Archives for March 2016

Affiliate marketing is a real and legitimate business model that is used by more than 1.5 million people on Clickbank alone. Affiliate marketing has always been around, but it has erupted into enormous popularity because of the Internet.

The reason why is because besides entertainment, people use the Internet mostly to search for products and services that they want to buy. With the World Wide Web, there are no international borders. People living in Katmandu can buy from you just as easily as people down the street.

So the pool of potential customers is simply enormous. Given that there are at least 1 billion people online at any given moment — which is a conservative estimate — any product you can possibly imagine has buyers out there somewhere.

No Delivery Limitations

With digital products such as eBooks, audio courses, video series and so on there’s not even any delivery issues to consider. You don’t need to mail or transport physical products to people. All you need to do is make it possible for people to download digital products to any device anywhere instantly.

The profit potential for affiliate products is limitless. There is no cap to the number of products you can promote or how many people you can promote them to. In fact, the larger your product line and the bigger your customer base, the more money you can stand to earn.

You don’t even have to worry about administration of your sales program because you are only the representative of somebody else. You don’t have to track sales or even collect taxes. All you have to do is promote products and cash checks.

Connect to Affiliate Networks

The easiest place to find affiliate products are through affiliate networks. These are places that offer thousands — and in some cases millions — of products, both physical and digital, that you can promote as an affiliate marketer.

Essentially, these affiliate networks act as clearinghouses for affiliate products so you can simply go to them, find products you want to promote and then start promoting them to your customers … whether they be your friends and family, you social media network, your email subscription list, or whoever you want.

Non-Exclusive Networks

Now, you might think that affiliate networks are exclusive regarding who represents their products, but that’s not really the case. Generally, just about anybody is allowed to promote affiliate products, as long as they are legitimate, don’t use underhanded tactics and don’t misrepresent themselves to their customers.

Most affiliate networks are free to join. Obviously, you don’t need to create your own products. And, usually, the affiliate network will provide you with all the marketing tools you need to promote their products for free.

You usually will get emails you can copy and paste to your subscription list, ad copy you can use if you want to buy Pay-Per-Click Ads or other types of ads, even pre-written blogs you can use as your own to promote specific products.

Amazon

One of the largest affiliate networks on the planet is Amazon.com. As you probably are aware, Amazon is the world’s largest online retailer.

But what you may not be aware of is that Amazon sells about 40 percent of its products via affiliates … or people just like you that promote Amazon products on their blogs, on their Facebook page, in Tweets or wherever and lead customers back to Amazon to buy them.

Commission Junction

For digital products, there are countless affiliate networks, some good, some not so good. One of the biggest is Commission Junction.

But probably the best on is Clickbank. It offers more than 46,000 different digital products covering every imaginable niche. Because Clickbank offers such a wide variety of products in so many different niches, it’s the top affiliate network for you to look for products to promote.

 

What makes it even better is that Clickbank offers commissions of up to 75 and 85 percent on the products you sell. No wonder it processes more than 35,000 transactions per day and generates about $350 million per year in revenue.

Clickbank also operates in 200 different countries, so when you promote their products, you truly have a global customer base.

Monitoring the social media marketing landscape is vital to your success. If you’d like to have access to even more powerful marketing tips, as well as a way to generate conversion-ready Internet marketing prospects each month, click here to learn about my done-for-you system.

After working with affiliate marketing for a while, most online marketers have a basic understanding of how the process works. Now we are going to do something a little bit different: We’re actually going to take the principles you have learned about creating sales funnels and actually walk you through the process using a real affiliate product that we are going to identify on Clickbank.

In the Beginning …

First, let’s go to Clickbank and look for a product to promote. It should be something that is within your comfort zone and in a niche you are familiar with.

Let’s say you have an info product you have either created yourself or bought from another online marketer. It’s got a high conversion rate, an attractive gravity and pays a 75 percent commission on its sales price. Plus, if you are familiar with it, you can talk about it intelligently with enthusiasm.

The next step is to create some web pages where we can promote this product. There are two we are going to build — the squeeze page and the sales page.

Squeeze Pages

For the squeeze page we are going to need some sort of giveaway that our customers are going to find irresistible.

Let’s think for a moment about the types of people who are going to be searching for your product: People who want to learn how to create passive online revenue streams but lack the experience or knowledge to do so.

Now let’s think about what sorts of giveaway products they would find irresistible. How about a top 10 list of some kind that gives them actionable information they can use in their everyday lives?

You can either create this giveaway product by buying a Private Label Rights product for ten dollars or less and reconfigure it as our own, or commission somebody to create it for you by hiring somebody on Elance, Guru, ODesk or one of the other freelance marketplaces.

Making the Offer

So now we have our Lead Magnet. The next step is to load it onto our sales page and hook up our autoresponder so that when people opt-in, the autoresponder sends them the giveaway report and adds them to our email list.

At this point, the autoresponder needs to point the visitor to our sales page, which is the other website we have created to promote the product.

Again, the content of the sales page can be something we have created ourselves using the techniques we have learned from this course, or hired somebody else to write for us.

Don’t Repeat Yourself

What you don’t want to do is to simply use the sales copy that the affiliate seller give you verbatim because then your sales page may be exactly the same as other sales pages out there.

It’s also important that your sales page be SEO optimized so that people can find it through organic Google searches and other search engines.

Promoting Your Product through Email

Now we have two paths leading to our affiliate link: People who opt-in to the squeeze page are led to the sales page and people who find the sales page organically also have the opportunity to buy our affiliate product.

The next step is one of the easiest. We want to build our email series that is going to promote our affiliate product to our subscribers. For this, it is perfectly acceptable to use the swipe copy provided by the affiliate seller.

Or you can create your own swipe copy if you want. Or you can modify their copy any way you like.

The next thing we want to do is to create social media marketing. For one, that means including widgets on our sales page so that it’s easy for people to give social approval signals so that our page ranking improves.

Knowing what to do with the knowledge you’ve gained as an experienced Internet marketer is vital to your success. If you’d like to have access to even more powerful marketing tips, as well as a way to generate conversion-ready Internet marketing prospects each month, click here to learn about my done-it-for-you system.

 

 

 

 

Forums are a great place to post articles that include links to your web pages. Forums are places where people interested in a particular topic can go to read posts by other people interested in the same niche.

All of the big internet sites – such as Google, Yahoo and Bing – offer forums on every topic imaginable. Even social media sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn host forums where you can post your articles. Your articles can even be broken up into smaller pieces and posted as comments to other people’s forum postings.

Any Topic, Anywhere

Forums on just about any topic can be found on any of the big internet services – such as Bing, Yahoo and Google – or look for forums on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

The more forums you post on, the more opportunities you have to attract customers to your squeeze page. Plus your posts will remain available to the search engines for a long time.

Better than Backlinks

Backlinks were the primary way Google and search engines determined a sites ranking up until a couple of years ago. But Google changed its search engine algorithm in 2011 and again in 2012 to put less emphasis on backlinks and more emphasis on social approval signals.

These are things like Facebook “Likes”, Google+ +1’s, and the number of times your link has been Tweeted on Twitter.

What happened was that a lot of people in Internet marketing figured out that having a lot of backlinks would get your pages ranked high. So they started to create hundreds of artificial backlinks just to fool Google into thinking that their site was more important than it actually was.

Panda and Penguin

And it worked … for a while. Eventually, Google figured out what was happening and that’s when it rolled out its Panda and Penguin upgrades to its search engine algorithm.

These two upgrades now give more weight to social approval, and it makes sense because social media is the way people today let other people know about the things they like the most.

So if your website gets a lot of social approval, it’s going to be ranked high on Google.

Attracting Social Approval Signals

The key to getting a lot of social approval is to be active on social media. Although it’s free, it tends to take a lot of time and effort … which, of course, is one of the hallmarks of a free traffic method. You also have to make it easy for people to give you social approval — so you want to include widgets on your web pages that let them give you Facebook “Likes” and Google+ +1’s right there from your page.

Another benefit of social media marketing is that it’s easy to categorize users according to preferences.

So in addition to using it to get social approval to improve your page rankings and boost your traffic, you also target your affiliate products to a highly specialized group of consumers: Those who are looking to buy exactly the products they are promoting.

Building Relationships

Social media sites are more informal than sales pages or retail sites, so your marketing plan needs to take a non-traditional approach. You can’t just send ads for your affiliate products to your Facebook friends or Twitter followers because they will think you are spamming them and will block you. Instead, to be successful you have to take the time to develop personal relationships with your customers.

Once you have gained their trust, you can promote your products in the form of product reviews,recommendations and offhand remarks, rather than blatant promotion.

When launching a social media marketing campaign, you want to identify people who are interested in the types of products you are promoting.

For example, search for Facebook, LinkedIn and Skype groups that are related to your niche, join them and interact with other members. Use Twitter tags … which are hash marks followed by keywords, such as #Forex … to find tweets about your niche. Then follow the people who are sending them. On Twitter, if you follow somebody, they usually will follow you back.

Monitoring the social media marketing landscape is vital to your success. If you’d like to have access to even more powerful marketing tips, as well as a way to generate conversion-ready Internet marketing prospects each month, click here to learn about my done-it-for-you system.

One of the fastest and easiest ways to get an online business up and running so you can earn recurrent income hands-free is by promoting affiliate products.

What are affiliate products? These are products that other people own and that you simply promote. These can be actual, physical products — such as bicycles, cars, homes and so on. Or they can be digital Information Products — such as an eBook or a video course.

When you promote affiliate products, every time you make a sale you get a commission on that sale. In other words, when you lead a customer to the product owner’s website and that customer spends money to buy that product, you get some of that money.

Automatic Sales Commissions

How much of a sales commission do you get? It all depends on the product and the terms of the affiliate agreement, but it can be anywhere from 3 to 5 percent to up to 75 percent of the sale price or even more.

Regardless of the sales commission, the more customers you lead to the seller, the more money you are going to make. So there really is no limit to the amount of money you can make with affiliate marketing.

A Recurrent Profit Structure

This is a little bit like Multi-Layer Marketing — or MLM — which is something some of you may already be familiar with. That’s when you sell other people’s products but you have to buy them yourself first. Examples include Amway, Mary Kay Cosmetics and tons of other business opportunities.

The difference between affiliate marketing and MLM is that with affiliate marketing you don’t have to buy any products yourself. All you need to do is to lead customers to where they can buy the products themselves and you get paid.

As the affiliate marketer, you are sort of like a middle man. Another way to think about it is that you are part of the seller’s sales team or sales force who is promoting their product in exchange for a commission.

No Upfront Costs or Inventory Required

One of the biggest benefits of affiliate marketing is that there aren’t any upfront costs. There are no products to buy and warehouse and no inventory that you are responsible for.

You don’t have to collect any money from customers or handle any actual products. You don’t have to provide customer support. You don’t need to have your own team of employees. Really, you don’t need anything except your own abilities and an internet connection and you can make a boat load of money with affiliate marketing.

Whenever Somebody Buys, You Get Paid

Literally all you have to do is to lead customers to where they can buy the products you are promoting and you can earn up to 75 or 80 percent of the sales price in many cases. That makes affiliate marketing an excellent, highly profitable business model.

So how much money can you expect to make with affiliate marketing? Well, the many web-based entrepreneurs who have affiliate marketing platforms in place right now are making six figures a year or more.

Super Affiliates

There are even a lot of super affiliates. These are people who have quit their full-time jobs and focus exclusively on affiliate marketing — and who are making more than a million per year with it.

It’s a great business model because of the opportunities created by the Internet. Remember that there are about 5 billion people on the planet and at least half of them — and closer to three-quarters — have access to the Internet. That means there is practically a bottomless supply of potential customers online at any given time.

Finding innovative new ways to connect with customers and promoting affiliate products that practically sell themselves is one of the fastest and easiest ways to build a recurrent, hands-free revenue stream that can earn you a substantial income over time.

Monitoring the social media marketing landscape is vital to your success. If you’d like to have access to even more powerful marketing tips, as well as a way to generate conversion-ready Internet marketing prospects each month, click here to learn about my done-it-for-you system.