Affiliate Marketing Secrets

One of the easiest and fastest way to make money online is through affiliate marketing. What “affiliate marketing” means is that you just refer visitors to someone else’s website, they do all the hard work of making the sale and supporting the customer, and you earn at least a 50% commission

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 set up the ordering, billing & delivery system.
2. There’s no time investment from you because they handle the billing, support, maintenance, etc.
3. You have nearly zero risk because you already know the product sells, because the product owner has already made sure the product sells. So you know that your traffic will result in sales.

Obviously affiliate marketing makes sense – these benefits make it a clear winner!

The downside is…

Once you send your visitors to the product sales page, they are gone forever. Less than 10% of the visitors your send will actually buy the product. The 10% or less that make a purchase now belong to the product owner. She can sell them additional products, but you can never sell to them again.

Is there are way around this?

Simply put, you need to capture the name and email of your visitors *before* sending them to the product sales page. This way you can follow up with them and keep sending them back to the sales page to increase your chances of making the sale. And if you’re a super star affiliate, you’ll provide high-quality content before sending them to the product website.

Here’s why you want to implement these affiliate marketing strategies:

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

The video squeeze page is where you’ll direct your traffic instead of directly to the product sales page. 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. Once your visitors have been subscribed to your email series, they are sent to your content pages.

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 even if they don’t buy on the first visit, your email series sends them back to the product sales page again and again to increase your sales.

All of this together increases your chances of making the sale by up to 500% so it’s well worth the effort of setting it up. And once it’s set up, it runs automatically – you just send visitors to the squeeze page, instead of the product website.

If you don’t have the time or expertise to set it all up yourself, you can use something 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. On the plus side, you’ll save a ton of time and money vs. trying to build this yourself. Plus you can get started instantly. One negative is that there will be other people using this same affiliate marketing system. However, the odds of you and them both finding the same visitor are so small, that it doesn’t really matter.

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.