Move Up to the Next Level of Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing can be an excellent way of getting started in the online business world. You don’t need a product, you don’t need to be able to handle credit cards, and you don’t need a website. Many people are earning a good income from affiliate marketing and don’t know the first thing about web sites and web hosting.

That’s fine for people who just don’t want the hassle of managing websites. Maybe they earn enough money for their needs, they have a decent life and see no reason to change things.

This is where you can start to stand out from the crowd and get on your way to turning a good income into a living. Imagine boosting your affiliate income so much that you could give up your day job. In fact, your online affiliate marketing will become your day job, only you won’t have to work 8 hours a day at it, and you can choose when you work those hours. So how do we move up to the next step?

If you’re not interested in setting up websites, stop reading now. However, if you’re willing to give it a try, this is what you need to do to jump above the other affiliates.

Many affiliates use the following system to earn their money:

Select a vendor’s product to promote
Get an affiliate link
Create Google AdWords ads to promote the affiliate link
Customers follow the affiliate link to the vendor’s website and purchases the product (hopefully)
Receive commission payment from vendor’s affiliate program (eg ClickBank)

Easy as pie! But what’s wrong with this scenario?

You’re Missing Out!
You have to analyse what’s going on behind the scenes. let’s say that 30 people followed your link and bought a product for $27. Your affiliate commission on each sale was $15, so you made a nice 30 x $15 = $450 from the promotion (less your advertising costs). The vendor made 30 x $12 = $360 from those sales.

When those 30 customers purchased the product, the vendor captured their details and added them to his mailing list. And we’ve all heard that old chestnut; “the money is in the list”.
So what happens when the vendor releases a new, related product? He offers the product directly to those 30 people in his mailing list. They are a captive audience, and they are known buyers, so there’s a good chance that many of them will buy the second product, too.
So let’s say that 12 of the 30 people in the list buy the new product, which is also priced at $27. The vendor makes 12 x $27 = $324. This time, he has no commission to pay, and he has removed those customers from the general marketplace so that none of his affiliates will be able to make sales from them.
Don’t forget that the vendor could have several hundred affiliates bringing in customers in the same way, so in reality his mailing list is going to be a lot bigger than those 30 people you brought in. It could be in the thousands for a popular product.
The vendor also has the advantage that he can offer the new product to people in his list BEFORE it goes on general sale, so the affiliates have very little chance of being able to make a sale to them when it does become available.

The problem is that the vendor is building up a nice big list, while you are doing all the hard work, and going through the expense of promoting the product.

You can’t stop the vendor from building their list and using it to sell new products before their general release, but you can steal a march on other affiliates when the new product does become available.

Build Your Own List
You need to capture the details of the buyers to build your own list. But with an affiliate link, how can you do that? It’s easy. Instead of promoting your affiliate link, you set up a website and promote that. On the website, you will present details of the product in question, along with an offer of some free reports. To get the reports, the buyers will have to enter their details into your squeeze page. Then you can lead them on to the sales page via your affiliate link.

If you offer a lot more for the same money than the other affiliates who are only promoting the product, you have a much better chance of making the sale.

You might want to confirm that they actually went on to purchase the product before you send the free reports. This could be done by monitoring your affiliate account, or by getting them to send you a copy of their payment invoice.

The best part of all, is that some vendors actually provide promotional websites that you can download and use to sell their product via your link, so the sales copy is written for you. All you have to do is modify the site to advertise your free reports and include the squeeze page fields.

So What About the Free Reports?
Search around for reports related to the product you are promoting to make sure the offer looks attractive. You can usually find several with PLR (Private Label Rights) or Giveaway Rights.
An even better idea is to write your own giveaway report, because then it will be unique.

What’s Next?
You have now begun to build your list. You know what kind of thing those people are interested in, so it’s a targeted list. So when you find another product to sell that might appeal to those people, email them directly. Your affiliate link will be in the email. You might want to cloak the link, but that’s the subject of another article.

Your list contains your own captive audience of known buyers. Build your lists with every product you sell. Sell to them directly and your income will climb rapidly.

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