Building Your First List

Affiliate Marketing – How to Choose the Best Market for Building Your List

Once you’ve decided on affiliate marketing as your online business model, it’s time to make some decisions about what sort of products you’re going to be promoting.  At the broadest level you’ll need to choose a market area, product or products within that area and a suitable domain name which ties it all together.

Some affiliate marketers make their money by having multiple streams of income coming from relatively small niches in a wide range of different markets.  This does have the advantage of not having all your eggs in one basket when it comes to a possible downturn in the popularity of some markets, but it does make it quite hard work in terms of keeping on top of trends and products in all your different areas.  In this case you will need to be building and running completely separate lists for each of your marketing areas of interest.

Luckily, there is a way to simplify things – and it’s always good to simplify things, at least when you’re starting off in a new venture.  Instead of looking for a load of tiny niches to exploit, you need to look for larger target audiences and offer them multiple, highly related offers.  That way you’ve only got to deal with and keep abreast of developments in one main area of interest – and if that area of interest is a personal passion of yours, then you’re laughing (hopefully all the way to the bank!)

The big question in undertaking any sort of marketing venture is what to promote.  There are three main areas you need to consider to help you make this decision.  Firstly, you need a market which is accustomed to spending money, preferably a lot of money, on their passion or interest.  For example, golfers are well known for having money to spend – not least because this tends to be a sport largely enjoyed by well-to-do enthusiasts.  It’s not a cheap game to practise even at a very basic level.

You need a target audience which can be presented with a variety of offers.  You want a market where you can put together a selection of offers which are all related to the general area of interest of your target audience.  This way you can make the best use of list and provide a comprehensive range of targeted offers to your subscribers.

If you can find a market which meets the above two criteria and is also an area where you have a strong interest yourself, then that’s the target audience you should be concentrating on.  Having a personal interest in the market area is not totally necessary but it will certainly make your life easier and more enjoyable if it’s there.

Affiliate Marketing – Build A List First

When first becoming involved with affiliate marketing, a lot of budding entrepreneurs simply promote their favorite offer by advertising their affiliate link and sending visitors directly to the sales letter on the vendor’s website.  If you’re lucky, you may get a few quick sales this way, but it’s not the best strategy.  Using this practice, for all your promotional efforts, it’s not you who gets the greatest benefits.  If the visitor doesn’t buy, that prospect is lost to you forever.  On the other hand if the owner of the product you are promoting is any sort of marketer at all, they will have an opt-in list of some kind for visitors to join and whether or not the visitor buys on that occasion, they will get the opportunity to promote to that subscriber over and over again.  Not just their own products but other people’s products as well.  You may get the credit for a delayed buyer who comes through your link and the necessary cookies are in place, but you will get no credit for any of the other offers that the owner of the initial product chooses to  promote to his subscribers.   You need to be able to grab these visitors’ contact details yourself.

An average sales letter will get around 2% conversion on first viewing.  This means that you are losing 98 out of every 100 people you send to the site.  These visitors are lost to you but if they join the list on the vendor’s site he’ll be able to contact them in the future with a variety of offers.  A great deal of your work and effort is therefore being spent to grow the list of the product owner .  Not a good marketing strategy!

Hopefully you’re now persuaded that you need to build your own list.  You might think this is more effort than you want to commit, but when you think about the alternative, you really have no choice if you’re serious about making any money online with affiliate marketing or indeed any other sort of marketing.

The easiest, quickest and most basic way to set up a list is using a squeeze page, the sole purpose of which is to capture a name and email address.  However, a much better way is to set up a list at your blog.  If your blog is set up correctly from an SEO point of view, you will get the added benefit of organic traffic sent from search engines when people search on your keywords.  This is traffic which won’t come naturally to your squeeze page, however good it is.

Whichever avenue you choose, you will then be able to promote your list instead of your affiliate link.  Your primary objective should be to build your own list, not somebody else’s.  You can set up your opt-in list to redirect the new subscriber to a thank you page which includes your affiliate link.  This way you get them on your list but you still get them to the affiliate product salespage.

Affiliate Marketing – an ideal online venture for internet newbies

Affiliate marketing is a popular way of making money on the internet especially if you’re a newcomer to internet marketing.  It’s basically a case of marketing (and hopefully making sales) on behalf of a third party vendor and being rewarded with a commission for doing so.  This method of earning income online is so popular because it’s so easy to get started.  Doing this at the most basic level, we don’t even need our own website but it’s becoming increasingly difficult to operate successfully with direct affiliate links to the vendor’s sales page.

Anyway, first off, let’s take a look at the plus points of becoming an affiliate marketer.

• we don’t need to come up with the idea for a product
• we don’t need to create or develop a product
• we don’t need to put together an effective sales page to market the product
• we don’t have to provide any customer support
• no major upfront outgoings or expenses
• we can market products from any interest area or areas of our choice
• we can quickly drop a product if it’s not successful and move onto something else.

It’s true, there’s serious money to be made for entrepreneurs who are able to both create and market their own products (and possibly also recruit their own affiliates) but as you can imagine, there’s a lot more investment required and a lot more at stake.  Marketing and selling an affiliate product also gives us an opportunity to test the water so to speak.  If we’re seriously considering developing a new product, we can choose to be an affiliate for a product in the same niche and see how it fares.  If we have little success with an affiliate product it may be an indication that we shouldn’t spend too much time and effort developing a product in this market after all!  Research and testing always pays dividends.

We’ve all come across the super affiliate marketers who make millions every year without ever marketing a product of their own.  There’s no doubt it’s a lucrative form of marketing and most top internet marketers will have a finger in the affiliate marketing pie even if it isn’t their main source of income.  The leading internet marketers who have large active subscriber lists can make hundreds of thousands of dollars by emailing out to their lists on the launch of the next great indispensable training course or piece of software.  But there’s no reason why we shouldn’t have a bite of this pie.

Initially at least, we should stick with reputable affiliate programs where we know our sales will get tracked and our commissions get paid, such as clickbank and amazon.  Clickbank only deal with digital products and this means that the vendors are able to offer far higher commissions than you would earn promoting physical products such as with Amazon.  It’s not unusual for clickbank vendors to offer commissions of between 50 & 70% of the sale price whereas on amazon you may only attract about 5% commission

I’ll be looking at various aspects of affiliate marketing in  future posts.

Until then.

Internet Marketing – Ensuring  Long Term Success

Julie talks today about IM success

A few years ago, when I was first introduced to marketing on the Web, I couldn’t figure out some of the numbers that the ‘Gurus’ claimed to be earning, $50,000 per month, $1,000,000 per year…etc.

Frankly I doubted the truth of these figures because I couldn’t see how they could be achieved month after month.  After all, there are only so many people interested in buying any product and some products have a natural shelf life, beyond which they’re no longer useful anyway.

And if a product’s selling for only $20.00, thinking about how many I’d have to sell to make even $10,000 a month – that would be 500 copies, each and every month – a lot!

What I didn’t understand then was the concept of Multiple Income Streams, (MISs).

The benefit of MISs is having more than one source of income – that much may be obvious, but how?

Well, for instance, it could mean something as simple as creating an ebook, which you sell – that would give you a single stream of income, but if you created an affiliate program which allowed others to sell that same ebook and keep 50% of the profits, the remaining 50% would be a second income stream for you.

Another way would be if you were to sell a product, again as an affiliate, any commission paid would be a single stream of income, but if you were to also sell a second product as an affiliate then that would in effect be a second stream of income too.

(A second string to your bow)!

If you take this concept further still and decide to sell 20 different products, then this would represent 20 different income streams.

One advantage of this strategy is that should any one of these products stop selling, then you’re still left with income streams from the other 19.  And of course there’s no limit to the number of different products you can sell.

This is what the Super Affiliates or Gurus were doing then and are still doing now.

They’re taking advantage of the concept of have multiple income streams.

That is precisely the way to secure your long term future on the Internet – Be fertile and abundant!

Another advantage of MISs is that should a particular product prove to be something less than the ‘surefire’ best seller you expected it to be, you’re not reliant on that single product to put food on your table or fuel in your Ferrari.

Should you decide that you have the talent to create your own products, the concept is the same.  If you produce two, three or more profitable products that are of interest to different markets, a downturn in one sector won’t leave you without an income.

I’ve been in this business long enough to know that there are no guarantees, but I also understand that both you and I can increase our chances of success in both the short term and the long by marketing multiple products in more than one marketplace.

We all have our failures, even the very top affiliates or Gurus but we’re all still here.

Some of the top well-known marketers have been around for a long time now and they’ve stayed profitable by being diverse in their product portfolio and maybe even their market sectors too.