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Friday, April 24th, 2009
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Affiliate Tip #1: Add Your Own Unique Slant

Affiliate Tip #1: Add Your Own Unique Slant

istock 000006789711xsmall 150x150 Affiliate Tip #1: Add Your Own Unique SlantEditor’s Note: This is the first in a series of five quick affi­liate tips by guest blog­ger Robert Plank. Videos of each are also pos­ted at the end of this article. Enjoy!
– Michel Fortin

Stop being so lazy with affi­liate marketing!

An affi­liate pro­gram is where you can link to someone else’s offer with your spe­cial ID and get paid com­mis­sion every sale you make. This pro­cess “seems” really hands-​​off and easy because there’s no pro­duct crea­tion or cus­to­mer sup­port invol­ved… just send traf­fic to a pro­ven offer!

Here’s the problem.

Most mar­ke­ters are lazy and don’t rea­lize that affi­liate mar­ke­ting has its own disad­van­ta­ges. It’s tougher to build a list using affi­liate mar­ke­ting, tough to con­vert and split test, and you have to devote most of your effort to pre-​​selling and mar­ke­ting that affi­liate product.

What the heck do you need to know about affi­liate mar­ke­ting in order to pull in decent results?

If you’re serious about affi­liate mar­ke­ting, setup a squeeze page that gets peo­ple on a mai­ling list first and redi­rects to the affi­liate offer. Send traf­fic to that page using forum posts and articles.

Even if they don’t buy right away, you can keep broad­cas­ting to that list every day with remin­ders about bene­fits for that offer… things they might have mis­sed or even things you thought about the ven­dor didn’t.

For exam­ple, once I pro­mo­ted an affi­liate offer about how to create iPhone apps and I wrote a quick follow-​​up asking peo­ple… what if you thought of eBay or AdWords before anyone else? What if you regis­te­red even one or two English-​​word domain names like Busi​ness​.com or About​.com before anyone else? What would those be worth today?

What’s great about this is the pro­duct ori­gi­na­tor prac­ti­cally wrote your e-​​mails for you. You can copy huge chunks of the sales let­ters and add them as e-​​mail follow-​​ups… then add a call-​​to-​​action at the end of the e-​​mail so peo­ple can click your affi­liate link to get back to the page.

Even if they don’t buy that offer, you can even­tually hit them with a dif­fe­rent but rela­ted affi­liate offer as well.

About the Author

Robert Plank is a computer programmer and Internet marketer. Even master copywriter Michel Fortin quadrupled his signups by adding Robert's simple exit pop-up email form to his blog. How many more subscribers and sales will it get you?

Category: Affiliate Marketing
Tags: adwords, affiliate, article, commission, list, Marketing, offer, Selling
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Pinpoint Hungry And Highly Profitable Markets

Pinpoint Hungry And Highly Profitable Markets

New! Streaming video lessons show you how to identify hungry niches online and how to "read their minds!" Discover what your market wants and how to sell more to existing markets. Click for more »

« All You Need to Know About Branding in 5 Steps
Affiliate Tip #2: Interview Or Add Your Own Bonuses »
  • Right, affiliate marketing products are tough to track and split test.

    When I first started, I used to promote them directly, but now I prefer to create my own product, and then, sell the affiliate product in the back end.

    Much better like this (for me).

    Franck
  • As usual Michel and Sylvie you did a phenomenal job of bringing Robert back to your site. He is just amazing at how he can produce products and articles at lightening speed. And he's so very personable and willing to help everyone. I respect him as a mentor tremendously. Thanks to him I have increased my productivity of blog posts (vlogs actually) and other videos by over 300% in the past 6 weeks. Thanks for having him on your blog. And...way to go Robert!

    Terrie
  • Squeeze pages work because they are opt-in, permit the receiver of the email message to opt-out , and allow the affiliate marketer to stagger messages using an auto responder. Once a series of auto responder messages is written, there may be little need to do more. Affiliate marketers succeed with this message, and their success validates commitment and energy.
  • Mogul
    Yeah, huge hassle getting enough traffic with some offers to do reasonable split-tests.
  • Mogul, I agree. Traffic is the achilles heel of most marketers. Paid traffic is tough to make profitable (requires lots of tweaking and 40 conversions before you can really tell anything from testing) and to get any decent amount from free traffic sources, you need a ton of blog posts, articles, and videos.

    All the more reason to send that traffic to a squeeze page with a bribe, so you don't have to try as hard the next time you need targeted traffic.
  • Mogul
    "If you’re serious about affiliate marketing, setup a squeeze page that gets people on a mailing list first and redirects to the affiliate offer. Send traffic to that page using forum posts and articles."

    A great example of someone doing this right now is Yaro Starak. The course he's currently promoting through Shoemoney, JohnChow.com, and Problogger begins with a free eBook "bribe" used as a lure to get on his mailing list. I don't really want to give him free traffic, but I'd advise marketers here just as an exercise to have a look at his copy/structure and eBook. The "squeeze" page is at http://www.membershipsitemastermind.com/

    You can avoid the mailing list signup and associated lifetime-of-spam by reading the book for free by going directly to http://www.membershipsitemastermind.com/masterp...

    I obviously don't recommend the course itself, but it's worth studying his copy, funnel structure, and sales techniques.
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Pinpoint Hungry And Highly Profitable Markets

Pinpoint Hungry And Highly Profitable Markets

New! Streaming video lessons show you how to identify hungry niches online and how to "read their minds!" Discover what your market wants and how to sell more to existing markets. Click for more »