You’ve probably seen those “plug and play affiliate systems”? They promise you that affiliate marketing is easy! All you need to do is “plug” them in, send traffic and make money! Mmmm, but it’s strange that the small caveat is actually the largest part of affiliate marketing: sending traffic. Any affiliate product can be sold, but that doesn’t mean anyone can sell it.
The hardest part of affiliate marketing is the “marketing” bit. Getting traffic to your affiliate offer is the biggest challenge for affiliate marketers and the part with which they need the most help. So purchasing a “plug and play affiliate business” is all well and good if you are already an experienced marketer. Otherwise, you’re better off with a program which gives you more help and support.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty of value in a “plug and play” system. You can get a lot of the hard work of affiliate marketing done for you. You get sales pages, marketing materials, landing pages email templates and of course the product itself. But if you think you have bought a profitable business, think again! You have only bought the “guts” of a business, like with a franchise. You still need to work at your marketing in order to make money from it and that costs you either time or money, or both.
Marketing A Plug And Play Affiliate Business
Marketing a plug and play business system will involve some kind of marketing strategy. This is arguably the hardest part of affiliate marketing. Just sending traffic to a landing page doesn’t guarantee you sales. Your traffic also needs to be targeted. What is targeted traffic? Targeting for affiliates is super important and not all traffic is equal. If you’re selling a “money making” program for instance, you’ll need targeted visitors who are looking for what you are selling. If you want to run paid advertising to a money making program, expect to pay a lot for your advertising. Why is target market important for affiliates?
With the right audience and product, you can sell products quite easily as an affiliate. But if you attract the wrong audience, it’s much more difficult to sell. If you don’t want to pay a premium for your traffic, you’ll need to attract it another way.
Organic traffic is super competitive, especially in a niche like money making and unfortunately most of the “plug and play” affiliate products are in this niche. This means you’ll either be paying a premium for your traffic or working really hard for it. Blogging and video blogging are another ways to attract traffic online. But in a competitive niche it’s going to be a long, difficult journey attracting traffic to your products.
What Does A Plug and Play Affiliate Business Give You?
A plug and play affiliate system is a good idea for affiliates when it gives you help and support as well as the products, landing pages, sales pages, email templates and all the rest. Most plug and play business systems will offer:
- A product to sell – or a range of products (ideally subscription and high ticket products)
- An email marketing setup – which you can setup in a few steps
- Pre-formatted email follow ups – follow up messages to send out automatically to your subscribers
- Landing pages – where you can collect subscribers emails
- Sales pages – to send your subscribers where they can purchase your products
- Ready made webinars – useful for affiliates to help promote the products you’re promoting
A good “all in one” affiliate business will also offer training and support in the way of:
- Pre-recorded video trainings, seminars and webinars
- Live webinars and trainings which you can access regularly
- Training step by step modules
- Multiple training courses in a variety of marketing methods
- Access to mentors and coaches who can help you 1 on 1
Access an all in one business system here which offers all of these options according to your requirements and budget.
What Most Plug and Play’s Are Missing
One of the most important ingredients in building a profitable online business is marketing. Without studying marketing, your chances of success are vastly reduced as an affiliate. In fact, most affiliates will fail and the success rate for affiliates is a shocking 5%! That means 95% of affiliates will fail! Perhaps the “plug and play” mentality is partly responsible for this statistic because so many affiliates can sign up to a program and just “give it a go”!
With a traditional business there’s much more cost involved in getting started which stops many from attempting it. But with affiliate marketing the costs are very low. This low barrier to entry means there’s a huge amount of people getting involved in affiliate marketing, many of whom will fail.
To be an effective marketer is becoming more difficult as more and more people enter the online space and attempt to make sales. Most plug and play businesses downplay the importance of learning how to become a successful communicator and marketer. But this is the crux of affiliate marketing success. A “plug and play” business has nothing to lose by selling their setup to partners who will absorb their marketing costs.
If you’re serious about building an online business, you need to factor in your marketing costs as well as the time and attention it will take to learn the strategies of online advertising. If you’re serious about doing this, you can get started here.