Net Strife - providing smashing tips on Internet Marketing

Most successful internet marketers agree that having your own product and affiliates is the #1 way to make a large income. In fact, if you look at the top players in the internet marketing field you will find that most of their sales when they launch a new product come from their JV partners and affiliates. So how do you actually go about recruiting affiliates?

First, if you have a digital product like an ebook, software or membership site, I recommend you set it up through Clickbank and let them handle your affiliate program. This gives you exposure to over 100,000 affiliates signed up at clickbank, and it’s just easier. Your affiliates won’t have to sign up and they’ll promote you because they KNOW they’ll get paid. You can of course set up your affiliate program with your own in house script like JV manager if you want, it’s totally up to you. I personally only use clickbank to sell products.

Anyways, once you have an affiliate program set up, here’s what you can do to get affiliates to sell your product. I’ve tried each of these myself, and they should work fine in any market.

Getting The Ball Rolling For Affiliates To Promote Your Product - Use Forums:

The first thing I do to pick up affiliates is go to forums. Specifically, you can use the Warrior Forum and Digital Point Forums. These are two very popular webmaster forums, with hundreds of thousands of members.

Digital Point has a separate affiliate forum where you can post a new thread advertising your affiliate program. If you sell a product through clickbank, for example, just go to their clickbank subforum and post a thread about your product and its affiliate program. This is GREAT free advertising. It only takes about ten minutes, and you’ll typically get hundreds of views. Just go through what commission you offer, your products price, and everything affiliates need to know. If you are an active member of digital point with lots of posts, you’ll get plenty of people promoting your product.

With the warrior forum, what you can do is post a WSO (Warrior Special Offer) for $20. This is WELL worth it for the price. As the name implies, this has to offer something “special” for members of the warrior forum. What you can do is make a WSO asking members to promote your product, and offer one-on-one support, as well as a free website to promote your product and other promotional material.

In addition to posting a thread on both digitalpoint and the warrior forum, you can advertise your affiliate program in your signature on these forums. This will come up at the bottom of every post you make.

After You Have Posted On Forums About Your Affiliate Program:

You want to pick up affiliates from:

• people already promoting products similar to yours as affiliates;
• product vendors that are selling a product similar to yours;
• your customers

To find affiliates that are promoting products similar to yours, I use Affiliate Elite (my affiliate link), which is a really neat piece of software that can give you a list of every website promoting a product. You can then get the WHOIS information for each site, and contact the owner asking them to promote your product too. You can find bloggers, website owners, and other marketers that already promote a product competing with yours - then just send a friendly JV request. Make sure you have a strong argument for why they should promote your product over your competitions.

You will also want to do JV’s and partnerships with product vendors selling a product similar to yours. I have to give Mike Filsaime credit for this one. Let’s say you have a generic weight loss product, and you find someone selling a product on how to build abs. These 2 products aren’t directly competing but they appeal to the same kind of person. So, you can make a deal with the person selling the product on building abs where they promote your weight loss product to their customers, and you promote their abs product to your customers. It’s beneficial for both sides.

In terms of recruiting affiliates from your actual customers, this is obviously much easier if you are selling an internet marketing or B2B product. I haven’t personally sold a make money product before so it’s harder, but you can still tell your customers that they can refer their friends to your product and make commissions. You’ll naturally get much more word of mouth exposure and customers becoming affiliates if you have a great product that actually works.

How To Make It Enticing For Affiliates To Promote You:

The main things affiliates look for in a product to promote is:

• The strength of your sales copy, and how well your website converts visitors into buyers;
• The commission % they get for each sale they send;
• The price your product is sold at;
• The quality of the product itself

Therefore, you want to invest in writing a compelling salesletter that converts, offer your product at a high price point, give affiliates high commission (you can give affiliates up to 75% in clickbank, which is what I recommend) and create a good quality product. To justify a higher price you will want to include additional bonuses and everything else that makes your product a good deal for the buyer.

Of course this post is just scratching the surface of some of the things you can do to build a successful affiliate program. I’ll touch on some more things later.

“I Want to Collect the Money Bag as Soon as Possible”

I was inspired to write this post because someone had asked me just a while ago how to get some people to sign-up under his affiliate link. Joining affiliate programs can make you rich — when I say rich, I mean REAL rich. I am not a “super affiliate” or whatever term that describes a person who’s an ultimate guru in affiliate marketing, but I have made a few thousand bucks by promoting others’ products. This post will, hopefully, teach you to do the same.

Let’s have a little scenario simulation. (I love doing this!) You’ve registered for some affiliate programs, and now you want to promote them in order to generate some sign-ups/sales and get the “money bag” as soon as possible. You start putting your affiliate links in your site, forum signature, and on a few blog comments. After doing all those, you expect to earn some serious cash by the next day…

The next morning, you eagerly wake up and check your affiliate stats. You see “Total Earnings: $0.00″ on your dashboard. What’s next? I guess it’s time to call it an EPIC FAIL!

You see, just by merely placing your links on certain sites WILL NOT generate decent revenue for you. Sure, you may get the occasional sign-up from a complete stranger, but it’s too random that you may not even experience it! To be able to guarantee that you’ll earn some money from being an affiliate, you have to do some work — this is where REAL marketing comes in!

Fantastic Ways to Increase Affiliate Sign-ups

As I have just said, you need to do real marketing in order to earn as an affiliate. Don’t expect some “magic tactics” or “instant affiliate sign-up generator schemes” in this section of this post. What I’m going to share with you are ways which I used in order to generate a good amount of sign-ups in the affiliate programs that I joined. Ready? Here we go.

Let your whole network know about the product.

Well, what better way to kick things off than to let everyone in your address book know about the product? Just a reminder though, it would be better if you send them enticing e-mails rather than just telling them to “check the product out” — if you do that, they wouldn’t really bother!

Review the product on your website/blog.

This is a common thing that people do, but it can be effective especially if your website has a decent amount of followers. Simply give an honest review (based on my experience though, a biased review tends to attract more sign-ups ) and place your links in the review.

Create a website dedicated solely to the product!

I’m sure you’ve seen those web hosting review websites which have articles about hundreds of web hosts. People search for web hosting reviews, and when they visit a review site, they gain some information about a web host. These review sites have affiliate links to the web host itself, so people will just have to click the link instead of putting the URL into their address bar! Why don’t you do the same? Create a site dedicated to the product you’re promoting and provide helpful information. For sure, people will come to your site and cash will come flowing into your pockets (well, not literally).

Post a related video on YouTube, then place your link in the description.

This works best for entertainment/recreation/sports products. Let’s say you’re promoting a guitar product. Maybe you could create a guitar tutorial, provided that you know how to play the guitar, and then put your affiliate link in the description. A call-to-action message placed near the link will help boost your sign-ups.

Buy typo domains.

I have done this many times and it proved to be an effective method. I was promoting web designing services before. Now, the website was fairly popular that it gets type-in traffic. I bought a couple of typo domains and I managed to get 11 sign-ups in one month. Not bad for a medium-sized web design firm with some type-in traffic! This method works wonders when done right, just make sure that this does not break the affiliate program’s terms of service.

Create PPC Campaigns.

Not just normal PPC campaigns though. Make sure your ads are attractive! Here’s a tip on how to determine if your ads are attractive: For example, you are a HostGator affiliate, and let’s say HostGator allows people to create PPC campaigns. (I’m not so sure about it.) When people search Google for “HostGator”, they will see the official HostGator site and your ad. If you were the searcher, would you click your ad or HostGator’s search engine listing? If you answered yes, you’re on the right track.

Give incentives to people when they sign-up under you.

Please take note that there are some affiliate programs which do not allow this method.

To encourage people to sign-up, you may give them some rewards/bonuses. I have already done this a couple of times and it works great — especially if you let them see that it’s a win-win situation. Let’s say you’re an affiliate of a shirt company, and their shirts currently cost $15 each. You get paid 50% (or $7.50) per shirt that they sell through you. Now, tell your friends (or whoever) that when they buy 5 shirts, you’ll get them one for free. Now that sounds like a sweet offer. They get 6 shirts for the price of 5!

Let’s calculate: 5x$7.50 = $37.50 revenue
Give them one free shirt: $37.50-$15.00 = $22.50, or if allowed, buy under your affiliate link - $30.00

You’ve got profit! Although the numbers are small, imagine if you were promoting products worth more money. OR you could always offer other things that would not affect your profit. Maybe you could offer some of your own products as an online entrepreneur.

Bonus Tip: Focus on One Program

If you focus on only ONE affiliate program, you would have more time to market it. Your concentration would not be shifted to other products since you only have one to promote. Try this, you might even earn more than when you promote 5 products at the same time!

Summary

Spread the word to everyone you know, review or maybe create a website dedicated to the product, utilize certain sites such as YouTube, and you will earn as an affiliate. Don’t forget about how humans surf the web — they don’t rely on search engines only. There are times when they type the URL straight into the address bar, so why not buy some typo domains see an increase in your revenue? PPC campaigns and incentives also work wonders.