Is it possible to fast track affiliate marketing? Since there’s a huge variety in the products you can promote, and the way in which you promote them, it makes sense that some ways are better than others.
When I started learning affiliate marketing back in the early 2000’s, I made a lot of mistakes. I used low value products and slow, laborious strategies to get people to buy them. My marketing strategy was flawed and I only made peanuts when I eventually did make a sale. In the early days my sales were sporadic and there would be months in between the sales I made.
Selling a low value product from Amazon would also make me only a tiny commission. Success never lasted and before I knew it I was back to the 9 to 5 job, which I hated.
Fast forward to today, and I’ve learned a huge amount. The mistakes taught me a number of valuable lessons. I hope this article can help you shed some light on affiliate marketing and that the lessons I learned can help you move forward more quickly with your own affiliate business, whatever you’re doing.
Fast Track Affiliate Marketing – Product Promotion (Organic) & Intent
I used organic strategies when I began as an affiliate and it’s worth noting that this can work well, although typically it’s a slow-lane approach. There’s a couple of ways you can fast track your organic marketing strategies and it starts with intent. Search intent to be more precise.
My very first sale came from a product review. Reviews are good because they attract the right kind of traffic – specifically buyer traffic. Buyer traffic is traffic, or visitors, who have a strong intent to buy something. They are looking for something to solve their problem. A product review attracts someone who is looking specifically at a certain product. They want some final information before making their buying decision. If your review gives them that, they will naturally buy through your affiliate link.
Another strategy you can use is a “how to” piece of content. With “how to’s” you show someone how to do something. A good way to align your “how to” content with an affiliate product is to include your product in part of the solution. So for example you can show someone how to do keyword research, and promote your keyword tool through your affiliate link at the same time.
Fast Track Affiliate Marketing – List Building
It took me a long time to discover the power of an email list. If you haven’t got one already you can get one here and access for free. An email list gives you control over your traffic. While organic traffic takes a huge amount of effort to build up, paid traffic costs you money. With a list, you can get your visitors to opt in and subscribe to your email newsletter.
This gives you the chance to build more long term relationships with your website visitors. Without a list, you rely on your traffic converting into sales immediately from a website. Since only a tiny proportion of visitors make a buying decision at first glance, the power of email marketing allows you to connect with them multiple times over weeks, months, and even years.
Fast Track Affiliate Marketing – Subscription Products
Low value items you might find on Amazon will only pay you a tiny portion of their value in commission. Amazon typically pays only 3-10% commission which means on a $100 product, you’ll only earn between $3 and $10. Once you have referred the sale, you have effectively handed a customer over to the product owners, Amazon. You make a single “one time” commission and the company makes a customer for life!
With subscription products however, you can earn ongoing commissions from each sale, potentially for life. With a high quality product which offers huge value, such as business tools and software, a business can’t live without it. As such the business owner will be likely to maintain their membership to these kinds of products for life! If you refer the sale, this means you earn commissions month in month out for years, just for referring a single sale!
Subscription products are a great way to increase the potential of your business and give you the ability to earn more regularly from even only a few sales. When you’re starting as an affiliate, this is huge for your bottom line and for encouragement and belief.
Fast Track Affiliate Marketing – Digital Products
Digital products too offer a greater advantage to affiliate marketers. With physical products you typically earn a lot less. Digital products will often pay between 30% and 40% commissions, compared with 3%-10% for physical products. So a sale of a digital product is therefore worth more for what can amount to the same amount of work.
There’s a huge variety of digital products available to promote for affiliate marketers. Software products and memberships will often pay the most and pay a recurring commission. Because there’s less cost involved with delivery and storage of digital products, product owners can afford to pay affiliate more because advertising is the largest cost for them.
High Ticket Items
High ticket items are typically those which pay out $500 and above. Once you learn the skill of selling online, you will largely be doing the same activities whether you are promoting low value physical products or high ticket digital products. So it makes sense to promote the latter because you stand to make much larger commissions for the same amount of work!
Paid Marketing & Landing Pages
The fastest way to build an affiliate business is through the use of paid marketing strategies. But paid marketing is expensive, so you’ll do better if you have a high ticket sales funnel with a range of high ticket items and subscription items to promote. But don’t just send traffic to a website because you’ll waste an awful lot of money doing this. Use a landing page and capture your visitors emails to build your email list.
Sending paid traffic to a landing page is far more effective than sending paid traffic to a generic website. On a website, the visitor can browse around and look through your content. But send them to a landing page and they only have two options: sign up to your list, or leave. This gives you more opportunity to build your list and generate more income from spending less, since on an email list you’re much more likely to sell something to someone.
You can also split test different landing pages to find a good template which coverts the best. This will save you money and help you become profitable more quickly.
For more information on the different affiliate models available, access a free video series here.
