Winning Affiliate Marketing Strategies

Affiliate marketing is by far the fastest way to get started making money online. What “affiliate marketing” means is that you just send traffic to someone else’s website, they do all the hard work of making the sale and supporting the customer, and you get paid 50% or more

The benefits of this are

  1. You can get started almost immediately because you don’t have to develop a product, write the sales page, design the website, create marketing materials, or do support, billing and maintenance.
  2. There’s no time investment from you because you don’t have to do the customer support or deal with billing or technical issues.
  3. There’s no risk for you, because the product owner has already done all the research , development and testing. So you know that your traffic will result in sales.

Looking at these benefits, it’s clear that affiliate marketing is the way to go!

The downside is…

You work hard to send the traffic to the product owner’s website, but once you do that you will never see those visitors again. Less than 10% of the visitors your send will actually buy the product. 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. If you do that, you can contact them again and send them back the product website multiple times. This will increase the number of sales you make. 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 Video Squeeze Page (with video)
  2. Several high-quality content pages
  3. At least a 5-Part Email Followup Series

Instead of sending visitors directly to the product sales page, you’ll send them to your lead capture page first. 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. After subscribing them to your email list, it redirects them to your content mini-site.

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.

Setting it all up yourself requires some skill, and if you’re not up to it, you can use a service like Affiliate Silver Bullet. These kinds of services will build the whole system for you and then just give you a video squeeze page (with video), pre-written emails, 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.

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 affiliate marketing.