I am going to be telling you later on in this series that you should begin this whole process of affiliate selling by identifying what people are looking for and then finding the solution to their problems.
However there is another logical approach which can be quite a shortcut and be just as successful if you do your homework.
If you find an active and seemingly successful website which also has an affiliate programme – then check out the merchant – get in touch with them – ask tough questions.
Now – I am not disguising here why I am writing this series. We at adam-eason.com are looking for affiliates to sell our range of self-help and self-hypnosis products. I am using our situation as the example here but the same could apply to all sorts of digitally delivered products.
I will talk about physical products in a later article but if you intend to make any sort of positive impact on your bank balance quickly I have this observation about our own products to help you decide what is best. We sell both digitally delivered MP3 and CD versions of our programmes. In retrospect we would not have had physical CDs made over 95% of our sales are MP3 downloads.
We as merchants love that because everything is automated and we don’t have all the fulfiment issues of posting packages worldwide and the time and expense involved. Our clients love it because they get their products instantly and they are cheaper.
CHECKING OUT THE MERCHANTS.
So what should you be thinking about when checking out websites for potential products to sell?
I will answer that by outlining what we have done at our website to get to the stage where we are selling our own products satisfactorily. It is in fact very easy to identify an active website and you can be sure that the merchant would not be putting in all that effort if his products were not selling.
When we started our website a couple of years ago Adam had for sale four CD programmes already professionally produced with original music background etc. In other words we had high quality physical products. We had no list (I will be dealing with building your list later this week) of potential clients and our website was very basic.
Our products are produced by Adam and we are really selling his knowledge and expertise built upon years of study and running his one to one hypnotherapy consultancy. He is a gifted writer and seminar leader and it was those strengths that we used to get traffic to our site.
Articles were written and placed in directories such as Ezine Articles and a blog was commenced. There is no doubt that these were very instrumental in driving targetted traffic to our site.
A weekly ezine and podcast were also added to the menu. Hard work for all involved and discipline is necessary.
As if all that was not hard graft – meanwhile we have developed a diverse range of products. Just take a look at our store page now.
Those were our core tactics but there were others and I will simply summarise here as a list without comment:
- Articles
- Blog
- Weekly Podcast
- Weekly Ezine
- Christmas Giveaway JV campaigns
- Easter Giveaway JV campaigns
- Book Launch
- Membership Site
NICHE – THE REAL DEAL
Is your Merchant selling a niche product.?
Again our own situation is a good case study.
We had a dilemma which you as potential affiliates will also need to consider.
Our main website is aimed at branding the name Adam Eason. Unless you are Walmart of Tesco using your name as the domain name is a handicap. Adam Eason is not a household name.
The second handicap we had was that the general category self-hypnosis or self-help products is not specific. BUT our individual products ARE niche. For example – our ‘Stop Smoking in 7 Days’ will appeal to those who want to give up smoking but our ‘Sleep Like A Log’ may not be of any interest to that customer.
SO – How do you go about getting targetted traffic to a site that is so diverse (and therefore difficult to get listed in the search engines).
Now our solution was to set up a series of independent sites with sales pages aimed at the individual niches. So for example here is one of our niche sites for the product Melt Stress
I hope you can see the point of all this and how it is important to you.
For example – I can write an article about Stress and place it on Ezine Articles with an Author link at the end pointing to Melt Stress page. Highly relevant to anyone reading about Stress. Of course all things lead back eventually to Adam Eason.
SELL – AND SELL AGAIN
The exciting thing is that this is all good news for you the potential affiliate for our products.
If you find an active merchant with a range of products you can pre-sell to a particular niche and not only get that sale but all future sales from that merchant to your client.
What has been so pleasing to us is that once someone has bought one product – they seldom stop there and we have many customers who have bought over ten products.
You may already have a website which with a little thought can be used as a vehicle to you as an affiliate to other products.
For example one of my friends has a website for her Swimming School . Many of her clients initially have a fear of water and lack confidence. What better place to promote two of Adam’s products ‘Phobia Release’ and ‘Ultimate Confidence’. As an affiliate for our products my swimming friend will not only get 50% commission for sales of these two products but also any future sales of other products.
PRE-SELLING
Tomorrow I will take a close look at an affiliates role in the sales process – believe me – it is NOT selling.
