Just how do you get sales in affiliate marketing? And how come some affiliates make hundreds or thousands of sales while many struggle? There’s a couple of reasons why newbies struggle while long term affiliates thrive! Long term affiliates have some battle scars. They’ve often failed more times than the beginner has even tried. Because of this they know what they’re doing!
The other reason long term affiliates can make hundreds or thousands of sales easily is because they already have an audience.
As a beginner it takes time to build your confidence and time to build your audience. But for a seasoned affiliate with an email list of over 10,000 subscribers, for example, it’s another story.
A single email sent to an engaged audience can result in a number of sales, so for the long term affiliate making sales is easy. But a newbie who has just learned how to build an email list doesn’t have this power yet! They need to figure out who their audience is, what product/s to sell and how to get traffic to their offers.
So if you’re new, and have maybe just joined an affiliate program, you’re probably wondering how to take your affiliate link and turn it into cash! Heads up!
How To Get Sales In Affiliate Marketing – Your Audience
You can’t make any sales without an audience. You need someone to actually click on your affiliate link and make a purchase. Spamming it throughout your social media isn’t the best tactic and although you may get a lucky sale, it’s not a great tactic without some planning.
Understanding your target audience for affiliate marketing is one of the best things you can do as an affiliate. Your “target audience” is the small cross section of the online marketplace who is going to be most likely to want what you’re selling.
So if you’re selling a Yoga course, you might want to find people who fit that particular demographic. How old are they? Where do they hang out online? Where do they live and are they mostly male or female? Once you have gathered more information on your most suitable customer avatar, you can spend your time more productively in finding them online. Checkout the customer avatar worksheet pdf for more on this.
You can’t hit a target if you can’t see it. So dissecting who you are going after with your product is some of the best spent time you must find as an affiliate. When you intricately know who you’re selling to, finding them with your marketing becomes easier.
How To Get Sales In Affiliate Marketing – Marketing
The clue is in the term “affiliate marketing“. Without marketing, you’re not going to be able to put your product in front of customers. Marketing can be defined as any interaction with your potential customer. That could be through an email message, a paid advertisement, a blog post or a YouTube video. Or it could be from all of the above.
The more marketing points of interaction with your chosen customer avatar, the better. These are known as touch points and studies have shown that most online customers won’t buy from a single “touch point” alone. They need more like six or seven touch points before they will make a buying decision – especially from a website they don’t already know and trust.
So as an affiliate, your job is to create many points of contact with your potential customer to make the sale. While this can be tricky at first, you can automate this process through the use of building an email list, or running a re-targeting campaign on top of your standard marketing strategy.
How To Get Sales In Affiliate Marketing – Building The Email List
Building an email list is one of the best things you can do for your affiliate business. Whatever products you sell, having a list of email subscribers puts you in charge of your traffic and allows you to build trust and increase the number of touch points you have with your audience.
From a website, it can be much trickier to make an affiliate sale. The visitor only has a few minutes on a website after which they leave, potentially forever. But if you can get them to join an email list you can send them marketing messages over a much longer timeframe.
Making affiliate sales from an email list is therefore much easier than selling directly from a website, hoping your visitor will purchase on their first (and perhaps only) visit.
The Lead Capture Page
To build an email list you can either build a blog website (and create a lot of content), or pay to send targeted visitors to a landing page. From a website, you can offer something of value (such as an ebook) in exchange for your visitor’s email address.
Here’s an example of a landing page:
Why use landing pages? Simple. A landing page gives visitors a simple choice: sign up to your list or leave the page. With a blog website, there’s much more going on. So it’s much more difficult to “squeeze” a subscriber because they’re more distracted by all the options and content which they can browse. Landing pages are also known as squeeze pages because you’re attempting to squeeze a decision out of your visitors!
When using paid advertising, it’s much better to send visitors to a squeeze page as you’ll get more people joining your list than through sending them to a website. Once on your list, you have more opportunity to make an affiliate sale because you have a longer time to build trust with your subscribers through your email messages. Get a landing page software here.
How To Get Sales In Affiliate Marketing – Multiple Touch Points
Email marketing is just one way to get your marketing message in front of your potential customers more than once. You can also use other tools such as PushEngage.
Push engage is a push notification software which lets you automate update messages when you post new content on a blog. I use Push Engage on this website and if you accept notifications, you’ll be updated when I publish new content.
Another strategy used by affiliates is retargeting. Retargeting lets affiliates set up advertising campaigns which target people who have already seen their content somewhere before.
So if you have a YouTube channel, you can target people who have seen one of your videos before. With a blog, you can “follow” your visitors around the internet with an advert and bring them back to your site.
How To Get Sales In Affiliate Marketing – Mindset
Your mindset as an affiliate is a pretty important but often neglected key to online success. To get sales as a beginner affiliate can be much more difficult than for longer terms affiliates. Long term affiliates have gained experience as well as built a larger audience.
For the beginner who is full of doubt and scepticism, there’s a lot to overcome. Not only do you need to overcome your own fears, but you also have a large period of learning to get through before you can start taking some action in building an affiliate business.
At the very beginning, you won’t have any website traffic or email leads. This means you have a lot less leverage than a top affiliate with a huge list of subscribers. But remember they started there too (with nothing)! So if you’re struggling with no sales, remember to keep going and don’t quit! It’s easy to quit but harder to keep at it, especially when you don’t see any results from your hard work!
Your Choice Of Product
There’s all kinds of products which you can sell as an affiliate. Some products pay more than others and some sell better than others. If you’re going to make sales in affiliate marketing it’s worth choosing products which are going to be around for some time and which are super valuable.
A small shift in trajectory of a space craft can send it miles off course over a long journey. The same is true with your choice of products. Using low valued physical products will only give you small “one off” commissions. But choose to sell high ticket affiliate marketing products, and those which pay recurring income and your whole journey can be totally different.
The same amount of work can result in a completely different experience depending on your choice of what to promote as an affiliate. Choose wisely! One of the best way to get sales in affiliate marketing is to choose a program which has a build in sales team and a range of products (including high ticket and recurring commission). Learn more here.
Summary
There’s many ways to get sales in affiliate marketing and it’s a good idea to think big! After all, as affiliates you can market your products globally from your laptop and sell to people anywhere in the world.
One of the best ways to connect with an ever growing audience is through using email marketing. Get an autoresponder here for free and learn how to build an email list. Promote high value products to your list which offer high ticket and recurring income commissions.
With a range of high value products, you can more easily access the more expensive (and better) marketing platforms. But of course depending on your situation, you might also want to use a cheaper marketing solution such as blogging or video blogging, for example.
Access a training resource here for more info.
