Whether you are new to the game of online marketing, you want to start a new campaign on little or no budget or you are looking to add yet another lucrative income stream to your already diverse Internet marketing portfolio, it sounds like an affiliate marketing campaign is in order.
Affiliate marketing is the easiest way to take a crash course in online marketing. You don’t need any money to start, but it helps, you can get started right away and, best of all, you can earn tons of money once you get the system down.
The best part of all is that you don’t even need your own product or service. With affiliate marketing, you sell other people’s products and services and you earn a commission on each one. Oftentimes, the commission is 50%, but sometimes it’s higher. Some vendors even offer 100% commissions because they make all of their money on follow up offers, which you can also sell as an affiliate marketer.
Are you ready to get started? First, you need to find a vendor or an affiliate marketing platform. In this case, we are going to use ClickBank, the largest online marketplace for digital goods. Sign up with ClickBank and then start searching for offers. It’s that simple.
Look For Affiliate Offers From Your Favorite Vendors
Do you have an aftershave you really like? Do you use a particular type of vitamin or protein powder? Do you love the way a certain shoe fits your feet? Find the website for the manufacturer of that product and look at the very bottom of the page. Oftentimes, top vendors will have an affiliate program that you can apply for.
Whether you are using ClickBank, another affiliate marketing platform or a standalone vendor, the following tips will have you on your way to becoming one of the top affiliate marketers on the Internet.
Affiliate Marketing Basics
The first step in becoming an affiliate marketer is to find a good offer. ClickBank makes it easy to find a lucrative offer you think you can promote with ease. Click the Marketplace link at the top of the page and use the Advanced Search function to filter your search results according to your preferences.
You will be able to enter specific keywords and you can even omit keywords from your search. The gravity represents the number of people who were paid in the last two week pay period. The offers with high gravity are hot offers, but they’re also ones with lots of competition. Remember that as you make your decision.
The average sale and average rebill should be obvious. A rebill offer is exciting because it’s a chance to earn a regular income month after month for work you only have to do once.
Beyond that, you can choose the country you want to target, the language and you can specify only those offers with a mobile offer. Keep in mind that many of your affiliate marketing prospects may be accessing your materials on their mobile devices.
Choose the specs you want and click submit. Your results will bring up a series of offers. Here you will be able to see the specifics on each offer, as well as a short summary. It is recommended that you visit the sales page to see if you would actually buy this product before you choose it for your affiliate marketing campaign. That is the key to choosing a good offer. Find an offer you yourself would buy and you’ll likely hit your mark with your target audience.
Affiliate Page
Many vendors offer an affiliate page. This is a goldmine to an ambitious affiliate marketer. It’s also a godsend to those who are looking for easy solutions to big money. A vendor’s affiliate marketing page is there solely to help you sell more of that particular product or service. You might find banners, articles, press releases, white papers, e-books, e-reports, links, slides or anything else you can fathom. Use these to your advantage to the most out of your online marketing campaigns.
Once you find an offer you like, click the ‘Promote’ button and you’ll receive your affiliate link. You also have the option of downloading the offer’s QR code, which can be used on all of your online or offline affiliate marketing materials.
Advanced Affiliate Marketing Techniques
Finding your offer is one small aspect of affiliate marketing. Now you must delve into your audience, your product and your subject matter in order to maximize your earnings as an affiliate marketer.
Keyword and Market Research
Spend as much time as you can researching the top keywords in your niche and study your target audience. Use the search function on popular forums and on social media platforms to find people who are discussing your very subject matter. These will be your prospects. Find out what they are most interested in, what their problems are and how you can help.
This will give you the best ideas on how to market your affiliate marketing products. Once you know who you are marketing to, the rest should be all downhill.
The Pre-Sell
Affiliate marketers used to be able to place a link anywhere and people would click. This resulted in many affiliate marketers becoming very rich. Those days are long gone. Today’s consumer doesn’t want to be pitched to. They want to come to you. For that reason, you need to draw them in and keep them right where you want them until they’re ready to buy. The best way to do this is with email marketing.
Email marketing is a great way to introduce yourself and pre-sell your affiliate marketing offer. You should offer your audience something free, such as an e-report, to entice them to give up their information. Create a squeeze page with your free offer and start gathering email addresses. Then, start sending out regular newsletters providing the latest news, updates, tips, tricks and techniques in your industry. This will help to build trust with your audience and with more trust comes more potential buyers.
Once you have established your authority in your niche, by becoming the go-to person in your field, your subscribers will begin to look to you for advice…and product and service recommendations.
Throw in a link every now and again and let your audience know how much you love the product in question. You might want to cloak your affiliate offer with a popular link cloaker, but this is one of the best ways to sell affiliate products for killer commissions.
Use Your Imagination
The above is only one advanced technique for selling affiliate offers. You can combine the email marketing technique with your own sales page that you set up for your offer. You might place the offer in a banner ad on your website. And you can even create flyers with your offer’s URL address or QR code.
With affiliate marketing, it is always the one who thinks outside the box that gets ahead. With this type of marketing, the sky is the limit. Wow your audience and you’ll likely fulfill your dreams as an affiliate marketer.
The above is only one example of how you can pitch people your affiliate offer.
