7 Things Smart Affiliate Marketers Do To Stand Head And Shoulders Above The Rest Of The Pack!

Without a doubt, affiliate marketing is the easiest way to get started online. Even if you have no website, list or product, you can start making money in as little as 24 hrs.

All you need to do is promote other people’s product and get paid a commission whenever prospects buy through your affiliate link.

And so, it’s unsurprising that most internet marketing newbies start their online journey by promoting products as an affiliate.

Unfortunately for most of them, their journey takes an unexpected turn when they discover that there is more to affiliate marketing than initially meets the casual eye.

After posting affiliate links all over the web and not making any sells worth talking about, most people give up. In fact, many people don’t even make a single sale. That’s why there are so many inactive accounts on Clickbank!

But things don’t have to work that way for you. With the right strategies in place, you can rise to higher heights where successful affiliate marketers freely soar, far above the rest.

You can do that by implementing these 7 strategies that smart affiliate marketers quietly use every day. Let’s get into them!

Build a list.

The very first thing you need to do in order to set yourself up to become a successful affiliate marketer is to build a list of prospects to market to.

The very worst thing you can do is send your traffic directly to a product sales page. Why is that? Well, if you send prospects directly to a sales page, about 1 or 2% of them will buy through your affiliate link.

The rest most probably will NOT buy. That means you would have wasted about 98% of the traffic you sent! You will never see those people again and you will have to run a fresh promotion to get more people to visit that sales page again.

But the bad news does not end there. You see, the true nature of the evil you do yourself when you market this way becomes even more apparent when you consider the concept of back end products. We will get to that in a little while.

Meanwhile, what’s the better way to do affiliate marketing? It’s as follows. Rather than sending prospects directly to a sales page, send them to a squeeze page where you can collect their email addresses.

Only after they have joined your list should you send them to the sales page. This way, if only 1 or 2% buy the product you are promoting, you still have free access to the other 98% of visitors who did not buy.

You can always follow up with them and remarket to them by giving them other reasons to buy the product through your link. Eventually many more will buy and you will make a lot more money in the process.

Furthermore, when you build a list, you can also offer your customers other higher priced products without spending any more money on advertising.

These are called back end products and they can make your online business far more profitable than if you only promote one product to every prospect you acquire. 

The difference between an online business that sells or promotes back end products and one that does not is like the difference between walking and flying.

You’ll rise much higher if you promote backend products. They don’t even have to be your own. They can be affiliate products. But you can’t promote them unless you have your own list

So start building a list today!

Build a relationship with your prospects.

The next thing you need to do is to build a relationship with your list of subscribers. The reason for this is that building a relationship will make your subscribers more responsive to you and your offers.

If they know you and trust you, they will spend more money with you. Period. As Stephen Covey has pointed out, trust has speed. It has speed in the sense that when people trust you, everything works out faster.

Your online business grows faster, you make lucrative joint venture deals faster and you even sell higher priced products faster.

So how do build a relationship of trust with your subscribers. One of the very best ways is to provide them with a newsletter. You could publish it weekly, bi-weekly or monthly. Personally, I prefer weekly.

A newsletter enables you to build a relationship because you provide your subscribers with helpful content that solves their problems on a consistent basis.

Eventually, they come to like you and trust the truthfulness of your content. You become a trusted expert or authority in their eyes.

When this happens, your prospects will become far more responsive to your offers. So start building a relationship with them by offering a quality free newsletter.

Promote What They Are Already Buying.

The easiest money you’ll make online is by selling products that your market is already buying.

So simply find out what they are already spending their money on and promote it to them. You need to do some detective work here.

For example, you can go to Clickbank.com and browse the products in your niche. Take note of those that are the bestsellers. ClickBank, God bless them, provide this information.

Once you have completed your research, grab an affiliate link for the hot selling products and start promoting them to your list.

If your market is buying these products from marketer A, they will buy them from you as well if you market them well.

Make Your Bonus Your Product.

This is perhaps the most popular marketing strategy for Super affiliates. And for good reason. It absolutely works!

Have you ever noticed what happens whenever there is a product launch in the internet marketing niche? I suspect you have.

Several top affiliates send you an email that says something to the effect of “If you buy this new product through my link, I will give you $50 000 worth of bonuses that will solve every online business problem you have, and will ever have.”

What they are doing here is making their bonus the product you really want. But in order to get it, you must first buy the product they are promoting. Very smart. Needless to say, this dramatically increases their sales.

So why not do the same? Of course you may not be in a position to offer a $50, 000 bonus (yet).

But you could still add serious value to a product you are promoting by offering your course, ebook or report as a bonus to those that buy through your affiliate link.

If you don’t have any of these, no need to worry. You can buy private label rights products and offer them as a bonus. With these products, you can claim authorship and ownership of a product you never created.

Better still, you can edit the product to create a completely new one. Slap your name on it and you’re ready to go. You can get reports, ebooks and courses from Special Report Club or Easy Plr.

Just be sure to make certain that the product you offer as a bonus is something your prospects really want.

If they are already buying a product on the same topic as your bonus, that is solid evidence that they will want your bonus too.

And if they want your bonus, they will buy through your affiliate link. So make your bonus your product.

Provide honest reviews.

Promoting affiliate products through reviews is one of the most effective affiliate marketing methods.

With reviews, you play the role of a helpful impartial guide that tells your prospects the truth about what they can expect if they buy a product.

So naturally, your reviews will be most convincing when you have actually bought the product and used it. This way, you will be able to provide information that only a product user can.

Now, buying products just to review them can obviously be quite expensive. So if you have an audience that listens to you, it may be better to convince a product owner to send you a free copy of his product.

This creates a win-win-win situation because you get to provide an honest and insightful review for you prospects, while you and the product owner enjoy increased profits.

Just remember that the key with this strategy is to tell the truth. So reveal both the pros and cons. In the long term, NOTHING will have a better impact on your online business.

Remember the speed of trust? Well, honest reviews breed trust like rats on steroids!

Create your own promotional materials.

Whenever you join a good affiliate program, you will normally find that the product owner has gone to great lengths to provide you with several materials you can use to promote his or her product.

This is a great thing because it can really help you warm up prospects to the idea of buying so that they arrive at the sales page in a ready to buy mood.

But as great as that is, it may also present you with challenges if several other affiliates are using the same promotional materials. These could be ads, articles, free reports, banners or the like.

Things may reach a point where prospects in your market start to say, “I’ve seen that before. Didn’t work last time, won’t work this time”.

This is where creating your own materials will come in handy. You can easily set yourself apart by using your own ads, articles, reports, ecourses and banners.

Of course you should also use the materials created by the product owner, especially if they are provided by a seasoned internet marketer. They have done extensive research as to what works and what does not.

But the real key is to test. Test to see which works better. Your ads or the program ads, your articles, or the program articles and so on and so forth.

If you test, you will soon find out exactly where you should use your own materials and where you it may be better to use the program materials. In short, you’ll discover what bring in the most profits.

Avoid losing commissions.

Product owners sometimes accidently create sales pages and selling systems that rob you of your affiliate commissions.

When this happens, your efforts are wasted. You lose both valuable time and money promoting products for which you receive no compensation when sells result. 

So here are a few things you need to look for in order to make sure that you get paid for your efforts.

·    Alternative payment options which don’t credit you, the affiliate. For example, a 2Checkout.com payment button on a Clickbank.com product.

This allows people to pay using other payment methods such as phone or fax. When this happens, you don’t receive any commission even if someone arrived at the sales page through your affiliate link. L

·   Squeeze pages that send subscribers to a different sales page for which you don’t get any credit.

·    Pop ups or links to other products for which you don’t get any credit.

·     Upsells that don’t credit the affiliate.

When you come across any of these scenarios it may be better for you to look for another product to promote.

The first 3 scenarios are particularly harmful to your online business. You may be able to live with the fact that you don’t get credit for up sells (further offerings during the buying process).

But generally speaking, stay away from promoting products that rob you of commissions in the four ways mentioned above.

You will do much better if you promote products that fully credit you whenever a prospect visits a sales page through your affiliate link.

Summary

As you can see, these seven methods are very powerful ways to increase your affiliate pay checks. So take the time to start using them in your online business. It takes a mindset shift and a bit more effort than just posting affiliate links all over the place. But eventually, you will come out on top.

And that’s worth the effort!

To Your Success

Bruce

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