lead generation Archives - Affiliate Marketing Mentors

Affiliate Lead Generation

Affiliate lead generation is the act of collecting leads, usually in the form of an email address. Some affiliates build their own list of leads and then deliver email messages to their subscribers promoting their affiliate products. Or, you can also send leads directly to an affiliate company if you’re working on a pay per lead basis.

In my personal experience as an affiliate I’ve built my own email list through offering some giveaway on my website or landing page. The benefit of using a landing page is that a landing page is a web page designed for the specific purpose of collecting emails. Whereas a website is different in that there’s more choices on a website.

On a website, visitors can have a look around and browse your posts. But on a landing page there’s only two choices: sign up or leave. This allows the marketer to “tweak” the details on the page to optimise the rate at which visitors opt in. This allows them to drive down the cost to acquire a lead.

Affiliate Lead Generation – Why Generate Leads?

Affiliates use lead generation to build an email list of subscribers. By sending out useful email messages which deliver some kind of value, they can build trust with a subscriber. It can be a challenge to sell an affiliate product directly from a website. A website visitor only sticks around for a few minutes on average, often less. Plus they only have one opportunity to buy from you if they never return.

Since most online shoppers will need between 6-8 touch points with a product/website online before they buy, it makes sense to connect with visitors more frequently through the use of email marketing.

Affiliates therefore have a greater opportunity to sell their products through email marketing than they would from a website alone. With email marketing, an affiliate can sell a product to a subscriber days, weeks or even years after they have joined an email list. This just isn’t possible from a website so a good way to optimise your affiliate sales is to capture emails from a website by offering a giveaway of some kind to deliver value to those who opt in.

The Lead Magnet – A Legitimate “Bribe”

The lead magnet is a legitimate bribe with which you can attain the details of your website visitors. A lead magnet should resonate with your customer avatar/target audience and also align with whatever product/s you are selling through your email list.

On this website I offer my ebook Affiliate Marketing For Beginners as a giveaway when visitors join my email list. Access here. A lead magnet could be anything but many affiliates choose an ebook or a course which can be delivered automatically via email.

Affiliate Lead Generation – Communicating With Your Leads

Once you start attracting leads to join your email list you’ll want to give them some useful information which will be beneficial to them. If you’ve ever joined someone’s email list, and all they do is spam you with products to buy, it’s unlikely you’ll keep opening their emails for long!

But if you offer them some genuine value through your email messages, and if they are a good fit for you, they are likely to open your messages more regularly. They might even start to trust you!

Trust online is a powerful thing (especially online) because there are so many people wanting your hard earned cash, it’s worth building trust by genuinely trying to help your subscribers somehow.

If you build trust first, and sell later, people are much more likely to keep opening your email messages, trust you and buy from you if it’s appropriate to their needs.

With an email autoresponder you can queue up messages ready to be sent out on autopilot when someone subscribes to your email list. You can access an autoresponder here for free.

Affiliate Lead Generation – Control

There’s another powerful reason to build an email list of subscribers too. To get visitors to your website requires either a considerable amount of work (in building content) or a considerable sum of money in paid advertising. If you use content to acquire traffic, Google can shift the algorithm any time and you can easily lose your rankings overnight, meaning your traffic can quickly drop.

Or, if you run out of advertising budget and stop paying for traffic, your visitors will drop off almost immediately.

Building an email list gives you control over your traffic so you’re not as reliant on either Google for traffic or a paid advertising budget. Some affiliates will build their list to over 100,000 subscribers! A single email sent to their list can mean hundreds or even thousands of link clicks which could mean either traffic to your website post or a sale of an affiliate product.

Control over your traffic is huge for affiliates because without traffic you can’t make any affiliate sales.

Summary

Affiliate lead generation is a powerful tool. On a website most visitors leave within a short period of time. This gives an affiliate only a small window of opportunity to make the sale.

But if the affiliate collects leads from their website, it gives them more opportunity to sell through email messages. Once someone joins your email list, you can follow up via email over days, weeks, months and even years and decades. This gives you more opportunity to give value, built trust and sell your affiliate products.

Since most online consumers will require between 6-8 touch points before they make a purchase, it makes sense to use email marketing so you can achieve this.

Leads For Affiliate Marketing

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!

landing page software affiliate marketing

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.

Lead Generation Through Content Marketing

Lead generation through content marketing can take a lot longer than through paid marketing. However, once you get traction with this strategy, it can work all by itself! Initially it’s worth identifying your perfect customer “avatar”. This is an important step in lead generation. By offering an attractive lead magnet, your efforts at content generation can go much further. If your visitor doesn’t match with your offer, you can have a much longer journey.

Website visitors will convert into subscribers much faster with well targeted content which attracts the right visitors. Likewise with your lead magnet. An attractive offer will convert more visitors into subscribers. So before creating a lot of content, decide on your target audience for both content and lead generation strategy – see how to know your target market. A ebook makes a good lead magnet. It’s simple and straight forward and your visitors should immediately see the value in it. See ebook lead magnet for more on this.

Lead Generation Through Content Marketing

Once you are clear on your customer “avatar” and lead magnet it makes it much easier to identify content which your target market is interested in. You can then use Google’s keyword planner to identify content ideas based around your audience and your lead generation offer. You can also use YouTube’s search feature to find content ideas related to your main keywords. So whether you’re a blogger or video creator, you can find suitable topics to create content around using these strategies.

A simple strategy for blogging is to find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty. If you accomplish this successfully and create some great content, you can get ranked on Google (and other search engines) for free traffic.

But this takes time and there’s often plenty of competing content which makes it more difficult to rank your content. So it’s better not to rely on this happening and to create your own content marketing strategy as well. If you content does well, think of it as a bonus, rather than the sole goal.

Lead Generation Through Content Marketing – Promotion

Once you have created some content either through blogging or video, your job isn’t over. You need to get eyes on your content and you can do this in several different ways. Although “content is king” is the generally held view for search engine optimisation, content promotion is most definitely “queen”! Unless you promote your content in some way, it’s harder for Google to see how people react to it, and rank it accordingly. But promoting your content is also a means to getting traffic and finding people to put in front of your lead generation “magnet”.

So here’s a few ways to promote your content once you have created it:

Through social media – share your content throughout your social media presence. You can also get various plugins which do this for you. See best free blog plugins for WordPress.
By offering share buttons on your website (see above link)
Through building backlinks from other blogs and websites
Using paid marketing – Google Adwords, Bing, YouTube etc.
Through deep linking – keyword targeted back links from your newer content
Revive Old Posts is a great plugin which automatically shares your older content through social media

Lead Generation Prominence & Cross Testing

With a lot of content generation going on, it’s easy to lose track of your main goal: getting leads. Your content should be a strategy to get eyes in front of your lead magnet. A good lead magnet should be cross tested using different content pitted against each other. By continually cross testing your lead magnet you get to know which one performs the best. Try different colours, titles and text in your lead magnet opt in page, or images.

Make sure your lead magnet is prominent on your website on all your content. Don’t forget your lead generation objective! If someone lands on your content, they only have a few minutes to decide what to do there. After that they are gone forever! But once you get them to sign up to your email list, you can communicate your messages over a much longer time period.

So make it a priority to test and measure your lead generation tools over 1000 or so web visitors. A good lead magnet can turn many more visitors into subscribers. So if you’re spending a lot of time (and money) getting people to your website, you want to make sure your lead magnet is converting them to leads. Consider using a lead magnet pop-up on your website and try out different strategies across a number of visitors to determine which works the best.

Summary

Lead generation through content marketing can take some time. But once your content starts generating traffic by itself, this can be a great strategy. You can see traffic from the work you’ve done previously. If you can convert this traffic into leads with a good lead magnet, you can earn money completely on autopilot!

First you should identify your perfect customer “avatar”. Create an enticing lead magnet which speaks to your audience and then start creating content which targets both your perfect customer and your lead magnet and connects them in some way.

Keep creating content which is targeted towards people looking for what you offer. You’ll also need a good content marketing strategy and you can outsource much of this too. Don’t just create content, but promote it aggressively too. Use social media platforms and the many available plugins which can help automate the process and encourage visitors to share your content.