Last week I had the honor of Mike Paetzold guesting here at Blog Income Life. Mike’s posts were mostly directed to blogging yet the very same principles apply to affiliate marketing. That’s how we get better and stronger – reps at the gym build your body muscles, reps on the internet build your marketing muscles
Ewen Chia of Secret Affiliate Weapon says that when you master affiliate marketing you can your write own paycheck any time you want. This self made mulit-millionaire made his first million focusing on affiliate marketing. In his book How I made My First Million on the Internet, Ewen sets out the step by step process that he employed to bring in the big bucks.
What is so powerful about affiliate marketing is that you do not need to have a product of your own. You profit by someone else’s research, development, production and fulfillment. All you need to do is promote and convert your promotion into sales. In other words you get to make money without the worry, stress and up front costs of developing a product. You can even be choosy and take on products that are proven to convert well, its like betting on a sure horse.
Here are some basic tools that you will need to have:
#1. HANG OUT YOUR SHINGLE
Tell the world you are open for business. How are you going to promote your affiliate product? Of course you can put up banner ads on the sidebar of your blog, as I have done here, but that of and on its own will not bring you many sales. Have you ever noticed that in the offline world big brand names appear in so many different media venues? Coke ads for example appear in magazines, on billboards, TV, as sponsors for major events, co-op with movie theaters, restaurants, and the list goes on and on. That is marketing at its most. As an affiliate marketer you need to do the same with your chosen product.
#2 – DIRECT MARKETING
One of the strongest methods of getting a message to your market is through direct opt-in marketing. Strictly speaking direct marketing is the flyers and leaflets and “junk” mail that finds its way onto your porch or mailbox. Internet marketing pioneers learned much from this method and with a few adjustments here and there developed a system that works. So when I say “direct opt-in marketing” I am really referring to getting your message to your market’s inbox. How do you do that without spamming? You build an opt-in list.
#3 – OPT-IN LIST
This is a list of people in your market who have opted in to receive information from you. It is permission based marketing by email that goes directly from your autoresponder to their inbox. This is how you send them information about your product, about any specials that you may have, or an introduction to another similar type of product that may be a good add on to what they already have. This works for both informational product as well as physical.
An example of this is the ABC’s of Blogging banner ad at the top of this page. When you click that on you are taken to a long sales letter at the end of which you are invited to submit your name and email address and for that you will receive the link to a free PDF download of my e.book ABC’s of Blogging for Money. Many marketers publish a newsletter and offer a free subscription – you may have seen such invites on other blogs.
#4 – VIRTUAL BILLBOARDS
Everything in the virtual world has a twin in the “real” world. Virtual billboards are mini sites and they are a full blown ad for the product that you are marketing. Typically a good affiliate program will already have this type of collateral material ready for you, and you can just go ahead and drive traffic to that mini-site, but it would be better if you could somehow manage to collect an opt-in before your prospect goes off to buy the product. Don’t get me wrong, a sale is good but it’s better if in the process you can also add the name of the customer to your own list. A future post will deal with how you can do this.
In future postings I’ll cover additional ways of growing your list. As a point of clarification RSS feeds and email via Google does not contribute to your list. Those are people who just want to know when you have fresh content on your blog or site – the contact information belongs to Google and you do not have access to it.
#5 – EZINE ADS
Look for online publications on your topic, be it a newsletter or an online magazine and place an ad. This is going to cost money but you are advertising to a qualified target market. Be sure to get the circulation numbers and other logistics such as the readership percentage and typical click through rate for each ezine broadcast.
These are some of the ways that you can promote your affiliate products. As with anything it is starting, testing and tweaking. It is best to start with one method, massage it till it starts to make money, then expand on the same method, when you get real good at it introduce another. Indeed, master affiliate marketing and you will be well on your way to living the big awesome on your blog income.
To Your Awesome Blog Income Life!
Valentina
