Not Getting the Results You Desire At Affiliate Marketing?
Stuck and overwhelmed? Not getting the results you expect and desire? Not sure where you are going wrong with Affiliate Marketing? Read on…. Here’s three important things you need to know, and can start implementing right now in your business to turn things around.
# 1 The Money Really IS in the Email List
If, as an affiliate marketer you are simply sending your traffic to someone else’s sales page, it’s industry standard that about 97% will leave that sales page without taking any action. You’ve gone to the effort and cost of finding those people who showed some interest in your promotion.
If you are going to treat your business as a real business you need to have your own customer base. The way to do this is to start building your email list. And it is never too early to start doing this.
With their email address you can continue to communicate with those who visited your page, provide more helpful information, build up a rapport. and when appropriate re-market to them. As people tend to buy from those that they know, like and trust, this is your first step in building that relationship. Your email list is your community of targeted prospects, to help and nurture.
Your email list is also a business asset. You are not at the mercy of third parties who may change the rules, or just disappear, and then your income stream has gone.
Although “list” is a term used widely, never forget your list are real people who have trusted you with their email address and are looking to you for ongoing help, guidance and recommendations.
So how do you go about building an email list?
As soon you have started your online presence, you need to put a mechanism in place to collect email addresses.
You need a Lead Magnet, sometimes called an “ethical bribe” which is a product you give away for free in return for an email address. People need a reason to give you their email address. It needs to be relevant to your visitor’s needs, will provide a solution to something they are searching for, and be compatible with other products you will later be recommending. And it doesn’t need to be lengthy. How often have you got more value from a 2 page executive summary, that you have from a 70 page ebook of waffle? Some examples of what you could offer are:
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- an ebook,
- a video case study,
- a short training course
- a ‘cheat sheet’
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You also need the mechanism in place to collect the email address, deliver the free product, and communicate with your prospect. This is your autoresponder. An autoresponder might seem complicated to use, which perhaps is why so many people fail to build a list. But after a short learning curve you have an amazingly powerful tool which – as the name suggests – does actions automatically.
There are many to choose from. A couple of the most popular with internet marketers are Aweber and Get Response. Through an opt-in form the subscribers are added to your list, and receive their gift either by email or by being directed to a page to view or download your gift. Once you have set up the complete system with your form, thank you page, and your emails, everything works on autopilot.
You’ll regret it along the line if you don’t take action and start your list building.
# 2 It’s Almost Impossible to Make a Profit at Affiliate Marketing Unless you have Access to the Entire Sales Funnel
It took me a while to figure out why product owners were bending over backwards to let me have 100% commissions on their $9 ebooks and 50% commissions on their $27 upsell. After all it was their product, so why was I getting such a big chunk of the sale? But oh boy, did I get my eyes opened when I finally realised what was going on,
Those commissions $9 + $13.50 were great pocket money for me when I got sales through free traffic such as from my signature link on forums, and Facebook page, but when you are treating affiliate marketing as a business, you need to be able to scale up with paid traffic. And this is when I realised the numbers didn’t really add up anymore.
Why do Back End Sales Make Such A Difference?
Using my example above, let’s have a look at 2 hypothetical scenarios* – say you pay $1 a lead and get 1000 leads to your sales page, and of these 3% buy your $9 product, and a third of those buy the upsell product.
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Sales commission would be
30 x $9 = $270
10 x $13.50 = $135
Total Sales = $405
Cost of sales would be $1000
Loss would be $505 … ouch [/feature_box]
But if you had access to the rest of the funnel and just 5 went on to buy a monthly training course for ten months at $12 commission each per month and just one of the 1000 leads bought the high ticket item giving you a $1000 commission, the figures would then look like this
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Original Sales commission would be
30 x $9 = $270
10 x $13.50 = $135
Recurring income commission 5 x 10 x $12= $600
High ticket commission would be 1 x $1000 = $1000
Total sales would be $2005
Cost of getting the sales would remain the same $1000
Profit $1005 Result!
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(*this is not a promise of earnings but shows the theory of a complete sales funnel)
#3 There Isn’t a Traffic problem – Most People Have a Conversion Problem
This actually overlaps a bit with my previous eureka moment. A great sales funnel, with quality products that meet the needs of your audience will convert. It will have a free offer, a low ticket offer, one or two upsells, a recurring income product and a high ticket product.
As we now know, most product owners tend to keep the last two goodies to themselves, but some do now offer a type of licence to let you have access to the whole funnel.
So let’s say you have a licence for a great funnel that is known to convert. The other part of the equation is getting the traffic. And getting traffic is not a problem.
Traffic is either Free Traffic, or Paid Traffic
“Free” is a bit of a misnomer as of course you are trading your time for getting the traffic. Some things you could do to get free traffic are writing blog posts, interacting on forums, having a Youtube channel, hosting a Facebook page. If you are time rich but cash poor, this is certainly a good way to start out.
But provided you are an affiliate for the complete sales funnel, and you know something about its conversion statistics then you should certainly test doing paid traffic. There are so many paid advertising channels to choose from. e.g. Facebook Ads, YouTube, Google Ads, Instagram, Twitter, Bing Ads, banner ads, solo ads, etc.
It’s always best start small and continually monitor and review your results. Only when you’ve found something that is working for you, then you can scale up. And don’t think you have to learn it all. Focus on just one or two methods until you fully understand them.
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I hope you’ve enjoyed the three insights I’ve revealed here. I certainly wish I’d known them when I started out.
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