Affiliate marketing is a business model which lets anyone earn through the sale of other people’s products and services online.
However there’s a variety of ways to do this. You can use organic marketing methods, blogging and video content for example, or you can pay for traffic with advertising.
But there’s another strategy which makes sense and I’m going to call this a main principle of affiliate marketing. It’s this – build a list.
Affiliate Marketing & Email Marketing
Email marketing changed everything for me as an affiliate. Before I learned about how important email marketing was, I was struggling trying to sell affiliate products from simple organic websites. No wonder I struggled for so long! For starters, the organic traffic I managed to attain was too little. Affiliate marketing is a numbers game after all.
But also, most people don’t buy from a website they have just landed on. In fact it usually takes between 6-8 visits before someone will buy from a new website.
So my organic traffic coupled with my lack of an email list was a recipe for failure as an affiliate marketer.
The two things which changed things for me were paid traffic and building an email list. With an email list you can send updates and stay in touch with a subscriber – leading them back to your product again and again.
Providing Value
The other principle I’m going to talk about is providing value. While this may not be important for every affiliate, in terms of certain products it is definitely key.
For high ticket affiliate products, you must provide value in terms of useful information which helps your subscribers with their problem. With a physical product this might not be as relevant. But with digital information and education products, you need to show up for your subscribers with useful content which shows you have their best intentions.
The best way to do this is to be useful and provide valuable information to them.
One example of this is something I bought online – a physical book called “Small Dojo Big Profits”.
Small Dojo Big Profits
This was a book I bought from a guy called Mike Massie. I own a kung fu school and I was struggling with the marketing side of it. So I found Mike’s website and signed up to his email list.
Mike was good enough to provide me with some awesome advice which I took on board. He talked about retention of students and advertising my school. He gave me so much value, that I knew he was genuine. I started implementing his advice and it helped me grow my school.
But here’s the thing. I bought his book after weeks of getting his emails.
I’ve found the same thing with my email list on this website too – some people have bought from me years after joining my email list! Years!
The email list works – but only if you show up genuinely trying to help your subscribers.
Summary
So there’s two main principles that have helped me dramatically with my affiliate marketing business (and my kung fu school actually)!
First build an email list. The email list allows you to communicate with subscribers long after they’ve visited your website. Give away a useful ebook, or some free video course (you can find a free video series on this site).
Once your list starts growing, you should find you make sales – providing you are building your list consistently and find the right people (see about customer avatar here).
Provide real value. There’s so many affiliates who spam their list and just go for the sale too early. But if you bring genuine help and support first, you’ll stand out. People will buy from you if you provide value and have the right products and services which can genuinely help your subscribers.