The Keen Marketer

Winning Affiliate Marketing Strategies

If you want to get started quickly and easily in internet marketing, then affiliate marketing is for you. 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 keep 50% or more of the sales

These are some of the benefits

1. You can get started really quickly because you don’t have to make a product, set up a website and sales page, design the website, create marketing materials, or get a merchant account and CRM.
2. It’s completely hands-free for you because the product owner does all the hard work of support, maintenance and billing.
3. There’s no risk for you, 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!

OK, but it’s not all rosy…

You work hard to send the traffic to the product owner’s website, but once you do that you will never see those visitors again. Unfortunately, the majority of those visitors (at least 90%) will not buy on their first visit. And of the 10% or less that do buy, the product owner will be able to sell to them again, but you will not.

What’s the solution?

It’s simple: You must get your visitors’ email addresses before you send them to the product owner’s website. 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 really on top of your game, you’ll then send to a content mini-site in between.

Here are the benefits of doing affiliate marketing like this:

1. By building your own list, you’re creating a renewable resource that you can tap again and again for instant profits.
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. One or more content-rich “warm up” pages
3. A multi-part email series with at least 5 emails in it

You’ll use the squeeze page as the place to send your visitors instead of using the product website. This page is where you collect your visitors’ contact info and add them to your autoresponder, which in turn starts sending them the multi-part email series. Once your visitors have been subscribed to your email series, they are sent to your content pages.

The content pages provide valuable information for your visitors and make them more receptive to the sales message that you’ll link to from inside the content. 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.

There’s no doubt that it’s worth the effort to put a system like this in place, because doing so will increase your profits by 500% or more. And after you get it all set up, it runs on total auto-pilot. You just refer people to your lead capture page, instead of the product sales page.

Someone new to affiliate marketing might want to create his/her own website that is simple but is created right the very first time around. For that to happen, the foundation has to be laid properly and it’s not just a create and post affair. There are specific steps that have to be taken for your site to be found.

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. The major benefit of using a service like this is that you can get started right away, and for a whole lot less than it would cost to do it all yourself. The downside is that other people will be using the same affiliate tools as you. But the internet is pretty big, so this isn’t much of a concern.

Alternatively, you can use a service like Elance to “outsource” each of these compnents. Whichever way you decided to go, it’s critical to get the right website creation training in place, if you’re at all serious about your business.