Affiliate Marketing Secrets

Affiliate marketing is by far the fastest way to get started making money online. This is when you refer traffic to someone else’s product sales page, they handle the sales, support and billing, and you get paid 50% or more

Here’s just a few benefits

1. You’re able to start almost instantly without having to create a product, craft a sales letter, design the website, create marketing materials, or set up the ordering, billing & delivery system.
2. It runs on auto-pilotfor you because you don’t have to do the customer support or deal with billing or technical issues.
3. Your efforts are risk-free, because the product owner has already made sure the product sells. So you know that your traffic will result in sales.

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. Unfortunately, the majority of those visitors (at least 90%) will not buy on their first visit. And of the 10% or less that do buy, the product owner will be able to sell to them again, but you will not.

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. By getting their contact info, you can follow up increase your odds of making the sale by sending them back to the product owner’s website multiple times. And if you want to do it like a pro, you’ll give them some great content before sending them to the sales page.

Here are the benefits of doing affiliate marketing like this:

1. You’ll be building your own list of potential customers that you can market to again and again.
2. You’ll be warming them up by providing valuable information and then casually linking to the product sales page in the context of this information.

In order to set a system like this up, you will need the following affiliate marketing tools:

1. A squeeze page, and even better a Video squeeze page.
2. Several high-quality content pages
3. An email series with at least 5 high-quality content emails

Instead of sending visitors directly to the product sales page, you’ll send them to your lead capture page first. This page is where you collect your visitors’ contact info and add them to your autoresponder, which in turn starts sending them the multi-part email series. Then it redirects them to your content pages after they subscribe to your email series.

You content mini-site builds the good will, so that when you send them to the product sales page, they are in a buying mood. 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.

Putting all of these pieces together will increase your sales by 500% or more, so it’s obviously worth the time and energy to do it. And after you get it all set up, it runs on total auto-pilot. You just refer people to your lead capture page, instead of the product sales page.

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. Services like this design the enter system (the video, the video squeeze page, the email series, the content pages, etc). The major benefit of using a service like this is that you can get started right away, and for a whole lot less than it would cost to do it all yourself. 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.

One of the easiest and fastest ways to make money online is through affiliate marketing. This is when you send visitors to someone else’s product sales page, they make the sale and deliver the product, and you get a percentage of the sale price as you commission (usually 50% or more for digital products).

The benefits of this are

1. You can get started almost immediately because you don’t have to create a product, write the sales page, design the website, develop marketing materials, or set up the ordering, billing & delivery system.
2. You have almost no investment of time because you don’t have to do the customer support or deal with billing or technical issues.
3. You have nearly zero risk because you already know the product sells. So if you send visitors you will get paid.

Looking at these benefits, it’s clear that affiliate marketing is the way to go! And of course if you are already blogging all you need to do is add your affiliate links into your posts.

The downside is…

After all your hard work of generating traffic to the sales page, you will never see any of those visitors again. Most of them will not buy on their first visit, which means you’re losing over 90% of the traffic right off the top. And of the 10% or less that do buy, the product owner will be able to sell to them again, but you will not.

What’s the solution?

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 pre-sales page in between.

Here’s what these affiliate marketing strategies will do for you:

1. You’ll be building your own list of potential customers that you can market to again and again.
2. You’ll be pre-selling them by providing valuable information and then casually linking to the product sales page in the context of this information.

In order to set a system like this up, you will need the following affiliate marketing tools:

1. A Video Squeeze Page (with video)
2. One or more content-rich Pre-Selling Pages
3. At least a 5-Part Email Followup Series

The video squeeze page is where you’ll direct your traffic instead of directly to the product sales page. It captures the name and email of your visitors and puts them into your autoresponder, which then begins sending out the 5-part email series. Then it redirects them to your pre-selling pages after they subscribe to your email series.

All of this together increases your chances of making the sale by up to 500% so it’s well worth the effort of setting it up. And once it’s set up, it runs automatically – you just keep sending visitors to the squeeze page.

If you don’t have the time or expertise to set it all up yourself, you can use something like Affiliate Silver Bullet. Services like this design the enter system (the video, the video squeeze page, the email series, the content pages, etc). 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.

The other route you can take is to hire people on Elance to create and implement the various aspects for you. Either way, it’s an important step that you need to take if you’re going to be serious about your business.