Here is a taste of what you’ll be learning during the 4-Hour Academy bootcamp. This session covers the basics of affiliate marketing.

Affiliate Marketing Basics

If you intend to use affiliate marketing as your sole Muse (automated online income stream) or as a supplemental Muse, you’ll want to have a basic understanding of what you want to achieve with your affiliate marketing program. Decide what level of income you intend to produce from each program you start. Search for a program or product that will allow you to reach your goal. You’ll have to know what questions to ask, then how to market your product, and what pitfalls to avoid. This article is not intended to be a sole source of information on affiliate marketing, however, it should get you started in the right direction.

Questions to Ask

Choosing the right affiliate program is essential to having a successful Muse. To get your feet wet, you can join the programs I’ll be including in a follow-up email. Using a broad-based service such as ClickBank will handle many of your concerns. Still, asking some simple questions will help you to decide:

1. What is the cost to become an affiliate? Since most affiliate programs are free, there had better be a VERY good reason that you’ll be charged anything to join a program.

2. How and when will I be paid? Each program is different. Some programs pay with PayPal, and others mail you a check. Some programs pay monthly, and others pay quarterly. Some programs require a minimum amount of commission is earned before they’ll issue a payment to the affiliate.

3. How is the customer tracking done? You’ll want to know how long your referrals will remain in their system, and if each email address belongs to the first affiliate that it’s referred by, or if the referring affiliate can be overwritten by a subsequent registration.

4. How and where are the affiliate statistics maintained? You’ll want to make sure that you can access your detailed stats online in real time.

5. Is the affiliate program one- or two-tier? You’ll get paid on the commissions of those you sponsor if it is a two-tier program.

6. What is the conversion ratio? This number tells you how many visitors you need to produce to make a sale. Obviously, the higher this number is the better.

7. Will the program pay you for hits and impressions as well as sales? This isn’t essential, and it’s a good question to ask.

8. What’s the commission rate? The commission on sales can be as low as 5% and as high as 100%. I’ve even seen 125% programs. You’ll want to make sure that the commission rate makes your work worthwhile. Commissions on hits and impressions are usually between .01% and .05%.

Marketing Tactics

It is more important that you get started with something, than that you start with the most amazing program known to history. The paralysis of analysis stops more people than any of us would care to admit. Selecting a program that will provide a decent return is a good idea. You don’t want to waste your money (or your reputation) on advertising or selling low-quality goods or services.

What you, as an affiliate marketeer, are hunting for is the best market to market into, one that provides the
biggest payoff for the least effort (a “4-Hour Compliant” business). While this holy grail is possible, there’s no formula out there for you to follow. There are some solid practices that have been used successfully by the biggest and best in the business. I’m sharing with you here the top methods and practices that will help you to do very well in online affiliate marketing:

1. Offer something free to each visitor. This can be a report or a piece of software, something easy for you to provide automatically with no cost to you. Make sure that your report or other free item has real value. This will distinguish you from others who are marketing the same product. Place the “Free Item” offer and button at the top of the landing page, so it will always be seen. Follow up with each person who takes one of your free items. Use an auto-responder like aweber.com to receive their information and to set up the follow-up emails. You likely won’t make the sale on the first visit. It’s been shown that the average customer will buy from you after the seventh contact, so stick with it. Make sure that your auto-responder messages are full of useful information related towhat you want to sell. Slant the information toward why they should want to buy from you. Each email from you should have a subject line that will get your prospect to open the email. If they don’t open it, they can’t read it and they likely won’t buy from you. Make sure to run your email through a spam filter checker before you send it so that you can avoid the pitfall of getting dumped in the trash by their email client before they ever get to see your amazing information.

2. Do everything you can to ensure that the traffic coming to your site is targeted. Having only random eyeballs looking at your site will get you random and pitiful results. To help target your traffic you can write articles on your topic and post them on relevant sites. You will also want to set up a web lens on squidoo.com. Learning how to get the most out of a Squidoo web lens is a whole lesson, if not a course by itself. If there’s demand, we can put one together. Do your best with Squidoo on your own first. You’ll want to write and post one or more 500-word articles each week. The effect of these articles will be cumulative. As you post more, your previous articles will begin producing more visitors to your site.

3. As you build your list (another lesson/course) you can begin to publish an e-zine or newsletter (yet another lesson/course) and send it to your list. Publishing the e-zine or newsletter will help you build a relationship with your list, and marketing to someone you know is easier and more profitable than marketing to someone you don’t. Make sure that the information you include is useful, but not a sales pitch. Once your readers feel that they’ve gotten information that is more valuable than what you’re asking them to purchase, they’ll become buyers.

4. When you put each web site up, make sure that there’s only one page for each product or service that you’re marketing. If you put everything together, people will get confused and leave without opting-in. Include testimonials and reviews on the site, so that the visitors will be able to relate the product or service to their own lives and needs. Photos, names and locations will make a big difference in the effectiveness of your reviews and testimonials. Designing and writing a sales letter page is again another lesson or course. Browse others’ sales sites and see how they do it. An example sales letter page for one of my Muses is www.driveyourkarma.com. Not to worry, it’s a test page example. Including your related articles on other pages on the site could help bring targeted traffic, too.

5. Use video whenever you can. Video sells much better than text. If possible, create a demonstration video showing the product in use. You can post the videos on your websites as well as on YouTube. The YouTube videos will direct people to your marketing site.

Pitfalls to Avoid

Affiliate marketing is a very powerful and relatively easy way to make some extra money online. If it is managed well, it could very well become your only Muse. Affiliate programs are very egalitarian in nature. The sites that attract and convert the most visitors will make the most money. The pitfalls are equally egalitarian in nature. Ignorance of these pitfalls will cost you:

1. Getting on a bandwagon. When you are marketing something that everyone else is also marketing, you’ve got some serious competition. This competition is not just for customers, but for clicks in your PPC campaign. To avoid this pitfall, look to your own likes and dislikes. Choose something to market that you enjoy (or would enjoy) and use (or would use). It will be easier for you to write compelling copy about something that you like and enjoy. You can promote that product to people who are like you where people like you will be hanging out (online).

2. Failing to buy or use the product. Not being your first customer will kill your business. Once you’ve identified the program that you want to join, buy the product and use it. Put it through its paces. The better you know the product, the better the copy you’ll be able to write. Your enthusiasm will be genuine and your prospects will feel it. Only after you’ve used the product and are happy with it should you sign up for the affiliate program.

3. Getting distracted by too many programs. It is easy to get excited about affiliate programs and great products. It is also easy to join affiliate programs, so you might join too many. Being distracted with too many programs and products will ensure that your sites, reports and articles are unfocused. Join them and build them one at a time until each one can run on autopilot. That’s the best way to ensure reliable income from your affiliate programs.

Pay-Per-Click Advertising

Pay-Per-Click advertising is an art, one that can be studied at length to great depth and still you’ll have more to learn. My best advice for anyone wading into this area is to purchase a system that will show you exactly what to do and how to do it. When you follow the system, you will produce results.

There is one system I have used that does just this. I did not want to have to become an expert in PPC. I just wanted results. The system that delivers the best results is Commission Blueprint.

Not that you’ll have any reason to utilize it, they have a 60 day refund policy. If you don’t produce results within 60 days, you’ll get a full refund. I figured that if they’re that confident in their system I should be, too.

Get a head start on your 4-Hour Academy Bootcamp classmates and get started with Commission Blueprint and ClickBank.

I look forward to hearing your success stories, so get started NOW!

To your freedom!

Thubten

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This entry was posted on Thursday, October 30th, 2008 at 10:00 pm and is filed under Affiliate Programs, Muses. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.