involve writing regular content and doing lots of promotion – almost to the extent of it
being a full time job. And while you’re doing this, you won’t be getting paid for the work
you’re doing. A lot of us just can’t afford to put such a big investment into something
that isn’t paying out yet.
And when you had gone into this, expecting that you would be a millionaire by month
two, it’s very easy to get disheartened and to just give up.
The Right Strategy
So what can you do about all this? Is it a lost cause?
Not at all – there genuinely are thousands of people who have made affiliate marketing
work for them and who have earned millions of dollars doing it. JVZoo’s elite program
requires you to be making at least $10,000 a month and there are no shortage of
members.
The trick is to be realistic and to set up a plan for how you can manage your current
lifestyle with your affiliate marketing aims.
The first key to doing this is to set yourself up to win: stack the deck in your favour by
understanding how affiliate marketing works and what you can do to ensure that it
works for you. In this eBook, you’ll learn how to avoid common mistakes and how to
find products that sell much more easily and cost you less to advertise.
The second key – and this is important – is to have moderate aims to begin with. Don’t
set out to be a billionaire. Instead, set out to supplement your current income with an
extra $50 a week. That doesn’t sound like much but it’s very easy to achieve and once
you’re at that point, you’ll actually be making $200 a month and $2,400 a year. That’s a
rather big raise, especially seeing as you won’t be taking on any extra responsibilities.
You’ll be able to go on an extra holiday every year, or to dine out every month with your
family without any guilt. How about getting that slick new computer you’ve had your eye
on?
And once you’re at that stage, you’ll be able to start investing more time and money in
order to grow your business further. We’ll look at how to scale a successful affiliate
marketing business model later and you’ll see that you can very easily go from this to
internet domination!
Finally: choose a niche that you enjoy and that you know. If you can sell products in a
niche that you enjoy and understand, then you’ll be able to turn writing about those
subjects into a hobby and something you enjoy. This makes a big difference to your
eventual success and means that you can take your eye off the goal and not only think of
these activities as a means to an end.
Product Selection
The most important key to your success before you set out is product selection. This is
what will help you to make sure there’s an audience for your product and what will
dictate what you write about, who your target demographic is, how much profit you
make and more.
So to start out, you need to make a list of all the niches you would enjoy writing about
and that you have some experience in. This isn’t going to come into play right at the
start but it will make a big difference when it comes to promoting a blog and creating
your own audience somewhere down the line.
What we’re interested in right now is finding a niche that isn’t over-saturated with
digital products and with affiliate offers. We’re going to start out with a digital product
because this will give you the most profit per sale which means you can get more
revenue from a smaller number of buyers. Later down the line, you might become
interested in selling physical products which have a much broader appeal – you can read
the full Affiliate Marketing Secrets eBook for an in-depth treatise on that subject.
When you take a look at the digital products on a network like Clickbank or JVZoo,
something might jump out at you right from the start: they’re almost exclusively in the
‘make money online’ niche. In fact, if you take a look at the network ‘WSO’ (Warrior
Special Offers) then you’ll notice that this one is actually 100% products in that niche.
I want you to resist the urge to choose this as your first niche. Why? Because as you can
see, it is already a highly competitive area to get into. If you try to sell a product in this
area, then you’ll be going up against pretty much every other affiliate marketer and
product creator on the net. As such, you’ll be paying considerably more for each of your
ads to appear on Facebook, Google AdWords or wherever else you choose to put them.
What’s more, you’ll find that you struggle to stand out to that audience. This particular
audience is very web savvy, they probably know exactly how the affiliate marketing
business model works and they’ve probably encountered some real duff products in this
niche. Even if you’ve chosen a product that is genuinely very high quality, your offer will
still be looked upon cynically and they will assume that you’re just out to make money.
They’ve been burned before, they’re inundated with such offers and it takes a lot more
marketing to sell to them.
On the other hand though, selling something to a much smaller niche means that you
can pay considerably less for your ads and find an audience that hasn’t seen offers like
yours before. Potentially, you can offer them something that solves a real problem
they’ve been facing and promises to make their lives easier: which is exactly how you
make money.
A great example of this is to choose a career. This is a very specific niche that you can
target directly through Facebook and indirectly through Google AdWords (AdWords ads
are ads that appear on Google searches). Pat Flynn is the owner of ‘Smart Passive
Income.com’ and he demonstrates how this can work with his ‘foodtruck’ niche. He has
a website that is aimed specifically at food truck drivers and he uses it to sell a digital
product that can help them to make more money from what they do. This is ideal
because there are millions of English-speaking food truck drivers around the world and
yet they’re not highly targeted with these kinds of products all the time.
Earlier we discussed the wedding planning niche. An eBook on how to save money on
planning a wedding is a perfect niche for a few reasons:
It’s not over saturated with similar digital products
The book promises to save money, thus making it an investment
It’s easy to target – people place their relationship status on Facebook and use a
lot of predictable searches when they’re planning weddings
The audience is young and thus likely tech-savvy enough to be interested in
digital products as a whole
The demographic is constantly changing: in other words, people are getting
engaged all the time meaning that you’ll never saturate the market and run out of
people to sell to
Another great option is to sell a product to a small section of a larger audience. Right
behind making money online, the fitness niche is another very over-saturated area for
digital products. There are no shortage of books on how to get abs or build muscle or
lose weight.
But you can still make this work if you pick a specific area within fitness to target.
How about training for the marathon? How about teenage bodybuilding? How about
fitness for the over 50s? These are once again specific niches that are constantly
replenishing and that give you a huge number of potential customers. What’s more,
these areas allow you to subsequently branch out with future products which means that
you can make more money from your market in future.
Route to Market
Another consideration here is your ‘route to market’. A route to market is simply a
platform through which you are going to reach your specific target demographic. Say
you have an eBook of knitting patterns, then your routes to market would be:
Forums and online communities aimed at fans of knitting
Knitting magazines
Real-world knitting clubs and societies in your area
Knitting websites
Whenever you’re picking your niche, try to think what your routes to market would be.
And like the niche itself, the key here is to find a route to market that isn’t going to be
inundated with competition. If your eBook is the only eBook aimed precisely that this
audience, then it’s going to stand a much better chance of selling.
Solving a Problem
Finally, try to find products that solve very specific problems. If you can do this, then it
will be far easier to point out the advantages of what you’re selling and to make it
appealing to your demographic. Your USP should be something that you can sum up in
just a few words – and this will then allow you to grab attention and really sell quickly
and efficiently.
Another way to look at this is by focussing on your ‘value proposition’…
The Value Proposition and Selling Your
Product
The old saying goes that you ‘don’t sell hats, you sell warm heads’. What does this mean?
It means that you don’t sell products themselves but rather you sell what the product
can do for your audience.
So if you have an eBook on how to get amazing abs, it’s not the eBook that you’re selling
but the abs. More than that, it’s actually the attention from the opposite sex, the
confidence and the great looks that you’re selling. When you sell an eBook on abs, this is
what you need to focus on.
Likewise, if you’re selling an eBook on making money online, you’re actually selling
freedom, power and status. You’re selling the opportunity for someone to feel freed from
the constraints of their normal jobs and you’re selling them the ability to wear nice
clothes and watches and to feel proud and confident in what they’ve done.
The reason this is so important, is that it’s what will actually help your products to sell.
Know that people don’t buy things that make logical sense to buy. People tend to buy
things on an emotional impulse and on a whim. Thus, you need to push the emotional
buttons of your buyer in order to get them to click that call to action button.
How to Write Your Sales Page
A sales page is a website page that is designed specifically with the intention of selling
whatever it is that you’re trying to sell. There are no links to other pages on your
website, there are no adverts – just one long block of text that grabs attention and sells
the amazing benefits of the product. Of course, this is then interspersed with ‘Buy Now’
buttons.
The key to a great landing page, is to focus heavily on that value proposition and to get
the buyer thinking and daydreaming about how much better their life will be with the
product in their possession. At the same time, you’re also fighting the constant urge they
will have to navigate away from the page – because most of us have very short attention
spans.
The best tip to keep their attention right away then is to use a narrative structure. This
simply means starting your landing page as a story and talking about how you once
didn’t have abs/didn’t know how to plan a wedding/were rubbish a cooking… You lay
this on thick and show that you sympathize with your reader. This gets them reading
and makes it hard for them to turn away because we always want to know how stories
will end. At the same time, it pushes the right emotional buttons. You can also use
rhetorical questions at this point such as: ‘ever thought there must be a better way?’.
These work very well because they force the reader to reflect one what you’re saying and
thereby engage with it. It all makes for very compelling reading.
You can also take this opportunity to acknowledge the concerns that they have as a
reader: explain how your product isn’t just another scam. Talk about your money back
guarantee (most affiliate products offer this) and appeal to facts, statistics and figures of
authority to back up your credibility.
That’s when you hit them with the real value proposition you’re offering and you get
them to imagine and almost feel their life after they make this purchase. Once you’ve got
them vividly experiencing and imaging the product, you finish off with a little pressure
to make them buy right away: this might mean you tell them that the product won’t be
available long, or that the special offer you’re providing will only last for a week. This
makes sure they buy now while they’re emotionally inclined to, rather than going away
to think about it (and realise it’s perhaps not the best way to spend their money).
The Lifestyle
This value proposition should tie into a lifestyle that you’re promoting and this is what’s
going to tie together your brand with the products you choose to sell. So if you’re on
Instagram, you need to promote this lifestyle and to inspire your followers. This is what
will turn them into real fans and what will get them excited for the products you’re
offering.
If you have a fitness product then, your Instagram, Pinterest and Twitter should be filled
with pictures of people working out on the beach, lifting heavy weights and looking sexy
and healthy in their training gear. For that wedding product, you might upload images
of beautiful weddings in exotic locations and with stunning decorations. Perhaps you
could also share tips, advice and inspiring stories. This gives people a reason to follow
you and warms them up to the idea of the product you’ll be selling to them
intermittently.
The Five Touches
This brings us nicely on to the idea of the sales funnel. You can consider a post on social
media to be ‘one touch’ – or one interaction with your audience. This is important to
recognize, because the general wisdom is that any sale takes approximately five touches.
Throughout these five touches, you’re able to then build excitement and anticipation for
your product, you’re able to build trust and authority for your own brand and you’ll able
to demonstrate the value of what you’ll be offering.
Your sales funnel means a sequence you’ve designed to attract and reel in leads. It might
start with a social media post, follow up with a blog post and mailing list, follow that up
with a newsletter and a free ‘seminar’ and ultimately lead to your landing page and
product. (The mailing list is key here as it gives you the means to make the multiple
touches.)
This is another reason it pays to slowly build up your own audience and platform rather
than relying permanently on PPC.
Building Content, a Mailing List and a Social
Media Presence
So how do you go about building this audience?
There are two main routes: one is through your own website, which you will fill regularly
with content to be found through social media and Google and the other is through the
social media directly.
To succeed on social media there is really one rule: which is to provide lots of value.
Don’t just post about promotions but remember the lifestyle aspect we spoke about
before. Give people a reason to follow you and ask yourself: would you enjoy the kind of
content you’re sharing?
What’s also important is to be everywhere: be on as many social media sites as possible
to create the maximum number of ‘in-roads’ to your content. This should at least mean:
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram
Pinterest
LinkedIn
Google+
Tumblr
This also helps to make your brand appear more professional and well structured.
On top of this, you’ll need to create a website of your own to host your landing page and
your blog posts. The best way to do this is through WordPress which you’ll install onto
your own webhost with domain name. The full eBook explains how to easily get set up
with a great website.
Creating Amazing Content
From here, you now need to start posting blog posts to your site. Doing this will act as a
free demonstration of the value and knowledge you can provide – it’s the perfect
example of that ‘first touch’. At the same time, it brings more people to your site and
encourages them to join your mailing list and to subscribe to you on social media.
So what makes great content? Again, the key is to genuinely provide value and that
means that the content should be the kind that you would like to read yourself. Most
importantly, this means that it should be unique and different from all the other content
out there. If you write an article on ‘ten things you’re doing wrong with SEO’ then you
won’t stand out at all from all the other sites. The same goes for ‘top ab workouts’.
Try to find something new to talk about and a new, exciting angle in your niche. Find
ways to combine different topics in interesting ways and always have a very specific
target audience (or ‘persona’) in mind. This latter point will help you find routes to
market to share to and it will encourage people to share – either to express themselves
or to share the content with people they think will like it.
Make sure the articles are in-depth and that they have been well-researched. Ideally,
they should be about 1,800 words long. Remember how important we said it was to
choose a niche that you’d enjoy discussing? This is why!
Another thing to note is that there is nothing stopping you from using your articles as
landing pages. All you need to do is to take your affiliate link and to embed it in the body
of your text. If you do that, and if you promote the product in the content, this can lead
to some direct sales. This is a great way to convince yourself to keep writing and to get
even more value from all the effort you’re putting in.
Of course if you don’t like writing or can’t write, you may want to skip this step. Better
though, would be to hire someone to write for you or to use another type of content. One
other type of content that is vastly overlooked is video. In a video you can very easily sell
the benefits of a product and engage your audience.
Growth Hacks and Scaling
Now you’ve seen the basics of affiliate marketing, it’s time to accelerate your progress
and to explode your profits.
There are a number of ways to do this. One exciting growth hack for instance, is to use
‘influencer marketing’. This simply means that you find someone who already has a very
big audience that trusts them and then you try and get them to promote your website or
your affiliate link directly.
How do you do that? One option is simply to pay them: as in the case of a solo ad (paid
e-mail promotion). Another option is to write them free content, which is known as a
guest post. Better yet though, is to interact with an influencer on social media that
doesn’t know quite how big they are. Use Twitter analytics to identify your most
influential followers and then engage with them by asking questions or retweeting their
posts. Often they will respond in kind out of politeness if nothing else!
Another powerful trick is to network with the big influencers in person. Go to
networking events and even try hiring their services. Once you’ve had a face-to-face
discussion, you will be much harder to ignore.
Scaling
From here, you now have a working business model that’s growing quickly. But you can
scale it even more for even more impressive profits: and one of the simplest ways to do
this is simply to repeat the business model you’ve laid out for yourself. Just find another
product, another audience and set up a second income stream.
You can do this as often as you like, essentially making your affiliate marketing efforts
infinitely scalable and drastically increasing your resilience. Not only have you
multiplied your profits but you’re now far less likely to suddenly lose all your income
because of a fluctuation in the market etc.
Alternatively, you might choose to branch out into physical products, to sell new items
to your existing audience, or to create your own product.
Either way, you now know everything you need to know to start building and growing a
highly profitable affiliate marketing business. Start with modest goals and be strategic
and logical. Don’t overcomplicate matters and choose a niche that has a clear demand
for a product. If you do all that, then you will succeed. Good luck