AffiliateMentor, Author at Affiliate Marketing Mentors

Affiliate Fundamentals

What are the affiliate fundamentals? The fundamentals are those affiliate marketing principles and techniques which every successful affiliate marketer should understand and abide by!

Affiliate marketing is a business model in which third party referrers are rewarded for selling other people’s products online. If they successfully refer a customer to a product, they earn a commission based on the sale. However, despite the huge potential of earning from selling affiliate products, only around 5% of affiliates are successful. Most affiliates will struggle and quit!

Knowing a few affiliate fundamentals well might mean the difference between success and failure as an affiliate marketer. Affiliate marketing is after all a performance based business model which means without sales you don’t make any money!

To make sales consistently as an affiliate takes more than most people expect. Knowing the rules of the game will put you ahead of the many other affiliates who will quit too early, not knowing that success may be only a few alterations of their knowledge and a change in their awareness.

Affiliate Fundamentals: Numbers & Targeting

Affiliate marketing is of course a numbers game. With only a small amount of traffic to your website, you’ll only make a small number of sales, at best! Often, new affiliates will struggle getting traffic to a website and then also struggle turning that traffic into buying customers. Not knowing who your customers are can therefore cost you dearly as an affiliate. First it can cost you several months of struggle in getting people to your website. Then it can cost you the psychological impact of realising that you’ve attracted the wrong kind of traffic to your site: browsers, not buyers! All of this is too hard to bear for many affiliates and they drop out; who could blame them after all?

So, one of the most important affiliate fundamentals is knowing your target audience. When you know who your customers are, where they live, how old they are and where they spend time online, you’re in a much better position to put your marketing messages in front of them, and to do so in a meaningful way.

When you understand your “perfect” customer, you’re in a much better position to target them and only them with your advertising. There’s a saying in sales, if you try and sell everyone, you sell {to} no-one”. By finding your customer “avatar”, you are able to focus your efforts on talking directly to them and marketing directly to them which will save you a heap of time and stacks of money.

Affiliate Fundamentals: Types Of Visitor & The Buyer Cycle

Affiliates need traffic to put their marketing message in front of buying customers. By far this is one of the biggest problems especially for new affiliate marketers. Not all traffic is the same of course and there’s a huge difference between an online visitor looking for free information and those looking to buy a particular product. Most website visitors are of course looking for information. Some of that information leads people to products and services (ideally through your affiliate link).

An example of a piece of online information which leads someone to a product might be a product review. Review websites are good for affiliate marketers because they attract the kind of person who is looking to buy something very specific. So if you’re going to become a content creator as an affiliate, this is an important thing to understand. Review sites work well also because you attract someone who is in the last stage of the buying cycle. They just want one more piece of information before making a purchase. A DIY website, on the other hand, will more likely attract people looking for DIY advice, rather than a specific product.

Depending on where someone is in the buying cycle, you may need longer to persuade them of your product’s value. This can be achieved if you build an email list.

Affiliate Fundamentals: Controlling Your Traffic

However you earn traffic, you will ultimately want to be in control of that traffic. This can be very difficult and you shouldn’t rely on traffic which is out of your control. Google, for example can only give a top ranking to one website at any given time. So competing against high authority websites can lead you to become very disappointed – especially if you’re choosing a competitive niche for your affiliate business.

You can of course gain free traffic by targeting specific keywords in your content, but ultimately it’s up to the search engines whether to reward you for the content you have created. It’s never a good idea to rely on traffic from an intangible outcome. Far better to choose your marketing strategy and work at getting very good at it. Whether this is paid marketing or organic marketing, you should definitely aim to make the most out of your website traffic by getting a list of subscribers. Most affiliate marketers use an email list, which they can build with either free or paid for traffic.

A list is a good idea because you can control your traffic, build trust over time and send your visitors to content you have created to help them. Access a free autoresponder for affiliate marketing here.

Affiliate Fundamentals: Touchpoints

Most people don’t buy immediately when they land on a website. In fact it will usually take several touch points before someone is ready to make a buying decision. On a unfamiliar website, this is all the more so. Whereas on trusted websites, such as Amazon.com for example, people are more ready to buy because they know the site and have come to feel comfortable buying from it.

If you’re an affiliate marketer this can present a difficult proposition because you’re effectively recommending products which aren’t actually yours! Certain products can be sold quite directly, and you can send your traffic directly to Amazon if you have a suitable product to sell. But with certain products, such as digital products, their value can be somewhat arbitrary. This can mean a potential customer will need to know more about the product (and about you) before they decide to buy.

This “getting to know you” process can be achieved by delivering value before the sale in the form of information. This can be achieved through email marketing, blogging or creating videos etc. An email list is definitely a good idea; especially if you’re going to sell digital products.

Branding: Selling “You”

Depending on the product you’re selling, you may want to consider your “brand” as an affiliate marketer. Unless people buy into you, they won’t want what you have to sell either!

Your “brand” is how you present yourself in all your marketing materials: your blog, website, email marketing list, video advertisements etc.

Ideally how you present yourself and your brand should be congruent across all your marketing “tools” and platforms to present your brand consistently to your website visitors, email subscribers and blog readers.

Branding goes hand in hand with targeting your customer avatar and it’s useful to know who you want to target with your message and who you are right for in terms of serving your customers.

Affiliate Fundamentals: Choosing Your Marketing Strategy

There’s many different ways to sell affiliate products and depending on your business model and marketing budget, you may choose from one or even two of many:

Blogging
Video blogging
Paid advertising – search, video, retargeting, etc.
social media platforms (paid and unpaid)
SEO – search engine optimisation

Paid marketing is a much faster way to get traction with affiliate marketing although you’ll need to be careful initially with your marketing budget. But once you’re profitable with a paid marketing campaign, you can leave ads running indefinitely and scale them up quickly. With content marketing it’s a much slower process. It can take several weeks or even months to see the results from your hard work. Plus it can be much more difficult to scale up to larger numbers with content. However, if you persevere with content marketing, you can ultimately make passive sales if your content gets free traffic from the search engines.

Ideally choose a marketing strategy with a view of the longer term and based on your available time, products and marketing budget.

Affiliate Fundamentals: Products

There’s thousands of affiliate products you can promote as an affiliate online. You can choose from physical products, digital products, subscription and high ticket affiliate products. Your choice of products is pretty important and will in many ways determine how successful you will become in making sales. The right kinds of products will always sell and some products won’t sell well however good a marketer you become!

Unfortunately many of the most popular products are in very competitive niches too. A competitive niche has many other competing affiliates in it which makes your job more difficult whether you’re running paid ads or creating content.

Physical products do sell well but as an affiliate you generally earn much less from selling them. Physical products will tend to pay between 5% and 10% commission whereas digital products will pay much more: generally between 30% and 50%. So if you’re selling low value physical products, you’re going to need to sell in bulk in order to make your efforts worthwhile.

High ticket affiliate products pay much more than average and are worth considering along with subscription affiliate products which pay you recurring commissions from your sales.

Mindset

One of the most important factors in your success as an affiliate is your mindset. Since around 95% of affiliate fail, it’s important to stay the course when others are quitting. This means learning from your “failures” which ultimately aren’t failures at all but rather learnings which should help you to eventually become successful.

Most affiliates will become disillusioned when they meet with some adversity. In the beginning it can be a little demoralising when nothing seems to be happening. But remember that affiliate marketing is a long term thing, and it’s also a numbers game. Long term affiliates know this and stick at it. With a small amount of traffic on your website, you may not see any sales coming in. But over time you can build on the small daily steps you continue to take. With a small email list, you likely won’t see a dramatic amount of sales, but over time your efforts compound because you can get better at growing your list and communicating with your subscribers.

The Handbook To Affiliate Marketing PDF

In The Handbook To Affiliate Marketing pdf I’m going to share some of the most important things I’ve learned about affiliate marketing over the last 10 years. Affiliate marketing is a business model which anyone can benefit from. Simply refer products and services online to customers! Sounds easy doesn’t it? While the concept of affiliate marketing is a straight forward one, there are several roadblocks to success which many affiliates will discover!

The easy part of affiliate marketing is joining an affiliate program and getting access to your unique identifying code or affiliate link. Once you have your link, you have the ability to make money by placing it online in front of buying customers.

When someone buys something through your unique code (affiliate link), your sale is tracked and you earn a commission. Sounds like nothing could be simpler. But the truth is many new affiliates will struggle to make a single sale online. Knowing why this is will best prepare you for a successful career as an affiliate marketer. That’s why in this article “The Handbook To Affiliate Marketing PDF”, I’m going to focus on this topic: why affiliates struggle.

The Handbook To Affiliate Marketing PDF

95% of affiliates fail! This statistic should wake you up to the fact that affiliate marketing isn’t as easy as some make out. But armed with this knowledge, and the knowledge in this article, you’ll be better prepared to become successful. If you also bring the right mindset to this fantastic business opportunity, your chances of success increase dramatically.

Why do so many affiliates fail? I believe this happens for a number of reasons:

Affiliate marketing has a very low bar to entry. This means anyone with a laptop and internet connection can “give it a try”.
Affiliate marketing is a very cheap business model which you can start for free. Again, anyone can do it without investment which is impossible in pretty much any other business model.
People have high expectations of what they can achieve without much effort. Yes high earnings are possible, but this takes more than most people are capable of.
People quit too easily because they expect an “easy ride” which affiliate marketing most definitely won’t give you!

Knowing all these things should prepare you better to become successful as an affiliate. With most affiliates, when they encounter a roadblock or problem, they see it as a reason to quit. Or at best they see it as a reason to doubt whether affiliate marketing really works. You should know that the 5% of affiliates who become successful don’t do this! They carry on through the problems and roadblocks, never allowing doubt to cloud their mind! They use roadblocks as learning opportunities, not as a sign of failure.

The Handbook To Affiliate Marketing PDF : Shiny Object Syndrome

So, mindset is a hugely important part of affiliate marketing. Ignore it at your peril. But as well as mindset it’s important to get the right information and stay your course over the longer term. It’s very easy to get distracted when you’re new to affiliate marketing because there are so many people trying to persuade you one way or another with their “shiny objects”. Another training course seems much more enticing when you’re facing problems of some kind. Especially when the seller proclaims how easy their system is compared to the one you’re currently using!

The Busy Fool

Most paths of affiliate marketing will require a good deal of work before you can see the benefit. Unfortunately this means you need to stay focused on your marketing strategy for some time without seeing the benefits! Whether you run ads, create content or post on social media, it’s not typical that you will automatically start making sales on your first outing as a marketer.

Controlling your time and not getting distracted by shiny new courses or being a busy fool is paramount to your success. It’s easy to work at things which don’t produce a meaningful outcome too. This is known as being a busy fool and it’s another trap many affiliates fall into. A “busy fool” spends time on affiliate activities which although might be enjoyable, aren’t moving your business forward. As a business owner time is your most valuable resource and you mustn’t waste it. Affiliate marketing is after all a performance based business. If you don’t make sales, you don’t get paid!

Types Of Products

As a new affiliate I made many mistakes; one of which was promoting the wrong kinds of products. I chose Amazon and eBay simply because I knew they offered an affiliate program and I used the sites myself. The trouble was, I didn’t know how little they paid in terms of affiliate commission. You can make good money of course from any affiliate program. But with low commission based programs you need to shift a lot more product in order to become profitable. Amazon, for example pays as low as 1% commission on some of its products. So it’s well worth becoming aware of the different affiliate marketing business models and their relative levels of commission.

Physical products tend to pay the least to affiliates – typically from 5-10%. Digital products pay more and usually offer from 30-40% commissions. Then there are subscription products which pay recurring commissions to affiliates and of course high ticket affiliate products which pay much higher “one time” commissions.

Of course the best products to promote will depend on your marketing method, but the most profitable are those which pay you recurring commissions and higher rates of commission: subscription and high ticket products.

The Handbook To Affiliate Marketing PDF: Methods Of Marketing

There’s various methods of marketing which affiliates use to get their products in front of a buying audience. Depending on your situation and marketing budget, or lack thereof, you might choose from a number of different strategies:

PPC – pay per click – paid marketing
Blogging
Video blogging
Social media methods (both paid and unpaid)

Marketing methods can be categorised into main groups: paid and unpaid. The paid marketing methods are the faster of the two and most scalable. Organic marketing methods such as blogging and SEO (search engine optimisation) are much, much slower methods. Plus they are less scalable. However, a free marketing method might suit you if you don’t have much free money for spending on marketing, but have a lot of time for content creation.

Creating Content

With content marketing, it can take weeks, months or even years to get traction and sell products on a regular basis. But with paid marketing, you can see results almost immediately. Most paid marketing campaigns don’t work however, so you’ll likely need to run several advertising campaigns to find just one which is profitable. This of course takes time (and money). But once you hit upon a successful campaign, you can leave it running (forever) and make money by running it. You can also turn up your marketing budget to make more sales. This is a bit like having a “tap” for money! Want more money? Turn the tap up – the “tap” being your marketing budget.

This can’t be done in the same way with content because you won’t see the same results as quickly nor is content as easily scalable. However, you can ultimately earn passively from content you have created previously if it does well.

An Analogy

I like the Chinese bamboo tree as an analogy to affiliate marketing. In my early days as an affiliate, I jumped around from one strategy to another without really getting any traction. I was frustrated and disillusioned over and over again. What I didn’t know then was that affiliate marketing is like a Chinese Bamboo tree. The Chinese bamboo tree takes a long gestation period of up to 5 years before you even see shoots above the surface of the soil. But if you water it and feed it, once it breaks the surface, it can grow 90 feet in only a few weeks!

The Chinese Bamboo Tree

Affiliate marketing is like this and although it might not take 5 years to show promise (depending on your marketing method/products), it works in a similar fashion. Your first blog post for example won’t suddenly bring in thousands of sales. But after several months of blogging, you’ll start getting traffic to your website.

Your first advert might not make you any sales, but once you find one which does, you’ll have an income from it which can be grown and scaled up. The hard work with affiliate marketing is definitely the “unseen” work which goes on day after day when there’s nothing to show for your efforts. This is like the gestation period of the Chinese bamboo tree!

Stick at it and learn from your mistakes. “Fail forwards” and learn from your experiences. Little by little, you will grow and develop your business and eventually it will be like a freight train which doesn’t stop! One day you’ll be glad you never gave up! With affiliate marketing you can ultimately earn money without working, because of the work you’ve done previously. Your systems and automation will do the selling, once you’ve figured out how to be profitable.

Summary

While this handbook isn’t a definitive guide to affiliate marketing, there’s several points I’ve mentioned here which I believe will help you become successful if you decide to become an affiliate. Here’s the main points I’ve mentioned for a quick recap:

95% of affiliates fail and quit – to succeed you need to be better than them!
Lower value products pay less – learn about the different products you can promote – see affiliate marketing business models.
Choose a marketing strategy which suits you and your marketing budget – and stick to it
Get help – access these free videos to learn more about training and joining an online community.

Affiliate Marketing Course Free PDF

In this affiliate marketing course free pdf downloadable document, we’re going to look at what affiliate marketing is and the different ways to do affiliate marketing.

access free workshop series — Access a free video course to learn more here.

What is affiliate marketing and why should you care? Affiliate marketing is a business model in which third parties are paid for referring products and services online. Anyone can be an affiliate and earn commissions if they learn how to sell online. They don’t need their own products and services because they can refer customers to existing products.

To do affiliate marketing you can join an affiliate program and choose a product to sell. You can then get your unique affiliate link, which tracks any sales back to you. Once you’ve done that, you need to learn a marketing strategy in order to promote your link earn money.

To join an affiliate program is quite easy. Amazon, for example is one of the most popular affiliate programs and anyone who joins it can promote any product from the site for a percentage of the sale value.

Affiliate Marketing Course Free PDF: Products

There’s thousands of affiliate programs available online and a huge choice in products you can promote. Amazon, as mentioned, is one of the most popular ones but mainly because it’s been around so long. (See the when did affiliate marketing start.).

There’s many other programs too and you can find affiliate programs in almost every area online. Not all affiliate products are the best to promote and there’s a wide range in affiliate commissions throughout the product range. For example, physical products like you would find on Amazon pay affiliates between 1% and 20% commission, with most products falling into the 5-10% commission range.

affiliate marketing course free pdf — Access a free video course and learn more here.

You can also promote digital products as an affiliate too. Many new affiliates will head over to Clickbank.com which is a site with many digital products to promote. Digital products are usually available for instant download and as such there’s fewer costs in their delivery.

Because you only need to create a digital product once, and you can sell it over and over again, there’s also fewer costs involved in manufacturing than with physical products. Because of this, most digital products will reward affiliates with higher levels of commission. Since the main cost in selling digital products is advertising, product creators can afford to pay much more, often from 30-40% of the sale value. This is obviously much better for affiliates than many physical products.

Affiliate Marketing Course Free PDF: Subscription and High Ticket Products

Affiliates can also promote subscription products and high ticket products. Subscription products are those which carry an ongoing regular charge. Memberships, trainings and software products often carry subscriptions and they are good for affiliates who can earn recurring income from each sale they generate. These are good, especially for beginner affiliates because they can help stabilise your income more quickly.

stuart chart free course — Access this free video course here.

With one time sales (which pay you only once) you need to keep making sales in order to keep making money. But with subscription products even a few “one off” sales can generate a regular income. Subscription products which are hugely valuable are good ones to choose, such as business tools which require a membership. These kinds of tools are necessary for online businesses, so members are more likely to maintain their memberships once they buy.

High ticket products are those products which carry a larger than average price tag and as such they offer the largest levels of commissions to affiliates. A good high ticket sale can earn affiliates the same as thousands of sales of a low value product. When you consider than most affiliate sales, even high ticket ones, will require the same or a similar amount of work to achieve, it makes sense to focus on high ticket affiliate marketing products.

Affiliate Marketing Course Free PDF: How To Sell Affiliate Products

There’s various strategies and methods which affiliate marketers use to sell their products and services online and offline. Most affiliates will concentrate on online sales using a variety of tactics:

Blogging or video blogging – content marketing involves creating a lot of content and attracting a specific “target audience“.
SEO – search engine optimisation (optimising website content for the search engines)
Paid marketing – Google Adwords, Bing, Facebook and YouTube are just a few platforms which offer targeted advertising for affiliates.
Social media – both paid and unpaid social media marketing methods can be used.
Email marketing – many affiliates collect emails from a website and automate an email marketing campaign, sending out emails on a regular basis to their list.

Depending on the products you choose to promote, the return on investment available to you, your marketing budget and available time, you might choose any one of these kinds of marketing as an affiliate. If you’re working in a busy job and have little time, you might choose a paid strategy which is faster and more scaleable. Whereas if you don’t have a huge marketing budget, or have more available time, you might choose content creation as your strategy.

Ideally choose a strategy which suits your working style and circumstances and which you can maintain for long enough to get some traction. See also 22 ways to promote affiliate products.

Is Affiliate Marketing For You?

Affiliate marketing is a clever business model which allows anyone to earn an income from anywhere globally. All you need to start is a laptop and an internet connection. However, not everyone is successful at affiliate marketing and there’s a huge drop out rate. Only around 5% who try it stick with it long enough to make it work, so you can bet that affiliate marketing isn’t easy, despite the low bar to entry and low cost of starting.

Depending on your strategy, the time to start making sales will vary, and this is something which is different for everyone. Some people will have some early success and others will struggle because affiliate marketing isn’t an exact science. However if you stick with it longer than most, your chances of success dramatically rise!

It’s definitely worth getting help and support if you’re going to take the affiliate journey seriously. Access a free video series to learn more here.

What Is Affiliate Marketing And How Does It Work?

What is affiliate marketing and how does it work? Affiliate marketing is an online business model in which third party referrers earn commissions by recommending other people’s products. Anyone can become an affiliate by joining an affiliate program and using their unique identifying link (affiliate link) to promote products and services online.

Amazon, for example has one of the most popular affiliate programs. Anyone can join the program to promote any of the many products on Amazon’s website. Once you have joined, you get access to your partner program portal where you can find your affiliate link. An affiliate link is basically a unique identifying link which tracks sales back to the person who has referred the sale.

Affiliate marketing is becoming a very popular model for earning an income online because you don’t need any experience to start and you don’t need any products or services of your own to sell.

There’s also more people shopping online than ever before and the traditional economy is being replaced by the digital economy as more people using the internet rather than visiting physical stores.

What Is Affiliate Marketing And How Does It Work?

Once an affiliate has joined an affiliate program, they can promote a product through their affiliate link. This can be done in many ways but most affiliates will choose an online promotion method to get people to click on their link. They can of course advertise in any way they want, including off-line traditional advertising methods. Here’s a few of the most popular affiliate marketing strategies:

Blogging – Creating written content online is a cheap and effective way to put your products in front of a targeted audience
Email marketing – affiliates build huge email lists by giving something away in exchange for a visitor’s email on a website.
PPC – pay per click marketing is one of the most popular methods of building an email list or simply driving traffic to affiliate offers
Social media – many affiliates leverage their social media account to get people to their products.

As a beginner in affiliate marketing, it can take some time to get off the ground and make your first sale. Long term affiliates who have been at it for several years have often built huge followings and can therefore sell many products quite easily; particularly if they have a huge email list of subscribers.

What Is Affiliate Marketing And How Does It Work? Types Of Products

There’s many types of affiliate products available to sell and although many new affiliates start out with Amazon, there’s many other platforms you can join. Clickbank.com for example is another popular platform for beginner affiliates and they can choose from thousands of digital products from the site. Although digital products can be more tricky to sell than physical products, they pay larger commissions for referrers. Typically a physical product will pay between 5-10% commission, whereas a digital product will pay more like 30-40% commission.

If you’re considering becoming an affiliate, it’s also worth considering high ticket affiliate marketing products and subscription affiliate programs. A “high ticket” product carries a much larger price tag and therefore will pay out much larger commissions to an affiliate when they make a sale. Most high ticket items will pay out $500 or more in commissions whereas low value products will often pay out less than $40 per sale you make.

Subscription products are things such as memberships and software products. These are beneficial for affiliates who promote them because they can earn ongoing commissions from each sale they generate. While most affiliate products only pay you once, subscription affiliate programs pay you a recurring income. So if you choose to promote them, you can more easily obtain a regular source of income once you have learned how to sell.

Content Creation Vs. Paid Advertising

Most affiliate marketers will choose between two categories of advertising: paid marketing or content creation. They can of course do a bit of both too! Paid marketing is often used to either build an email list from a landing page or website, or send traffic directly to affiliate offers. While paid marketing is more expensive than content creation, it offers a much faster way of getting traction with an affiliate business. Paid marketing is also much more scalable than content generation because once a winning ad has been set up, you can leave it running and scale up quickly just by increasing your advertising budget. See also how to scale affiliate marketing.

Content marketing, while cheaper, is a much slower form of marketing. Content creators will use blogging, video content or some other form of content to draw an audience towards their affiliate products. They often spend several months building content which attracts free traffic via the search engines. Search engines such as Google reward content creators with free traffic. But it can be competitive and depending on your particular topic/niche, this can take some time and effort.

Summary

Affiliate marketing is a business model in which third parties refer people to products and services online. Anyone can become an affiliate marketer by joining an affiliate program, getting their affiliate link, and learning how to sell products through their link.

The hard part of affiliate marketing is attracting enough of the right kind of people to your affiliate link in order to make regular sales.

Once you understand how to do this, you can repeat it, automate the process and scale up to an ever growing global audience. This can mean potentially unlimited earnings can be made from affiliate marketing.

However, this outcome isn’t typical and around 95% of affiliates will quit. The top 5% are the ones who go on to create a “lifestyle business” giving them financial and geographical freedom.

If you’re ready to start your own affiliate business, access this free video series to learn more.

How To Succeed In Affiliate Marketing

Are you wondering how to succeed in affiliate marketing? Perhaps you’re struggling to make any sales? As a beginner you are besieged by different marketers all trying to sell you something. You probably have signed up to many email lists? Do you have constant conflicting information landing in your inbox? This can be overwhelming and very difficult to navigate.

The beginning phase of affiliate marketing is complicated by the various messages you will get from the many affiliates out there. Getting a clear idea of what you are doing is therefore the best thing you can do to get a good foundation for success. It is therefore information that is king as a beginner affiliate. The wrong information can send you down a rabbit hole for many months, getting you nowhere!

A solid and realistic expectation is another important issue. If your expectations are too high, you’ll likely quit when things don’t go as expected. If they are too low, you likely won’t even start! Managing your expectations and following a solid route in affiliate marketing are two of the most important factors. These are of course mental issues rather than practical considerations. But unless you get your head right, you’re more likely to fail as an affiliate like the 95% of those who attempt it.

How To Succeed In Affiliate Marketing – Why Many Fail

When you understand that around 95% of affiliate marketers quit, you will know that it takes more than most are capable of to succeed as an affiliate marketer. Just knowing this prepares you and should give you an idea that affiliate marketing is not at all easy! But why do so many quit? Affiliate marketing is an incredibly easy business to get into. All you need is a laptop and an internet connection to become an affiliate. Join any of the many affiliate partner programs out there and wham, you’re an affiliate.

That hard part of affiliate marketing isn’t joining a program, although some programs can give you a challenge; particularly if they require you to have a large following or a huge email list etc. But most programs only require you to fill out a form to become an affiliate. You get your affiliate link and hey presto, you’re ready to go! But the next step is the difficult one; promoting your affiliate link and successfully making a sale!

There’s many ways to promote affiliate products and most affiliates will focus on promoting their affiliate link online, although you can use any form of advertising as an affiliate – online or offline. The most popular methods involve either content creation (like this article), or paid advertising; using platforms such as Google Adwords, Facebook, Bing, YouTube etc.

How To Succeed In Affiliate Marketing – Knowing Your Audience

Most new affiliates don’t bother to understand their target audience. They run off in high spirits, thinking that spamming their links everywhere will result in many sales. Sadly this don’t normally happen. What happens instead is that they don’t make any sales at all, and wonder why. That’s around the time most will pack up their bags and declare that “affiliate marketing does not work“!

The reason they fail isn’t that affiliate marketing doesn’t work. It’s more that they don’t yet understand affiliate marketing. If only it were so easy, more people would be flocking to it in ever greater numbers!

Target Audience

target market in affiliate marketing — Your target audience in affiliate marketing is the small sub-section of the online marketplace which is best suited for your particular products or service

When you better understand your target audience, you are better able to place your link in front of them in a meaningful way. An example of this might be a product review. A review is where I made my first online sale. Review websites work well for affiliates because they attract an audience who is in the last step of the buying cycle. They are looking for a review because they are wanting to make a purchase. They only want some small insight to know whether the product will fit their requirements. Then they make a purchase – hopefully through your affiliate link.

Once you better understand your target audience and get to know your “perfect” customer avatar, you are better able to focus on a marketing method which attracts them to your affiliate products.

How To Succeed In Affiliate Marketing – Product Choice

Your product choice has a lot to do in whether you are successful as an affiliate. Some products are better than others and if you rush into affiliate marketing and pick a random product to promote, chances are good that you’ll struggle. A good product sells itself and a bad product will never sell, however good a marketer you are! Some products pay much more than others too. Take Amazon for an example which typically pays out around 5-10% commission on products, (although it’s commission structure runs from 1% to 20%). Digital products pay much more – from 30-40% in many cases.

Certain products will pay high ticket commissions and then there are those which pay out recurring commissions. If you can make a sale as an affiliate, it’s worth focusing on those products which will pay out the most; since often the same effort is required in either case.

Marketing Strategy, Method & Marketing Budget

Your marketing strategy and method are arguably the most important factors in whether you’re going to be successful as an affiliate. Choose the wrong marketing strategy, (or give up too soon), and you will struggle. Most affiliates who quit haven’t necessarily chosen the wrong marketing method – more likely they have simply given up too soon.

Since affiliate marketing is a numbers game, the more people you put your products in front of the more will buy. While there’s an obvious targeting alignment issue to deal with, it’s also about getting more eyes on your affiliate link as well as the right kind of people.

A cheaper strategy such as blogging will likely take much longer than a fast method such as paid marketing to attract a large audience. So whatever method you choose for getting people to your affiliate products, you need to consider the appropriate timescale for doing it successfully. A blog will take many months or even years to gain traction with, depending on your topic; while a large marketing budget can see you selling products very quickly with the right message and targeting.

Fail Forwards (Failures Are Stepping Stones)

There’s a saying within the affiliate marketing space as “fail forwards” which simply means you learn from your failures. If you’re too scared to fail, perhaps affiliate marketing isn’t for you. Failures aren’t really failures either. When a small child falls over while learning to walk, they never give up saying “well, walking just isn’t for me”! They keep getting back up and trying again. With affiliate marketing you need this same philosophy. Each small failure is a stepping stone in which you can learn something to make you a better affiliate.

With a small list of subscribers, you might get really upset that you aren’t making any sales. But consider this “phase” the same as a child learning to walk. Most affiliates will quit long before they get even 1000 subscribers on their email list. Affiliate success is there for those who refuse to quit whatever happens and continue on, learning from the problems and difficulties they face.

The Chinese Bamboo Tree

If you’re still wondering how to succeed with affiliate marketing, consider this analogy. A good analogy I like for affiliate marketing is the Chinese bamboo tree. A Chinese bamboo tree has a gestation period where nothing breaks the surface of the soil for 4-5 years. During this time, if you didn’t know the nature of the tree, you might assume that it has died! But if you continue watering it and feeding it, after the gestation period the tree can grow to be 90 feet tall in just five weeks time!

Like the Chinese bamboo, affiliate marketing has a gestation period where you struggle and learn. But once you understand it better and get things running in your affiliate business, you can see very quick gains if you’re prepared to go through the difficulties in the beginning.

Access a free video series here to get help and support and get started with your affiliate business today.

Autopilot Affiliate Marketing

It is possible to completely autopilot affiliate marketing which is a good reason to become an affiliate. With the affiliate marketing business model, third parties refer customers to products online. They don’t need to personally own the products themselves or even deal with customers.

The systems and processes of selling online can be automated completely. Although some affiliate strategies are faster and more effective than others, there’s several ways you can do this as an affiliate:

Blogging – A digital “asset” can be built which grows in size over time. Ultimately online content can sell your products for you.
PPC – Pay per click marketing can be used to send customers directly to affiliate products or to a landing page where an email list can be built.
Email marketing – Email marketing is a very effective way in which affiliates sell their products on autopilot. The bigger the list, the more you can sell.
Social media – Many automated processes can be used through social media marketing too, both paid and unpaid social media marketing methods.
SEO – search engine optimisation can be used to generate traffic to affiliate offers.

Autopilot Affiliate Marketing Methods

To become an affiliate marketer you only need to join an affiliate program. You’ll then get access to your unique affiliate link. This link is your referral link which is tracked back to you when a sale is made. The next step is to learn how to promote your affiliate link.

There’s many ways to do this and your strategy will depend on your circumstances and marketing budget. For example, if you’re working in a busy job, you might choose to run paid advertising to build your business. If you aren’t tied to a full time job, you can use your time to build a digital “asset”. You might choose blogging or video blogging, for example.

Your affiliate marketing business model has some say in your marketing methods too. If you are selling low value affiliate products from Amazon, for example, this can limit your ability to run paid advertising. But if you have a high paying program with recurring income, you are much more able to profit with paid ads.

The method you choose to promote your affiliate products will determine the timescale with which you’re likely to create an autopilot affiliate marketing business. Paid marketing is faster, but obviously more expensive. It’s also more scalable than content creation, which can take a lot longer.

Autopilot Affiliate Marketing: Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the best resources you can use as an affiliate marketer to automate your business. Whether you use paid marketing or content creation to build an affiliate business, email marketing can help you. Email marketing is a strategy in which affiliates collect emails from a website or landing page.

aweber - automating an affiliate business

By offering some kind of free giveaway to visitors, affiliates can collect emails and build a list of subscribers. On this website for example, I give away a free video series to subscribers. They join my list to access the free videos and I follow up with useful emails which help subscribers with a specific problem: (making money online). I also promote affiliate products which I’ve found helpful to me and earn a commission when someone buys something from my list.

The email list is such a powerful tool for a couple of main reasons:

It gives you more time to communicate with your subscribers than you could possible do from a website alone.
You can built trust by offering value, entertainment and insight.
Statistics show that most online customers will need several touch points before they make a purchase. This is more possible with a list than a website.
You can control your flow of traffic better when you own the list. Otherwise you rely on SEO, link building and/or paid traffic for potential customers. Either way it costs either time or money, or both. A list puts you in control of your traffic.

Autopilot Affiliate Marketing Fast & Slow

The fastest way to make with affiliate marketing is through using a high ticket sales funnel and running paid advertising. To qualify for the highest levels of commission with a high ticket sales funnel you will usually need to invest in the products yourself. Then there’s an investment in learning marketing, which can take some time. So this method of building an affiliate business might suit someone who wants to escape their 9 to 5 job/career.

autopilot affiliate marketing sales funnel

This method of building an affiliate business is fast and scalable, but still not without a fair amount of sacrifice. Many affiliates quit because they don’t realise the time and commitment they need to invest upfront, before they can benefit from the commissions! With high ticket products and subscription products you can earn more than average on sales you generate and recurring income from subscriptions.

A slower but cheaper method of building an online income from affiliate marketing is through content creation. Blogging, for example is a much longer term strategy which can take weeks, months or even years of work before you start generating a passive income from it. However, once you have built the content you can continue to earn from it potentially for years afterwards. So depending on your situation and available time, you should choose wisely! Of course you can do a bit of both paid marketing and content creation. See also 22 ways of promoting affiliate products for some other methods.

Summary

Anyone can build an autopilot affiliate marketing income by selling other people’s products and services online. To do so isn’t easy and it will take some serious commitment however.

By choosing the right products and services to promote, and finding a marketing strategy which suits you, you are giving yourself the best chance of success.

Access a training program here to get started with your affiliate business today!

Automated Income Online

Can you really make an automated income online which can replace an existing job or career? One of the best ways to do this is through using a business model known as affiliate marketing. By selling other people’s products and services online, anyone can earn an income on complete autopilot. Online purchases are dramatically overtaking the traditional economy and this trend has been given a massive boost over the last couple of years.

Affiliates are third party referrers who get paid commissions for product referrals online. They don’t own the products and services themselves but can make an income through recommending them.

Anyone can become an affiliate and one of the most popular affiliate websites is Amazon, which offers thousands of products you can refer for a percentage of the sale value.

Automated Income Online: Affiliate Marketing

To become an affiliate you only need to join an affiliate program. Once inside an affiliate program you will be able to access a unique identifying link. You use your link to promote the product through. When someone makes a purchase through your identifying link (affiliate link) you are credited with the sale and earn a commission.

There’s many ways in which affiliates can promote their link. Whether they are successful or not depends on how they promote their products and the products they choose to promote. Not all affiliate programs are equal of course and some pay more than others. With Amazon, the commission levels range from 1% all the way up to 20% depending on the category of item you choose to promote. See also Amazon affiliate marketing commissions.

There’s other kinds of products you can promote as an affiliate too, and you don’t need to choose physical products. There’s thousands of digital products which affiliates will promote too. These typically pay much more; often from 20-40% commission on certain items. You can find a lot of digital products on the site Clickbank.com.

Automated Income Online: Product Promotion

Not all affiliate marketers are successful at generating an automated income online though. Something like 95% of new affiliates will quit so that statistic shows that affiliate marketing isn’t easy! With more people becoming affiliates all the time, there’s growing competition. There’s over 600 million blogs on the internet; to give some perspective of just one marketing strategy which affiliates use. Within the next few years this number will be significantly higher!

Not all affiliates use blogging as their strategy though and there’s many ways to promote affiliate products. Here’s just a few of the strategies which affiliates use to sell their products online:

PPC – pay per click (paid marketing)
YouTube
TikTok
Social media
Email marketing
SEO – search engine optimisation

Because there’s a huge range of products to sell as an affiliate, you can promote a wide variety of products in almost any area. Some topics are obviously more competitive than others and these tend to be the most lucrative niches.

Automated Income Online: Best Tactics

The best tactics to make an automated income online are those which can be scaled up to a large global audience very quickly and run on virtual autopilot continuously. One of the best ways to do this is to choose to promote a high ticket sales funnel which contains multiple earning methods:

One time sales – only pay you once for a sale but are an important part of a good sales funnel
Subscription affiliate products – pay you over and over again for each individual sale. They are typically memberships and software type products
High ticket affiliate products – are those which pay much more than average and offer huge value to the customer. A good example is a personal training program which offers one to one tuition.

Here’s a video course run by a personal mentor of mine who explains the different types of products you can sell as an affiliate:

online autopilot income — OT = “one time”, S = Subscription, HT = High ticket affiliate product. Access video training here.

Using Scalable & Fast Marketing Strategies

The slow route to build an affiliate business is through creating a lot of content, or content marketing. With content marketing, you can build up your “portfolio” of content on a blog or YouTube channel, for example. Over time, the search engines should index your content and you will get found in the SERPS – search engine results pages. Although this is a notoriously slow method of going about selling online, you can benefit from passive income over time once you have built a lot of content. That content can keep working for you for years (or decades) after you’ve put the work in initially.

So although there’s a lot of work to do initially, this can pay off if you put the time in.

A much faster method of building an automated income online is through using a high ticket sales funnel and a paid marketing strategy. With a high ticket funnel, you can benefit from multiple products and recurring income affiliate products.

Initially with paid marketing you should tread with caution. You’ll be testing and measuring your advertising campaigns to find those which consistently produce a profit. This requires a bit of patience initially but ultimately this is a much faster way to build an automated income online. Once you know what you are doing, you can cut the ad campaigns which don’t work while scaling up those which are profitable. This can mean you can build a huge online business very quickly and benefit from the automation of selling products online 24 hours a day, 7 days a week!

Access this free video series to learn more and get started.

All About Affiliate Marketing PDF

In this “all about affiliate marketing pdf“, I’m going to share some of the best insights I’ve come to understand in the last 10 plus years as an affiliate. Affiliate marketing is a business first and foremost. Understanding that it’s a business, and not some magic bullet or get rich quick scheme is one of the best things to know first! When you understand this, you’re less likely to kid yourself and you’re not going to expect more in return that you’re putting out in effort!

Affiliate marketing is a business model in which third parties share their affiliate links online in some way (generally online). When someone makes a purchase through your affiliate link, you earn a commission based on the sale. In many ways it’s like recommending a restaurant to a friend. Except with affiliate marketing you get paid when your friend shows up and pays for a meal.

There’s many ways affiliates can promote their products online and there’s many products to choose from. Your choice of product and your ability to promote it are the two main reasons for success or failure as an affiliate. With a huge drop out rate in affiliate marketing it’s reasonable to say that most people won’t become successful affiliates. When you understand why there’s a 95% drop out rate in the industry, you’re far better prepared than most for success.

All About Affiliate Marketing PDF: Products

Before you set out on your affiliate marketing journey, you need to choose a product to sell. There’s thousands of affiliate programs out there, so which products do you choose to sell? Some people say choose products you have already bought yourself. That way you can genuinely talk about them and promote them authentically. If you haven’t bought a product yourself, how could you genuinely recommend them?

Many affiliates start out with a program they know about, such as Amazon. Amazon is one of the best known and most widely used affiliate programs out there and there’s a huge amount of products you can promote from the site. But Amazon’s commission rates are some of the lowest in the industry varying from just 1% commission on some of its products. See Amazon affiliate commission rates.

Clickbank.com is another favourite affiliate resource for new affiliates. With digital products there’s a better commission structure typically. Digital products often pay out from 20-50% commission in some cases. This is much higher than most physical products you can choose from. There’s also high ticket affiliate products you can promote. These pay out much larger commissions than average. Subscription affiliate programs too are worth knowing about. With a subscription product you can earn ongoing commissions from previous sales you’ve made. This can make a dramatic difference in your bottom line as an affiliate quite quickly.

All About Affiliate Marketing PDF: Promotion Methods

There’s many different ways to promote affiliate products and you can use both online and offline methods. Most affiliates will concentrate on the online methods but you can use any form of advertising available to you. One of the best forms of online advertising is one which can be quickly scaled up to a larger audience.

It’s easy to get into trouble as a new affiliate, believing you can throw some content out there and get some fast results (with a strategy such as blogging, for example). But with over 600 million blogs on the internet today, and growing fast, it’s incredibly difficult to compete. So it’s well worth educating yourself before you jump right in because otherwise it’s very easy to waste time and get nowhere – even with a lot of activity.

Promotion

Here’s a few of the most popular promotion methods which affiliates use to put their products in front of an audience:

PPC – pay per click marketing or direct marketing. Platforms such as Facebook, Google Adwords or YouTube let marketers pay to place their ads in front of a targeted audience who are most likely to want their products.
Organic traffic through SEO (e.g. blogging/Video blogging)- methods such as content creation, blogging or video content can be used to attract search traffic from Google, Bing , YouTube and other search and social media platforms.
Social media – some affiliates focus solely on social media accounts to find potential customers for their affiliate products
Email marketing – most top affiliates will build an email list of subscribers and communicate their marketing message to their list. See also free autoresponder for affiliate marketing.

All About Affiliate Marketing PDF: Promotion Methods & Timescale

Many new affiliates choose a promotion method and run into problems when nothing happens! For example, blogging is a popular method of building an affiliate business but it takes a long time to reap the benefits from it. A blog might take several months or even years to come to fruition and start generating regular sales. But blogging is super cheap and even free to do, so it suits a lot of people who are trying to make money online. Because of this there’s a huge amount of competition for blogging. See also how long does it take to make money blogging.

PPC Vs Organic Marketing

PPC or pay per click advertising is much, much faster. You can see the results of a pay per click campaign the same day as starting it! However, it costs money to run paid advertising campaigns with PPC, so it doesn’t suit everyone. Plus, many of your campaigns won’t work immediately either, so you can spend a lot of money just finding a winning advert. Many new affiliates will test multiple ads and give up before they find a winning one which returns a regular profit!

The good thing about running paid ad campaigns is that when you find a profitable campaign, you can keep running it and even scale it up, adding more funds to find more buyers. See also how to scale affiliate marketing. This is the fastest way to build an affiliate business but it also comes with some inherent potential problems. If your affiliate product is a low valued one, it’s much harder to profit while running paid ads. The margin for error is much smaller than if you have a high ticket sales funnel with multiple high value products in it. Using the highest paying affiliate programs with recurring commission will give you a much higher return on investment when running paid ads. So it’s advisable to do that instead of choosing low value physical products which can hardly recover your ad spend!

All About Affiliate Marketing PDF: Understanding Your Target Audience

Understanding your target audience as an affiliate is one of the most important factors for success. Unless you can consistently place your products and services in front of buying customers, you won’t make it as an affiliate. The best way to do this is to learn about your audience. The customer avatar is your “perfect” customer. They are those people who will not only buy from you, but love what you do, what you stand for and become life long customers who buy again and again.

To determine who your customer avatar is, you can look at your existing customers and the people who you can help the most with your products/services. See also customer avatar worksheet pdf. These are some of the things you should know about your customers before running a marketing campaign:

How old they are
Where do they hang out online
What are their values
Where do they live
What are their needs
How can you serve them

The better you understand your customer avatar, the better able you are to place your marketing in front of them, but also communicate in a way that is meaningful to them; talking directly to their needs, pains, desires and aspirations. Understanding their audience is one of the most overlooked factors for beginner affiliates so this is worth spending some time on if you’re serious about being successful.

All About Affiliate Marketing PDF: Customer Journey

The “customer journey” is another important element of understanding affiliate marketing. After you place your advertising material in front of your customer avatar, you want to encourage them to take a specific action, (on your website, for example).

For many affiliates this action is to sign up to their email marketing list. On a website, a visitor only has a few minutes to buy something which the affiliate is promoting. After that time the visitor leaves the site, usually never to return. But if you can capture the email address of a website visitor, you can follow up with an email marketing campaign over many more days, weeks and even months and years.

Research shows that most online visitors don’t become customers on their first visit to a website. In fact a visitor needs multiple “touch points” before they become a customer and makes a purchase. This is difficult to achieve from a website (or an advert) alone, and so most affiliates will build an email list to help with this.

“The Flow”

The “flow” from one piece of marketing material to another should keep your visitor engaged with a congruent theme. Too much disparity between your information will result in a disconnect where the visitor feels like the messages don’t match up. They click away and you’ve lost a subscriber, or a customer! Maintaining a congruent theme or idea allows the customer journey to follow through from one piece of marketing to another. The flow from an advert, to a landing page to your email follow up messages to the product is known as the customer journey; it’s the journey the customer takes to arrive at the end product. When you get this nice and smooth, you can consistently attract the right customers to your products.

Should one piece not fit with another, you may find your conversion rates are suffering. This might be because of a disconnect which needs to be fixed before you can maximise your marketing efficiency. See also affiliate marketing journey.

Email Marketing

It’s well worth using email marketing, whatever you decide to promote as an affiliate. With a website most of your visitors will leave without taking any action at all. But an email list can help you build a long term relationship with your website visitors if you can get them to sign up to your email list.

To build an email list you need an email autoresponder. Email autoresponders allow you to collect emails from a website and send automated messages to your subscribers. From a list, you can deliver value to your subscribers and help them with a specific problem. Over time (and after having helped your subscribers with a problem), you can build trust. Once people trust you online, you’ll have a much easier time trying to sell them products and services (if you’re genuinely helping them)!

Attraction Marketing

There’s tens of thousands of affiliate marketers online, many of whom are competing for the same space as you. To shine out you need to be better than most of them. You can do this by being of value and focusing on genuinely helping people rather than simply trying to sell them!

Many new affiliate marketers just try and sell and nobody wants to be sold! People are much more likely not to buy from pushy sales people, especially when they can find out more information for free from the internet.

To shine out online you need to be an affiliate who is value driven. By offering value you can build trust, instead of pushing people to products they don’t necessarily want or need.

Find products which offer the best value and which genuinely help people with their needs. A favourite example of a value driven affiliate website is the site Moneysavingexpert.com which was created by Martin Lewis. The site is an affiliate website, but you wouldn’t know it. It’s focused on providing huge value to its visitors and genuinely helps them with problems of finance, mortgages, bills, energy use, credit cards and debt.

Everything changed for me as an affiliate when I switched from trying to “get” to genuinely helping my readers/audience.

Access a free video series here to learn more about affiliate marketing.

Best Ways To Make Passive Income Online

What are the best ways to make passive income online? Making income passively can be done by creating automated online systems and strategies which sell other people’s products. One of the best ways to make passive income online is through the selling of other people’s products and services. This is a business model known as affiliate marketing.

With affiliate marketing you don’t need your own products and you don’t need to deal with customers directly. You get paid by referring people to products online. There’s a few ways of doing this so that you can ultimately earn a passive income from your efforts:

Content creation – sell products through your online content
Email marketing – build an email list of subscribers and sell products to them
Automated websites – build niche websites which attract traffic naturally through SEO – search engine optimisation
PPC – paid marketing strategies can drive online traffic very quickly. Once you learn how to do this profitably, you can set it and forget it!

Best Ways To Make Passive Income Online: Content Creation

There’s over 600 million blogs on the internet today in 2022. This number is growing fast too because blogging is a simple way that anyone can earn an income through product referrals. Blogging is a long term solution to a passive income though and you’ll need a lot of content (and patience) to make money passively from a blog.

But it can be done and that’s what is so attractive about it! As your content grows and you start attracting an ever larger audience, you can send your visitors to relevant products and earn commissions from their sale. Blogging isn’t the only content creation method either. Many affiliate marketers use video to promote their products too. Content creation is therefore a fairly versatile way to make a passive income online.

You attract an audience through your content and promote relevant products to them. With enough content this can happen passively over time. Still, it takes a lot of effort to build a passive income using this method. Depending on the topic of your content, and the relative competition, this can take weeks, months or even years. See also how long does it take to make money blogging.

Best Ways To Make Passive Income Online: Email Marketing

Email marketing is a favourite marketing strategy for most online marketers. It allows a marketer to build an email list of subscribers and promote products and services to them over a long period of time. On a website, a visitor only has a short period of time to make a buying decision. But once on an email list, this time period is dramatically extended.

Marketers can sell products to their email list even years after a subscriber has joined it.

An email autoresponder for affiliate marketing is a very effective marketing strategy and it’s also compatible with multiple different marketing strategies such as organic and PPC (pay per click) advertising.

So if you’re considering building an online income, you should definitely get an autoresponder.

Best Way To Earn Passive Income Online: Automated Websites

Websites can be used to promote and sell other people’s products to allow the owner to earn passively from them. There’s two main categories when it comes to generating traffic to a website and earning from it. You can either build a niche website which generates traffic organically, through creating content. Or you can run paid marketing towards a website and collect email subscribers/sell directly from your site.

To build a niche website which gets organic traffic for free will take a little more effort.

PPC – Pay Per Click (Paid Advertising)

If you’re running paid advertising, you can create a simple Google/Facebook compliant website and run visitors to it very quickly. Although this is more expensive, it’s much easier to scale a paid marketing campaign than it is to scale an organic one. See also paid vs organic traffic generation and scaling an affiliate business.

With a good affiliate business model, you can earn passively from subscription and high ticket products.

Subscription affiliate products in particular are useful for generating a passive income. With a subscription product you earn a passive income from each individual sale so long as your customer maintains their membership. Subscriptions and high ticket product funnels are the best to use if you want to build an online business quickly, and benefit from recurring commissions.

Why Use Landing Pages?

Why use landing pages? What is a landing page? A landing page is a web page which is specifically designed for a single purpose. Landing pages are used to get a visitor to perform a specific action, such as making a purchase or signing up to an email list.

On a website, a visitor can have a look around, click on many pages and generally look around. But on a landing page there is no navigation option. You can’t browse the website further and you have only two options: perform an action or leave.

Most landing pages are designed to collect an email subscriber but there are also landing pages which link to products sales pages too, or checkout carts. So a landing page is useful to marketers because it helps force a specific action.

Why Use Landing Pages: Conversions

A landing page will convert a visitor into a subscriber much more effectively than a website ever will. On a website, you can offer a very attractive opt in offer to your visitors. But because there is so much more to distract your visitors, the opt in rate of your form will likely be very low.

On a landing page, you only have two options as a visitor. You either sign up to the offer by inputting your name and email address, or you leave the site. This is much better for the marketer because they can measure the opt in rate and cross test similar landing pages to optimise for optimal performance.

Ultimately a landing page can convert 40% and above (of visitors to email subscribers) if it is well optimised. Whereas a normal website will likely only bring in a few percent of it’s visitors to your email list.

Landing pages can easily be copied too and this means you can run two different landing pages side by side to see which one performs the best. This is known as cross testing.

Why Use Landing Pages: Email Marketing

Email marketing is a tactic used by online marketers to collect emails from a landing page and follow up with an email marketing campaign. On a website, a visitor only has a few minutes to look around and make a buying decision.

Research shows that most people need several contact points or touch points before they will buy something online. On a website, you only have a tiny window of opportunity to lead your visitor to a product to make a sale. Most won’t buy. But once you capture their email address, you can follow up with more messages and build a longer term relationship with them. This also gives you many more touch points to connect with your potential customers.

Email marketing works and most online business owners use it. To get leads more efficiently you need to use landing pages to help build your email list of subscribers. See also the power of email marketing.

Efficiency

The cost of advertising online is steadily rising as more as more marketers join the party! If you can’t afford to pay for your marketing, you’ll need to build a lot of content and earn traffic organically. Either way, marketing is an expensive or time consuming option. If you intend on building an income from it, you will want to make the most of your time and/or marketing budget.

Landing pages can help you turn traffic into email subscribers which can extend the effectiveness of either your organic marketing approach or your paid advertising.

Instead of running adverts sending people directly to products, you send them to a landing page instead. On the page you can encourage your visitors to sign up to your email list. This is done by offering a hugely valuable offer which is aligned with the needs/interests of your visitors.

Once on your email list, you have a lot more time to build trust and help your subscribers. This ultimately makes your advertising more cost effective because you are able to convert more visitors into customers.

Squeeze Pages

Landing pages are also known as squeeze pages because they “squeeze” visitors into giving their email address. This will only happen of course if you give them something valuable in return.

Often squeeze pages will offer downloadable guides, ebooks or a video series detailing some kind of interest. Squeeze pages can be used in any niche. By creating some automated value driven giveaway, you can encourage your visitors to enter their details for access. See also ebook lead magnet. A lead “magnet” is often what is referred to as the giveaway item.

Whatever you give away from a landing page or “squeeze page” should align somehow with the interests of your visitors and the products you are promoting to your email list. See also customer avatar worksheet and how to know your target market.