Affiliate Marketing Success Secrets

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If you want to grow an income that is both location-independent and time-independent, building your affiliate marketing success is a powerful way to start. Here are 6 steps to take you from absolute beginner all the way to making money while you sleep.

Learning affiliate marketing for beginners is a powerful strategy for new online marketers. I’ll show you the affiliate marketing tips that will help you get started the RIGHT way. And, I’ll show you how to find the best affiliate programs that will maximize your profits.

Social media marketing, email marketing, blogging and affiliate marketing all go together hand-in-hand. I’ll show you how to pull all the pieces together into a powerful platform for affiliate marketing success. I’ll even show you some secrets to manage your affiliate links.

You’ll learn how to create a powerful, income-generating affiliate blog, and the secrets behind successful affiliate marketing for bloggers.

6 Steps To Affiliate Marketing Success

So, now let’s dive right into the powerful affiliate marketing tips that will help you get on the right track for affiliate marketing success.

1. The Right Audience For Affiliate Marketing Success

Many would-be marketers see a really cool and awesome product, then go looking around for customer to sell that product to. This is backwards.

Russell Brunson likes to use the analogy of fishing. First you need to decide what kind of fish you want to catch. Then, you need to figure out where that kind of fish lives. Finally, you need to know what kind of bait works well to catch that kind of fish.

So, Who Are Your Fish?

Start by thinking about yourself. What are your own interests and desires? Who would you like to hang out with? Which interests would those people have?

Then you can start asking yourself… Who is your ideal target customer, male and female? Where to do they hang out or congregate? What is their “Big Domino” pain point?

Most importantly, what is it about YOU that makes you someone that your ideal target customer would want to hang out with? What is YOUR story that your target customers will find compelling and attractive?

Create a written description, known as a customer avatar, for both your ideal male customer and for your ideal female customer.

See also: Nail Your Niche

2. Products That Bring Affiliate Marketing Success

Once you have a good idea of who your target customers are, now you can go find products to sell to those customers.

When you look for affiliate products to sell to your target customers, you always want to focus in on the customers’ Big Domino.

Remember that the Big Domino is the ONE THING, that if your customers can solve, all the rest of their challenges or objections will either disappear or be inconsequential.

Build A Value Ladder For Affiliate Marketing Success

You also want to find a combination of products that will help you create a properly structured value ladder.

Here is an example of a value ladder:

via mindworthymarketing.com

A value ladder starts on the initial ladder step with a Bait product that is often free or very low cost. We often call this initial Bait product a lead magnet. This helps get your customer in the door.

Then, as customers climb the steps of the value ladder, each additional product complements the prior products on the ladder. It adds value and also increases in price. Finally, your value ladder will end up presenting your customer a very high-value / high-ticket item as the high-end product.

In the process, you want to present your customer opportunities to purchase ongoing, continuity products. Continuity products are products that your customer will use (and pay for) month in and month out. They help provide you with a stable, ongoing revenue stream.

As an example, you may start with a free PDF as your bait. On the thank you page, you present an offer for a $7 front-end product. Immediately after that, you may present an offer for a course that’s in the range of $49 to $249. And, the ladder grows from there.

Categories Of Affiliate Products

Affiliate products fit loosely into three different categories:

1. Physical Products
2. Information Products
3. Subscription Services

First, affiliate programs certainly exist for physical products. One thing to be aware of is that the affiliate commissions on physical products tend to be very low–sometimes as low as 1.5% to 5%. If your target market primarily will want physical products, you may want to consider eCommerce marketing or online networking, instead of affiliate marketing.

Second, information products are typically online courses. They teach your target customers how to do something. The advantage of information products is that they are delivered completely online, with little action on your part. And, the commissions on information products tend to be larger, ranging from 25% to 50%.

Information products are ideal for the individual steps of your value ladder.

Third, subscription services are any services that your customer will subscribe to and pay a monthly (or annual) fee for. These can be things like magazine subscriptions, subscriptions to private member sites, email autoresponder subscriptions, Dropbox subscriptions, etc. And the list goes on and on.

Subscription services make up the continuity products on your value ladder.

Finding The Right Affiliate Products

One of the keys that drives your affiliate marketing success is to identify the right affiliate products.

Doing so can be as simple as putting yourself in your customer avatar’s shoes. Ask, “what do I need to have, know, or do in order to address my Big Domino?” Then, do a Google search to see what products are available already to answer this question.

Once you identify a potential product, do a search on the product sales page to see if you can find the word, “affiliate” anywhere on the page. That will usually be a clue to find out if there is an affiliate program, and how to join it. You can also do a Google search for the product name and affiliate program, like “Brian Tracy affiliate program”.

The challenge you may run into, especially as a new affiliate marketer, is that each affiliate program will have its own minimum commission payout amount.

You might find yourself in this situation… You might belong to a lot of different affiliate programs, but never make enough sales to meet the minimum payout in any of them. As a result, you could end up earning fairly substantial commissions that you never receive.

Join An Affiliate Network

The answer to this is to join an affiliate network. For instance, an affiliate network is a single network that many affiliate programs are a part of. Each affiliate program in the network has the right to accept or reject affiliates, and to set its own commission percentages. However, commissions are collected and paid at the network level. You have just one minimum commission payout amount for the network as a whole.

3. The Right Bait For Your Audience

Now that you have identified the affiliate products that will make up your value ladder, you need to decide what Bait will attract your target customers to you. Ask yourself what you can offer to your audience that will attract them to you?

From the answers to this question, you will create one or more highly focused and targeted lead magnets. These will be the Bait on the first step of your value ladder. In addition, it’s best if this is something you create yourself.

4. An Ecosystem To Power Your Affiliate Marketing Success

At this point, you’re ready to create the ecosystem that will power your affiliate marketing success.

Your ecosystem will have three major components.

1. Social Media Channels
2. Email List
3. Blog

A. Social Media Channels

In today’s online world, social media tends to be the pond where your target audience fish will hang out.

You identify which one social media channel is the place where most of your target audience congregates. There’s lots of variety possible here, but your audience will likely be found in one of these ways:

1. Facebook Groups
2. Twitter or Instagram Hashtags
3. Pinterest Boards
4. Online Forums
5. Etc.

Then, you begin building your own presence on that one social media channel.

NOTE: you are not here to sell to your social media audience. Instead, you want to get them to know you, like you, and trust you. You do this by providing valuable content to them.

See also: 6 Must-Have Ingredients for a Killer Social Media Marketing Plan

B. Email List

The second component in your affiliate marketing ecosystem is your email list.

Your email list is your most valuable asset online. It is the ONLY tool you have to reach out and place a message in the hands (or inbox) of your target customers with reliable deliverablity. Your email list subscribers either implicitly or explicitly give you permission to market to them.

Once you build your email list, your subscribers belong to you as long as they stay subscribed, even if you change to a different autoresponder platform.

The lead magnet that you created in Step 3 is one of the tools you will use to invite your social media audience to subscribe to your email list.

Your email list, used correctly, will be one of the most powerful ways to get your target customers to BUY your affiliate products. In fact, several different research studies have shown that a well-run email list should generate $1 of revenue per month, per email subscriber.

See also: Email List Building for Absolute Newbies

C. Blog

The third component of your affiliate marketing ecosystem is your blog.

Where your email list is your most valuable asset online, your blog is your most durable asset online.

Your blog doesn’t have the ability to proactively jump directly into the hands (or inboxes) of your audience… However, each blog post stays around and sells for years and years. An email message lasts only until it is deleted or moved out of the inbox.

You create blog posts that contain powerful, compelling content for your audience. Sometimes your blog posts focus on getting people to join your email list, and sometimes they focus on selling your affiliate products. In fact, sometimes they will do both!

Note that, you may choose to supplement your blog with a YouTube channel. This is a great approach. But be aware that your YouTube channel is NOT an asset that you own. YouTube can shut it down any time they choose to.

See Also: What Is Blogging and How Do I Start?

These three components all work together and compliment each other. Your social media channels send people to your blog posts and invite them to subscribe to your email list. Then, your email list sometimes sends people to your blog posts, and sometimes sells directly. Finally, your blog posts sometimes invite people to subscribe to your email list, and sometimes sell directly.

5. Powerful, Compelling Content For Your Audience

Next, you want to start thinking of the questions and problems your customer avatars have. These questions and problems lead to additional forms of content that you can provide for your target customers.

These questions and problems lead to headlines. The headlines can be used to drive any number of blog posts or YouTube videos.

The more valuable content you create and provide to your audience, the more they will come to know, like, and trust you.

6. Promote To Your Audience

The final step to achieving affiliate marketing success is to promote your affiliate products to your target audience. You promote your affiliate products in two primary ways.

A. To Your Email List

Your email list will be the most powerful tool to sell your affiliate products. This only works well when you’ve built a relationship with your email subscribers. For this reason, you need to communicate with your email list in ways that get them to know you, like you and trust you.

As a result, your email list subscribers will be open to receiving marketing and promotional messages, as well.

B. In Your Blog Posts

I’ve already described how you can link to your affiliate products inside your blog posts. It’s worth pointing out that the more naturally you can include the affiliate links, the more powerful they will be in driving sales. Banner ads are one of the least effective ways.

Once you publish a blog post, you promote it to your entire audience. You email it out to your email list and you post your blog post on your social media channels.

You send traffic to your blog post, and the blog post exposes that traffic to your affiliate offer(s).

RECAP: Affiliate Marketing Success Secrets

And there you have the 6 powerful steps to succeed as an affiliate marketer. Affiliate marketing is a powerful approach to jump into the world of an online entrepreneur, especially as a brand new beginner.

And, by following these 6 steps, you can reach the point where you have income that comes in, week in and week out, while you are out and about, doing other things.

It’s the ultimate leverage in building your online income.

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