Archive | December, 2023

Affiliate marketing is one of the quickest ways to start making money online. However, like all businesses, there are many potential pitfalls in an affiliate marketing business. The most common mistakes can cost an affiliate marketer time and money. Avoid these 3 common affiliate mistakes and you will be a lot more successful in a faster period of time.

1. Choosing the wrong affiliate program to promote.

Many people want to earn from affiliate marketing as fast as possible as soon as they hear there is money to be made. In their rush to be part of a lucrative affiliate program, they often choose a product that is not in strong demand, doesn’t have a high-paying compensation plan or even a product the affiliate is not really interested in.

To be successful, it’s important to do quality research first and ensure that the products you want to promote as an affiliate have a strong and growing demand in the marketplace, that the affiliate program has a generous compensation plan that will reward you well for your efforts, and that you truly have an interest in the products you will be promoting as an affiliate. When these criteria are met, you will have a much greater probability of success with your affiliate marketing endeavor.

2. Joining too many affiliate programs at the same time.

Since affiliate programs are very easy to join, you might be tempted to join too many affiliate programs at the same time in an effort to increase your earnings potential. You may think that there is nothing wrong and nothing to lose by being part of many affiliate programs at the same time.

It is true that developing multiple streams of income is an important key to financial success as an affiliate marketer, but the cost of joining too many programs at the same time will be a loss of focus and concentration on the primary program or programs that are providing your opportunity to earn additional income.

The result? The maximum potential of your affiliate program is not realized and the income generated will not exactly be as much as you were thinking it would. The best way to maximize your results is to join one core program, or a small handful of related programs within a specific niche market and focus your efforts primarily on learning how the programs work, and then implementing an effective marketing action plan to start promoting your affiliate products effectively.

The idea is to roll out your marketing strategy consistently, day-by-day until you are making the sales and income you aspire toward with the affiliate program or programs that you have joined. Once you have achieved your goals, you can always expand the portfolio of affiliate programs you belong to, and with your well-developed marketing skills, success in new affiliate ventures will always come easier. The key in the beginning of an affiliate marketer’s career is to become an effective online marketer.

3. Not buying the product or using the service you’re promoting as an affiliate.

As an affiliate, your primary purpose is to effectively promote a product or service to potential customers. For you to achieve this aim, you must be able to share the benefits of the product or service convincingly with the correct target market. This is a lot easier to do if you have purchased the product yourself, and have your own experiences with how it has benefited you. It also adds to your personal integrity and credibility as a marketer.

Some of the most effective affiliate promotions of all are personal reviews. Many successful affiliates setup review sites or videos online to promote products and services they believe in by sharing their personal experience (story) that they have had with the product. Most consumer’s buying decisions are either influenced or motivated completely by a personal recommendation they have received from a trusted source. If you can establish yourself as a trusted source by writing or recording honest and insightful reviews for products you are promoting as an affiliate, you will be far more effective than simply trying to advertise the product through other means.

Therefore, buy and try the product or service personally first before you sign up as an affiliate to see if it is really delivering on what it promises, and if it’s something you would be proud to promote as an affiliate. Your prospects will then sense the sincerity and truthfulness in your recommendations and this will lead to more product sales.

Many hopeful affiliate marketers fall prey to the 3 affiliate marketing pitfalls above, and don’t succeed in their affiliate marketing business as a result. Now that you are informed, you have the knowledge required to avoid these common mistakes and get your affiliate marketing business off to a profitable start and successful future.

To make more sales, you can send more people to your offers, you can send better qualified people to your offers, or you can convert more of the people you send. Today let’s talk about how to convert more of your traffic into sales by using little copywriting tips and tricks that massively improve your copy’s ability to make those sales for you.

1: Do more research. If you know how to hit your prospect’s hot buttons, your conversion rates will improve. And to know what you’re talking about, you’ve got to do your research.

What other products are on the market? How is yours better? What do your prospects want most? How can you tailor your benefits to what they want? What did the reviewers say?

Sometimes you’ll even discover the perfect headline buried deep inside your research, such as the comment someone made when they tried the product and got spectacular results.

2: Talk to your market. Who is it that you’re targeting with your product? These are the people to talk to. If you don’t fully understand the relationship between your product, your customers and how it improves their lives, then find out. Ask for their experiences and listen carefully for emotions and key phrases that convey both how they felt about the problem and how the product has changed things for them.

Are you just launching and don’t yet have customers? You can still ask about their problem and what it will be like for them when they have the solution. Even going to Amazon and reading the reviews that people leave for products similar to yours can be super helpful. Look for the experiences others can relate to, the ones where someone is talking about how tough it was to have the problem, and how frustrating it is that the product didn’t solve the problem or how their life has changed since it did solve it.

3: Test headlines. Always have several headlines to test, because the one you are certain will be the winner is probably going to be the loser. It’s just a fact that even the most seasoned copywriters often can’t predict which headline will hit it out of the ballpark.

Try not to get attached to a headline prior to testing, either. Give each one a fair test and let the numbers speak for themselves. I’ve seen marketers fall in love with a headline and lose a great deal of sales because they took too long to test others.

4: Use mini-headlines. Those little headlines that break up copy also work like Australian Cattle dogs to herd sheep. When your reader starts to stray, your mini-headline will bring them back into the fold because it’s going to create intrigue, give benefits or simply raise so much curiosity that they MUST read what comes next.

Imagine someone is skimming your sales copy and all they are reading are the mini-headlines. Do they tell a story on their own? Do they create curiosity while also conveying benefits? Would you be drawn into the copy and perhaps even want to buy the product just from reading the mini-headlines? If not, you might want to work on those.

5: Use lots of bullet points. I’ve seen a lot of marketers who seem to think you’re supposed to have one section of bullet points and that’s it. But I’ve also noticed that some of the highest converting sales letters have 2, 3, 4 and even 5 separate sections of bullet points.

Bullets make reading easy. In fact, some of your prospects will read the headline, the bullet points and then maybe the guarantee before making up their minds if they want to go further. To create a bullet point, first write a mini headline and then add a sentence that supports the headline and adds a benefit.

For example:

The #1 Stealth Method of Persuasion (This is the exact covert method the US government used to turn die-hard Russian spies into secret double agents – use this method to get what you want every time.)

6: Add sidebars and boxes. Break up your copy with sidebars and boxes that highlight benefits, showcase testimonials and quote experts. This breaks up your copy, makes the entire letter look interesting and keeps the reader reading.

7: Use an experienced graphic artist. Ideally your designer has experience formatting sales copy within your niche. Take a look at the work they’ve done and see if their style will work for what you have in mind. Jot down ideas and suggestions of your own and then listen to your designer’s ideas, too.

Remember that good copy with great design can sometimes out-convert great copy with lousy design. The look of your page can be just as important as what your page says. If you don’t believe it, think of the last time you arrived at a sales page and clicked away because of what you saw and not what you read. First impressions are made so fast that the reader has often formed an opinion before they’ve even read your headline.

You know those headlines that scream out you can earn XXX amount of dollars by simply “pushing a few buttons” or “sending a few emails” or some such? Well, this case study is actually about someone doing almost no work and yet banking close to $5,000 a month.

In fact, she might be up to that amount now. The $4,400 was how much she earned when we spoke, and she mentioned that her income is increasing every single month. Yet she does almost no work whatsoever.

And by the way, OPA stands for Other People’s Artwork.

Here’s how it works:

I’ll call her Sally because, well, when I talk to her she giggles a lot and sounds kind of silly. Sort of like a high school girl, and yet she’s in her mid-twenties.

Sally has several different identities on Etsy and Ebay. Each identity sells a certain type of artwork. One sells paintings of animals, one sells landscapes, one sells abstract art, one sells hearts (I’m not kidding!) and so forth.

She has a real life assistant (we’ll call him Gorgeous George because as Sally tells it, in addition to working for her George also does some modeling and fitness instruction.) George makes all the listings for the artwork, gets the prints made from the originals, fulfills the orders and handles any customer service requests.

What does Sally do? She outsources work to several artists who do all of her paintings for her. Just like hiring a ghostwriter to write a book which you then sell, Sally is hiring “ghost painters”. She has them sign a non-disclosure agreement that gives her all rights to the paintings. And she never tells her artists what she does with the paintings, either.

If I were doing this business model, I might consider giving the artists a percentage of sales, but Sally likes to simply pay one fee up front to keep things simple.

Sally chooses the styles for the paintings by finding examples and showing them to her artists. She then asks them to replicate the style and not the actual painting. She sells the original paintings for a good price ($300 to $1,000) and sells limited edition prints for a lower price.

Her listings never claim that she or her persona is the artist. She’ll use generic language such as, “This painting was created May of 2021 using pastels on canvas.” She has her artists use several mediums, including acrylic, watercolor, pastels, ink, charcoal and so forth.

She also has a virtual assistant who has one job: Promoting the artwork through various social media channels. This is why her business is growing so fast, because word is getting out via social media. And she’s very good at picking her subjects, too, some of which are extremely timely and most of which prove popular.

As you can see she has expenses: Her real life assistant George, her virtual assistant, the artists and selling fees. But even after all this, she pulled in $4,400 in profit the month she revealed her system to me, and like it said, it’s increasing every month.

The real key here is to choose subjects that will sell. That’s why she likes animals, hearts and landscapes because they always do well. And her paintings aren’t super elaborate, either. An experienced painter can likely create one in a short afternoon.

One of her best-selling stores sells paintings that are somewhat cartoonish, including caricatures of real people as well as animals doing silly things. As mentioned earlier, one sells hearts. I suspect this artist probably does 4 or 5 paintings in a day because they are that simple. But they sell like hotcakes because people love hearts and bright colors.

This business is easy to replicate and if you use assistants, it takes very little time at all.

Boys and girls, there was a time when calculators weren’t apps on smartphones – they were actually stand-alone hand-held electronic gizmos that did nothing but calculate numbers. (I’m dating myself…) Some of these calculators were even what you might call “desk sized” because they were so big you had to set them on something to use them.

One day a salesman found himself stuck with a gross of these large desk calculators. Nobody wanted to buy them, so here’s what he did…

He told his customers they were giant “ice scrapers” they could use to scrape ice off of windshields. The customers would object and say, “No, they’re calculators,” and he would reply, “Oh ya, I suppose you could use these as calculators, too, but they’re really great at removing ice!”

People would laugh and then buy one, and within days the calculators sold out.

Do you have a product that’s not selling?

Maybe you can find new positioning for your product, or a new and imaginative way to describe it.

For example, do you have a course on how to drive traffic via social media? Reposition it for one particular niche – dating, health, mmo, chiropractors – you get the idea. Do you sell a course on how to make art? Reposition it as art therapy so that it’s now about the process and not the outcome.

Almost any product can be targeted to a new audience or even rebranded as something entirely different.

Time and again I’ve seen new marketers complain that they’re not earning 5 figures a month. So, I ask them what they’re selling…

$7 reports…

$17 ebooks…

$27 video sets…

“Okay,” I say, “let’s do some math. Five figures a month is $10,000 or more. How many $7 products do you need to sell to make $10,000?”

“I don’t know,” they say.

The answer is 1,428.

What about $17 ebooks?

If you sell 588 of those a month, you’ll make five figures.

Yeah, but what about $27 video sets?

You only need 370 of those a month. That’s 12 or 13 sales every day.

If you convert a whopping 5% of your visitors, you’ll need 360 interested visitors a day to achieve that.

That’s going to cost money to drive that kind of traffic, which means you’ll need to sell a whole lot more products.

You see where this is going.

If the basic structure of your business prevents you from earning the income you want, then you’ve got to change your business.

It’s like buying a car that only goes 50, and then feeling disappointed and mad when it won’t go 100. It’s just not built for that kind of speed, and your business might not be built to earn 5 figures a month, either.

Low priced products are great for building a list of buyers and essential for self-liquidating paid advertising. You pay $100, you make $100 but you’ve got a list you’re building, or rather two lists because one is subscribers (which can be good) and the other one is buyers (which is where the real profit is made.)

But if you want to make five figures a month, you’ll need to either sell something more expensive like a $197 course or a $500 coaching program, or else promote affiliate products.

Let’s talk about that $197 price tag – to earn $10,000 a month, you need to sell just 50 of those a month. Or you can sell 20 of the $500 coaching.

The point is, if all you’re doing is selling nickel and dime stuff, then you can’t complain if you’re not making any REAL money.

It’s time to step up your game. Whatever is holding you back from selling more profitable products, knock it off.

Don’t tell me your list won’t buy expensive products because I know they will. They’re already buying more expensive products from other marketers, so why not from you, too? Build trust and rapport with them and some of them will buy anything you offer.

But the first step is getting your own mindset in shape and believing that you can sell big ticket items.

And if this is too much of a stretch for you right now (you’re not alone) then you can at least get on the right track by adding multiple products to your line. Add a continuity membership site, paid newsletter and/or paid podcast. Add products that sell for $47, $67, $97 and more. Find affiliate products you love and believe in that earn good money per sale. This way you can work your way up to the big-ticket items.

Heck, I know one marketer who won’t sell anything that costs less than $1,997. He doesn’t have a list of 500,000 because he doesn’t need one. He’s got a couple of lists of about 5,000 each and he is absolutely CRUSHING it because every single sale brings big money to his own pocket.

His mindset is that $17 products are a total waste of his time, and he’s right. To earn $1,997 he can make one sale or he can make 117 sales. He chooses to make one sale and even as I write this I realize that I, too, need to focus more on the higher priced products. I guess there is a lesson in here for all of us. 😉

What do most people like least about buying tangible goods online? I think it’s the shipping costs. Sure, you’re ready to pony up that $20 for the item you’re dying to have, but do you really want to pay the $7.99 shipping fee? Maybe not.

Then there’s another factor we might want to look at – remorse. Not the remorse that comes from buying something and then regretting it, but the remorse that comes from NOT adding something to your order.

Sure, you got the Super Duper Widget and the Super SUPER Duper Widget Accessory, but darn it, why didn’t you get the Super Duper Case to go with it? Blast it all, now you feel like you blew it. Except…

Except there is a company out there called Zulily that has an innovative solution for both of these obstacles. When you place an order with Zulily, you can order again anytime in the next 2-3 days and pay NO additional shipping costs.

This means you can go back and get the items you wish you’d purchased in the first place, and it won’t cost you a dime in additional shipping.

Zulily also offers to split your payment in half. You pay half now plus shipping and the other half in a month. They have your credit card on file, so the risk to them is extremely low. And I’ll bet the increase in business is substantial.

Is there a way you can apply these super consumer friendly practices to your business, and increase your bottom line in the process?

I couldn’t find the download anywhere. I checked my email, I clicked all the links and went to all the pages, I set up my new, free ‘membership’ and still the download wasn’t there. But they kept telling me to be sure to download it as soon as I watched the video. So I watched the video, but the download still did not appear.

Do you know what DID appear?

An email.

“We noticed you still have not downloaded the XYZ Document. If you need help, just click this button and someone will call you to assist.”

Ah-Ha!

Sneaky clever, don’t you think?

Here’s what they’re doing:

They’ve created an outstanding video that teaches a marketing technique. To get you to watch the video, they promise you a free download of one of their internal documents that’s made them millions.

But you can’t get to the document until you watch the video (it’s a long one) all the way to the end. You watch the video and… WHOOPSIE! Haha!

No download.

Next comes the super nice, super helpful sounding email. This is where they get you on the PHONE and sell you on their expensive program.

It’s a bit diabolical, but still I have to acknowledge their creativity.

They almost didn’t add the upsell because it was too expensive and most of their buyers wouldn’t be interested… Or so they thought.

The main product was a super cool software plugin, priced at $47 for use on one site and $67 for unlimited sites.

Most people bought the $67 version.

The upsell was developers’ rights to the plugin.

Most people won’t buy that, right?

The two partners argued about it for three days before finally adding the developer’s rights as the only upsell to the funnel.

The promotion ran for a week, had plenty of affiliates promoting and guess what?

You know it – they brought in an extra $13,396 just from the upsell.

Maybe it wasn’t a fortune, but it’s extra money they otherwise would not have made.

Plus, it didn’t cost them a dime to offer that upsell, either.

What are you not selling right now that you could be in your sales funnel?

I’m gonna wring this guy’s neck and I don’t even know who the heck he is. Gimme a second to decompress…

Deep breaths…

Okay, here’s what happened.

I get an email with a topic that sounded good. Real good. “Go check out the product,” it says. So, I click it. I’m trying to read the sales page. I mean I’m REALLY TRYING TO READ THE SALES PAGE but he, whoever this guy is…

… WON’T LET ME READ THE SALES PAGE!

I am his prime prospect.

I want the benefit he so eloquently offered in the email.

He’s worked hard to get me on his list, get me to open that email, get me to click the link…

… but the result is I wanna strangle him.

Why?

Because every two seconds there is another pop-up that says:

JOE BLOW JUST BOUGHT THIS PRODUCT!
SUSIE Q JUST BOUGHT THIS PRODUCT!
JEDI MASTER JUST BOUGHT THIS PRODUCT!
FREDDIE KRUGER JUST BOUGHT THIS PRODUCT!

Sigh.

I closed the page and came here to write you this note.

While it’s terrific to show your prospects that your product is flying off the shelf, I’m not so sure that continuously interrupting them while they read your sales page is the way to do it.

Plus, between you and me, I’m not sure I even believe he’s making all those sales.

It comes out to about 1 sale every 2 or 3 seconds, and that just doesn’t seem likely, does it?

But here’s where I advise you to not take my advice…

(Wait… let me think about that a moment…)

Those super annoying pop-ups that tell you everyone and their brother are buying the product… (I hate to even admit this)

… actually increase sales.

Yup.

I am the exception here and NOT the rule.

People are naturally influenced by what other people do. It’s the herd instinct, and it’s hardwired into us for reasons of survival.

People see that others are buying the product and so they buy the product, too. I’ve seen data on sales launches where there is a big surge at the opening bell of people buying. This is typical behavior in a successful launch. Most people buy the first day or the last day, and in between sales sharply taper off.

But when these annoying sales notifications are added on the second day, suddenly sales go up again. More people who visit the page are buying right then and there rather than putting the decision off.

You can get the software to do this at fomo.com or other software providers. Just sign up for an account, implement the code, set your parameters for how you want the software to appear and act, and if all goes as planned, sales will increase.

But please, please make the notifications unobtrusive. The idea is to gently let prospects know that other people are buying the product.

If the pop-up is continually stopping the person from reading the letter, you will lose sales to people who don’t have the patience to put up with the distraction. Like me.

First let me say that $3,000 is an ultra-conservative guess. I suspect this guy (we’ll call him Mike) is earning 3 to 5 times that much, but let’s be conservative and call it $3,000…

Mike has found a way to earn residual income that is right underneath all of our noses. In fact, it’s a method that’s been taught for a couple of decades or more, and yet very few marketers do this.

I’m almost positive you already know of this technique. But I’m also pretty confident that you are not USING this technique, at least not to the extent Mike is using it.

On the technical side, all you need to make this work is a squeeze page and an autoresponder.

Remember, residual income is what you earn for work you do ONCE and get paid for over and over again. If you write a hit song, you get royalties every time that song is played. If you sell software as a service or a membership site, you get paid every month until that person unsubscribes.

And if you’re Mike, you do what might be the simplest thing of all: You create specially made autoresponder sequences that last for YEARS, keep subscribers interested and continuously sell, sell and sell some more.

Mike’s ENTIRE business model is built around autoresponders. It’s not just a sideline for him, it’s what pays his bills, bought him a second home and put his kids through college.

Here’s what Mike does:

He chooses a niche. His favorites are weight loss/health, along with making money online. But he works in a couple of others as well.

He writes a follow up sequence that goes on for years. YEARS. Naturally he doesn’t do this all at once. Once he targets a niche, he writes follow up emails for the first couple of weeks prior to going active. Then he adds to the sequence on a regular basis until it’s about 3-5 years long (I’m not kidding!) He sends out about 1 email per day on average, although sometimes he sends out 2 emails if he’s promoting something hard.

If you’re freaking out about writing all these emails, remember two things: You just have to write enough emails to stay ahead of your earliest subscribers. And you can always outsource the work.

Mike’s emails are a mixture of information, content, observations, humor, jokes, quotes… pretty much whatever he feels like writing that he knows will interest his niche not just today but also in years to come. And every single email does something else, too. It sells.

Sometimes the entire email is selling. Other times the selling part comes in about halfway through the email. Once in a while he doesn’t sell until the P.S. But the point is this: He delivers content his readers WANT and he never stops selling, either.

He chooses evergreen products that are likely to still be available well into the future. ClickBank is his #1 source for these.

He sells one product per week. That is, he spends 7 days talking about just one product, what it can do for the reader, anecdotal stories of what it’s done for others, common questions answered and so forth.

And here’s a little trick he uses: Because each week focuses on just one product, he makes it look like a new product launch. Mind you, he never SAYS it’s a new product. Nor does he say that the product will no longer be available after the week is over. But he does give that impression in order to give the reader a sense of urgency.

To create even more urgency, he also offers a bonus that is good for that week only. His bonuses are usually built on PLR that he’s repurposed just for this.

And here’s where it gets even MORE interesting: 5-6 times a year he promotes a PACKAGE of products that are all his. These are the same products he’s been giving out as bonuses, all with big price tags attached so they look high value. He bundles about seven of these together and offers them for one ‘low’ price. And of course he gets to keep all the profits when he does this.

Offering these PLR products as bonuses and then packaging them together to sell is optional to the system, but it does bring in more sales and revenue and it doesn’t take all that much time to source good PLR products and rename them.

Now then, this all sounds great but you’re probably wondering how he gets people to join his lists so he can send them all these emails on autopilot. And the answer is awesome lead magnets.

In fact, this is where he spends his real time and energy, because the better the lead magnet is, the easier it is to get subscribers. Often, he’ll buy the rights to a product that’s sold well and offer that as his giveaway for joining his list. When you can say that a product sold 3,000 copies at $297 but the visitor can get it for free just for subscribing, your conversion rates can get pretty high. For his non-IM niches his conversion rate is over 70%, and for his online marketing niche it’s about 50%, which is still excellent.

By taking the time and expense to get the lead magnet right, he doesn’t just increase the conversion rates on his squeeze pages. He also builds a lot of goodwill and credibility with his new subscribers, which makes it easier to get his emails read and his links clicked.

This all sounds great, right? But what about traffic?

Good question. Mike pays for all of his traffic because he likes being able to turn on the traffic switch whenever he wants for as long as he wants. He already knows what each subscriber on each list is worth for the first six months they’re on the list. Any sales that come in after six months are just gravy.

His method is to spend as much as 50% of what he will earn in the first six months on advertising. So for example if the average subscriber earns him $3.00 in six months, he’ll spend as much as $1.50 to get that subscriber. But most of his subscribers stay with him for years, so in the end he actually earns a good deal more than just $3.00 apiece.

He buys his traffic from solo ads, Facebook ads and Google ads. He also uses several less well-known methods, two of which I was able to pry out of him. One of these is paying Facebook Group leaders to promote his free offer to their members. And another method he uses is to pay product sellers to offer his free product on their download page. Since everyone who hits the download page is a buyer, these tend to be especially good leads.

Naturally Mike uses a tracking service to find out where his squeeze page traffic is coming from so he knows what’s working.

Once a new subscriber joins one of his lists, that subscriber automatically receives emails for a long time from Mike. But the emails never look dated because they’re written in a style that makes it look current. Mike does have to check and make sure the products promoted in his sequences are still active. If one of them is no longer available, he simply finds a similar product and substitutes out the URLs and the product name.

And Mike does a lot of cross promoting, too. For example, if he has a list of people who use social media for online marketing, he’ll promote his free video marketing lead magnet to that list to see if he can get them on a second and even third list. Yes, this can mean a subscriber is in maybe three different autoresponder sequences simultaneously, but the profits far, far outweigh any unsubscribes.

As you can see the hard work in this business model is getting things set up. But once you do, it takes very little work to keep things running smoothly. And if you decide to take a month off, it shouldn’t affect your income, either.

Here’s maybe the most interesting thing about this entire case study: Mike had no previous marketing or writing experience prior to setting up his first squeeze page – autoresponder funnel. He was good at technical stuff but never did any kind of sales or marketing before.

And I wonder if this didn’t help him to succeed, because his writing is very basic and sounds like it comes from that slightly weird ‘guy next door’. He just writes about what interests him in each niche, because he figures that same stuff will interest his readers. His grammar isn’t great but he tells new subscribers up front that he’s no English professor; he’s just a guy like them who enjoys doing XYZ just like they do.

It works for him. And if you choose an evergreen niche that interests you, then I think you could easily build a hands-free funnel like Mike’s and start earning some of that residual income on autopilot. You set it up, send a continuous stream of new subscribers and get sales. It’s so simple, most people overlook this – but it works.