Many of you would have heard of affiliate marketing, even if you haven’t you can probably figure out what it is. Basically it is a web-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each customer brought about by the affiliate’s marketing efforts.
So as an affiliate, you find a product that you think you can sell of behalf of the products creator, and if successful you will receive a sales commission. These commissions are generally in the are of 1% to 100% of the price of the product, usually 50% or 75%. If selling a recurring billing product as a subscription, affiliates will earn commission for each rebill. So as you can see, it can be an extremely lucrative business.
There are a few tactics that affiliate marketers will use in order to drive traffic to the products sales page, the main one being Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising such as Google Adwords, or Yahoo! Search Marketing.
Recently Google has changed their rules a bit and you can no longer link directly to an affiliate link on your ad, however there seems to be quite a bit of that going on today. So in order for your PPC ads to work, you will need to create some kind of landing page from where prospective customers can then click on your affiliate link. One such was it to create what is called a review page.
Here is an example of a review page for some weight loss products.
http://www.reviewcb.com/remedies/lose-weight.html
As you can see, it is a simple page with two product reviews. The point of this is to attempt to convince the user to click through on the affiliate link to the sales page of the product. Once they have done that it is totally out of your hands, so obviously it is important to chose a product with a great sales page.
Chris McNeeney or Chris X as he like to be known, has just released a product called Google Nemesis. This is attempting to help wannabe affiliate marketers get ahead of the rest by implementing some clever keyword tracking technology, along with some ready made review page templates. That page i linked to up there was made with this product. He has demonstrated a number of pages he created using Google Nemesis that are pulling in well over $1500USD a day.
Once you have this review page setup, you can then start your Adwords campaign and see how convincing you have been with your reviews. This could end up costing you a fortune for nothing, as all those clicks are costing you money and if they do not complete the process you have lost that lead forever.
Another way is to build a list of subscribers that you can market directly to again and again. This is not easy and takes a great deal of time to build a list of substantial size. If you have a huge list of say, 50,000 subscribers, and 10% of those buy the product you marketed directly to them you can see the huge amount of commissions you will receive just from sending one email.
In order to build a list you need what is called a ‘squeeze page’. This is a page that is used to grab peoples attention with a free offer of some sort, then convince them to put a name and an email address in to get said free offer. It could be an ebook or something like that.
Here is an example of a squeeze page.
www.milliondollarcommissions.com
What you see is it is offering a free ebook and has an ‘opt in’ form at the bottom. This way you can get the visitors information and it is yours to keep until they unsubscribe or the email dies etc. You can probably somehow work these two techniques together then that would be very beneficial to you indeed.
I am interested in this business so will come back to the topic again. In the meantime here are some links you might be interested in:
www.djknemesis.com
www.affiliatemarketershandbook.com
Brad Callen’s Adwords Made Easy
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