One of the best pieces of advice I got as an affiliate marketer was to give first and receive later. When I first became an affiliate, I simply wanted to get those sales! Make the money! I didn’t really consider how this would happen. But affiliates succeed with an exchange of value:
Acquisition, conversion then value delivery are the main first principles of online selling.
As affiliates we send traffic to offers, but to build trust, acquire leads and convert them into customers, we must have some kind of value first. This didn’t occur to me as a beginner affiliate. I thought I could simply set up and advert, send traffic, and make money. While it can work like that, it’s what you give that attracts your customers, and builds trust.
If you’re running an advert, you attract customers by giving value and meaning. By creating content, or emailing your list, you give understanding and insight. If you do this enough, and to the right people, they will buy from you because they trust you, and because you’ve already given them the value they will exchange in monetary terms.
Give First, Receive Later – Example
Over the last few years I’ve been teaching martial arts and initially, I struggled with building up my school. I sought the help of an online “guru” who I found online. His name is Mike Massey. Now I didn’t have much money to go buying his stuff, and I didn’t know whether he could help me in any case.
So I signed up to his email list to learn more about what he was offering. His emails alone helped me enormously. He taught me to use online advertising, offer more courses and teach summers schools etc., how to retain longer term students and a whole bunch of other useful stuff!
I didn’t want to do some of the things he recommended, but after several weeks of reading his emails, I felt like he’d given me huge value – and completely for free!
Guess what? In his emails he sells his book and I bought it. I realised there and then that this was how to sell online. Nobody wants a pushy salesman shoving their wares at them. But once you’ve already given the value, the law of reciprocity kicks in. It’s a commonly known sales technique and one which works really well in the online space.
The online space is a buyers marketplace. But if you continue to deliver value and build trust, your subscribers and visitors will buy from you if your products are a good fit for them!
Give First, Receive Later – Example
Another example of the give first, receive later principle is Martin Lewis’s website moneysavingexpert.com. In it, he gives financial advice and links to companies and services through affiliate links. Money Saving Expert is a hugely popular and successful website which helps people with their finances by showing them the cheapest utility companies, credit cards, discounts and offers.
It advises on mortgages and other financial matters, such as getting out of debt. The point is that the site is built on the principle of helping people first, making money second. You might not even be aware that the site makes money from referrals (affiliate marketing).
Without having built the huge amount of helpful content on the website, Moneysavingexpert.com wouldn’t have gained the brand awareness and readership it has today.
Be A Producer Not A Consumer
We often don’t think in terms of producing or consuming, but if you look around you’ll see that most of us are in fact consumers nearly 100% of the time! We consume entertainment, blogs, videos, food and goods and services.
Most of our days are spent consuming something, whether it is food, goods, entertainment or a service. To shift this relationship and earn from affiliate marketing, you need to become a producer.
When people are consuming your information, your courses, ebooks and downloadable content, you have their attention! Use the content you produce to lead people to products which will help them, by giving them useful information which is of service. This can be done through blogging, through video or through your own ebooks, or email messages.
Be a producer, not just a consumer!
Delayed Gratification & Patience
As an affiliate marketer, it’s important to realise the importance of delayed gratification and patience! If you focus only on the getting, you might scare away your potential customers by being too keen! If you walk into a shop, and the salesman is too needy for the sale, it pushes customers away! The same is true in the online space.
But if you give through your content and email messages, you build trust over the longer term. Continue to do so, and your subscribers will know you are consistent and therefore reliable. But if you get frustrated and drop off, you can’t serve anyone over the longer term.
As a beginner affiliate I was definitely focused on the getting, rather than the giving. I was looking for the quick wins, the easy buck! But it didn’t work because I didn’t provide any value to anyone.
I recently had a sale drop in from a subscriber who had been on my email list for 5 years! Such is the power of email marketing and of course of patience and delayed gratification!