Winning Affiliate Marketing Strategies

One of the easiest and fastest way to earn a living online is through affiliate marketing. What “affiliate marketing” means is that you just refer visitors to someone else’s website, they do everything else! (make the product, design the sale page, handle the billing and support, etc.), and you get a percentage of the sale price as your commission (usually 50% or more for digital products).

Here’s just a few benefits

1. You can start instantly with no up-front costs and no need to create a product, write the sales page, develop the website, come up with support tools, or do support, billing and maintenance.
2. It’s completely hands-freefor you because you don’t have to do the customer support or deal with billing or technical issues.
3. There’s no risk for you, because the product owner has already done all the research , development and testing. So you know that your traffic will result in sales.

Looking at these benefits, it’s clear that affiliate marketing is the way to go!

There is one major drawback…

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. Less than 10% of the visitors your send will actually buy the product. And of the 10% or less that do buy, the product owner will be able to sell to them again, but you will not.

Is there are way around this?

Simply put, you need to capture the name and email of your visitors *before* sending them to the product sales page. 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’re generating good will by giving them high-quality content. This way, they are much more likely to make a purchase when you send them to the sales page.

Here’s what you’ll need to create affiliate tools like this:

1. A lead capture page, preferably with video
2. One or more content-rich “warm up” pages
3. A multi-part email series with at least 5 emails in it

Instead of sending visitors directly to the product sales page, you’ll send them to your lead capture page first. Your squeeze page adds your visitors to you autoresponder. This is how you start building your list, and at the same time begin sending them useful information. 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. While they’re reading the content you’ve provided, your email system is already following up with them to send them back to the product website again and again.

All of this together increases your chances of making the sale by up to 500% so it’s well worth the effort of setting it up. 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.

Setting it all up yourself requires some skill, and if you’re not up to it, you can use a service like Affiliate Silver Bullet. Services like this design the enter system (the video, the video squeeze page, the email series, the 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 drawback is that you won’t be the only one using these affiliate tools. But the internet is huge, so this shouldn’t really affect you.

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 an affiliate marketing system like this in place, if you’re at all serious about your business.