Does affiliate marketing present a huge opportunity to make money online?
Let us consider the advantages of affiliate marketing for a moment;
— You don’t need to create your own products
— You don’t need to fulfil the buyer’s order
— You don’t need to provide support to the buyer or answer complaints
— unlimited earnings potential
— You don’t need any special skills
–anyone can do it
This list of advantages certainly presents a compelling case for the affiliate marketing opportunity but why is it that so many newbies fail to make more than a handful of sales and quickly give up on their affiliate marketing dream?
The number one reason why newbie affiliate marketers fail is they focus their time and energy on driving traffic directly to the affiliate products sales page and they miss the most crucial step in the process.
You must remember that most people don’t buy a product the first time they read the sales page, in fact research shows that on average it takes 7 contacts before the sale is made. This means that unless you have a system in place to capture the contact details of your prospects you are leaving the majority of the money on the table.
The solution is relatively simple; you have already generated the targeted traffic so all you have to do now is present a page offering an incentive in exchange for the prospect’s email address (a quality, free report works well).
You are now able to approach your prospect again and again with the offer and you can vary the offer to highlight different benefits of the product.
If you are wise you will develop your relationship with your email list by sending regular messages containing quality content and occasional free gifts and offer them other related products to help solve their problems, this way you are actually providing a service not just trying to make a quick sale.
Think of your email list as a list of ‘customers for life’ because, properly nurtured, that is exactly what they are.
If you want to fully realize the affiliate marketing opportunity you must shift your mindset and focus on building long term relationships that earn you the right to present offers and make affiliate commissions on an ongoing basis.
Take a long term view with your affiliate marketing, dedicate your efforts to building a list of happy subscribers who look forward to receiving your emails and the money will naturally follow.
One of the most popular affiliate marketing questions I receive is;
“How do I cloak my affiliate links?”
I have created two short videos to explain;
I hope you have found this article helpful, if you have any more affiliate marketing questions drop me a line at;
stuart@stuart-turnbull.com
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Hi Stuart,
Came to this page today re the cloaking videos. I have used the first option, buying a similiar domain which incidentally is to one of your products. However, the second method is brilliaant. Why haven’t I used this myself…..i don’t know but certainly going to start using this method.
Take care.
Donald
Hi Stuart,
At last, a simple way to cloak. I have a couple of domains lying dormant. Will put it to use.
Thanks again.
Regards
Donald
Hey Stuart,
I think you summed up the entire post beautifully with this sentence:
If you want to fully realize the affiliate marketing opportunity you must shift your mindset and focus on building long term relationships that earn you the right to present offers and make affiliate commissions on an ongoing basis.
Fantastic reading too mate.
Can I just say to you and anyone reading this that the reason I came over to comment was to continue the conversation from your comment at my blog, but I came straight away and have now subscribed to your blog too because your comment was awesome!
You really provided some geniunely helpful and valuable advice and I just wanted to come back and personally tell you that you ROCK!
🙂 Chat soon
Hi Alex
Thanks for visiting and subscribing to my blog, much appreciated!
To anyone else reading, this is proof that blog commenting is a very effective way to drive targeted traffic and build great relationships!
Stuart,
I think this article is great for those wanting to dip their toes into the water so to speak… And some people do really well out of it if set up right. Thanks for the Information
Keldyn
Thanks for your contribution, Gary.
The route to success for me was;
1 create my own product
2 build list on the back of it
3 recommend products (as an affiliate) to the list
4 'rinse and repeat'
Thanks for sharing this Stuart. I'm also into affiliate marketing. What I really like about affiliate marketing is you don't experience the hassle that you can experience if it's your own product that you are selling. I'm not sure that it's better to sell someone's product than sell your own product, of course, having your own product is still better for me.
But then again, you bypass the level of hassle if you promote someone's product. I would also like to emphasize the importance of building an email list. You won't succeed in affiliate marketing if you don't have a list. So build your list first before anything else.=)
Hi Jacinta
Thanks for your comment.
Those are good suggestions to capture email addresses.
For me, affiliate marketing is not something I do as a 'stand alone' income stream, it is something that happens naturally as I interact with my list of subscribers.
Taking article marketing as an example, it is a much better strategy to use articles to drive traffic to your sites where you capture email addresses and then recommend affiliate products to this list than to drive the article traffic directly to the affiliate product sales page.
It is a more sustainable, long-term strategy because you can build a relationship that allows you to promote affiliate products on an ongoing basis.
I'd better sign off before this comment ends up longer than the post!
Hi Robert
Thanks for your question, I use my article resource boxes to link to my own products and sites so hadn't really considered this.
Your comment prompted me to look into the rule on Ezine Articles and here it is;
"EzineArticles.com Editorial Guidelines: (AFFILIATE PROGRAMS):
Affiliate links will be allowed if the link is a domain name you own which forward/redirects to the affiliate link from the top-level of the domain name. For example, it is permissible to forward to an affiliate link from:
http://your-company-name.com/
…but it would not be permissible to forward to an affiliate link from:
http://your-company-name.com/page.html http://your-company-name.com/subdirectory/ http://your-company-name.com/subdirectory/page.ht… http://sub-domain.your-company-name.com/
Any article with an affiliate link that does not adhere to this guideline will cause the article to be rejected."
I use the technique I demonstrated in my eBooks and my email campaigns.
Hi Stuart,
I am really starting to learn more about affiliate marketing as I am moving along in my online journey. Although I do believe the money is in the list so to speak and that is something I really need to work on first! 😆
I have been reading a lot about techniques of having a squeeze page before promoting the affiliate product as well as some marketers have even suggested creating a small report within the niche that you can give away before promoting the affiliate product as a lead capture and then using email marketing to them promote the affiliate product as well.
What do you think of those?
Hope all is going well. See you back here soon! 😎
Cheers
Jacinta 😀
P.S We have started a blog commenting challenge over at JT forum, are you up for it? I have written a post about it as well. 😛
Hi Stuart,
Interesting videos, I cloak my links using a software program but this is obviously taking things a step further.
I have a question…
Using this method does this bypass the strict rule used by the likes of EzineArticles.Com about promoting affiliate links via your articles?
It's just that the affiliate link stills shows up in the URL at the destination page when clicked.
Robert