The Most Important Lesson For New Affiliates
Now I must stress that I am telling you the pros and the cons – the ups and downs of affiliate selling. I will mention from time to time the ‘How To’ – but I can’t stress enought that you should be guided by an expert such as Anik Singal on his excellent site Affiliate Classroom.
However I am going to tell you THE most important thing to do if you want to become a successful affiliate.
Here it is – TAKE NOTE!
AS AN AFFILIATE YOU HAVE TO BUILD A LIST- YOU WANT YOUR OWN LIST TO WRITE TO AGAIN AND AGAIN
I know – I know – there are people that use Google Adwords (basically buying traffic – more on that later) to send traffic to an affiliate site and without even having a website themselves just collect the cheques. To them it is simply a numbers game and as long as the coins they put in the Google Adwords fruit machine turns into more money at the other end from converted sales they are happy.
With this type of approach it is critical that you select an affiliateprogramme that is converting well. You will also have to monitor the results constantly as the money will continue to be taken at the Google Adwords end (unless you change it) but the conversions might be affected by all sorts of outside influences.
You may be tempted to start that way and probably want to know why I am so against that model.
Just think about it for a moment….
If you don’t collect the data of who you are sending to the sales pages of your merchants
You are completely anonymous in the system.
Your advert on Google has been clicked but absolutely no-one knows who placed it.
From there the potential buyer lands on the sales page of the product you are promoting in your advert.
Then – guess what?
If the visitor (your lead) buys the product:
- who gets to keep the data of the person who bought? – The Merchant
- Who gets to follow up with further promotions? – The Merchant
- Who (usually) gets the full income from future purchases – The Merchant
- Who gets to build his follow up list? – The Mechant
What about YOU the affiliate?
What do you the provider of the client in the first place get?
Well – you do get the commission for the original purchase – BUT – that is all.
Furthermore the big ticket items that the Merchant sells are not usually the ones that you will be promoting as people need to be seduced with small ticket items initially and it is only after a few contacts and a build up of trust and credibility that they then buy the larger ticket items.
We see that all the time at Adam Eason’s website. Most people do not buy right away – they try our freebies – buy a small ticket item after a couple of weeks such as ‘Melt Stress’ for about £17. Then maybe weeks later we see the same people buy things like ‘High Esteem in 21 Days’ for £97
Isn’t that what you would do? – if you weren’t sure about the credentials of the person selling the product.
This straight to the merchant to buy may not be quite as bleak as I am portraying depending on how the Merchant has things set up. For example we have a system in place that ensures that if an affiliate sends someone to our site the affiliate ID is kept in place for a year and covers all of our products. If the potential client returns and purchases within that year the affiliate will get the commission.
Tomorrow I will carry on telling you all about the benefits of having your own list.
Some homework.
From what I have said above – think it through. What are the benefits of having your own list?
Till tomorrow – Cheers
