One of the best ways to collect leads for affiliate marketing is to offer something to your website visitors in exchange for their email address. Most bloggers will give something away from their blog, for example. For some it’s a free ebook or downloadable file. Others offer free video courses and training videos to entice visitors to take some action and sign up to their email list.
If you haven’t already got an email autoresponder, you can access one for free. Sign up and get an autoresponder account here – this gives you the ability to collect subscribers from a website.
Leads For Affiliate Marketing – Why Build An Email List?
An email list gives you control over your traffic. Once you start building a list of subscribers, you can send them information, bring them back to your website, or send them to an affiliate product. To get traffic to a website you can either create a lot of content or pay for it. Either way, this is a cost – either your time or your money. But once you build an email list, you can tap into this asset without doing either!
Of course it can take some time and effort to build your list in the first place. One of the best ways to do this is through creating a landing page.
A landing page is a page built specifically for the purpose of collecting email subscribers. If you’re going to pay for traffic, it’s much better sending it to a landing page. If you send paid traffic to a normal website, there’s a lot more your visitors can do. They can browse around and look through your site. But on a landing page there’s only two options; sign up or leave.
This makes it easier to optimise for performance. If you’re spending money for traffic, it’s far better to turn that traffic into leads because it gives you more opportunity to sell your affiliate products to those visitors. Access a landing page builder software here.
Leads For Affiliate Marketing – Traffic Vs Leads
Most website visitors aren’t necessarily looking to buy something. Most are looking for free information. So to sell something from a website you need very targeted visitors. Review websites are a good example because visitors are often looking for a product review just before they make a buying decision. But still, they might not quite be ready to buy when they read your review. So even a review website will have a certain amount of passing traffic.
But if you can offer something of value to your website visitors, such as an ebook or video course for free, some of them will sign up to your email list and become a subscriber. This gives you more opportunity to place your products in front of them many times.
Studies have shown that it can take between 6-8 touch points before most website visitors will make a purchase. It’s difficult to create this if someone leaves your website and never returns! But capture their email address and you can build a longer term relationship through your emails if you give value and build trust.
Someone on a list can buy from you weeks, months or years after signing up!
Building Trust Through Email Marketing
Once someone signs up to your email list, you’ve entered into a contract (of sorts) with them. You have promised to deliver messages relating to their point of interest. Their reason to sign up is to receive some useful information which may be of interest to them. You may also send them to affiliate products and services which they might want.
But the main point of them signing up is for their benefit, not yours! This is worth remembering if you’re going to follow up with spammy email messages flogging your wares relentlessly! They will soon unsubscribe if you do this. Instead you should send messages which are of value and interest. If you can tie your “value add” to your affiliate products in some way, so much the better.
Ultimately, people are more likely to buy from you if you deliver value and do so consistently. Otherwise they won’t be opening your messages and they may even unsubscribe. The law of reciprocity means people will reciprocate your good intentions buy buying from you (if your products are a good fit). But only if they genuinely get to know, like and trust you!
Summary
Building leads for affiliate marketing is definitely a good idea. But you also need to make sure you are building a list which is targeted to your customer avatar. Get people on your list who aren’t a good fit for your products and you’ll struggle to make those sales.
Or, if your marketing message isn’t a good one, you can easily put people off. Build trust with a list by offering value and helping your subscribers in some way. When you do this first, and sell later, you’ll have a more authentic vibe which will naturally stand out among the spammy emails which only push products into customers faces!
Grab free access to an email autoresponder here and access a landing page software here.