Affiliate success roadmap – Simple strategy to succeed as an affiliate
With all the information overload, it become a pain in the neck to understand what to do as an affiliate marketer. You are supposed to create a website, build a list, create free products, or build traffic, do seo, write articles… is there anything which makes more sense.
When I asked this question, I decided to create a simple roadmap for affiliates.
You need a very simple formula (not much skill).
1. Buy a domain name
2. Buy a hosting.
3. Create a website.
4. Build Traffic.
5. Promote the heck out of the products through your affiliate link.
6. Rinse and Repeat.
Now this is 6 step formula, you should keep in mind. As I go along this article series, I’ll show you what to do with each step.
Before you go ahead and buy a domain and hosting. You should try to create a time table of sorts and find out how much time you can spend daily.
I highly recommend something like 1 hour per day for first 6 months.
Step 1/2/ – Buy a domain and Hosting.
Before you buy domain, you have to find out which niche you are going to target.
Read this article – Niche Research(opens in new window) – Why your success largely depends on this step.
1. How to choose a Hot, rabid niche – I
2. How to choose a Hot, rabid niche – II
Read those articles and think what kind of website would you like to create?
When you are finished with these articles and found a good market to target. you are ready to buy your first domain/hosting.
Step 3 : Create a Website.
You can go through this in 2 ways.
1. Buy a template and edit it manually (it’s easier to edit a template than to create a web design from scratch).
2. Use some kind of software (like Xsite Pro) to create a website.
It doesn’t matter what option you chose, you shouldn’t spend more than a day or two in this.
Of course, you can always buy a custom design (but it takes too much time, time which you can spend building traffic and making money).
If I am spending more than an hour in web design, I know I am doing something wrong.
Well, we just finished first 3 steps, I’ll discuss the rest in next article.
Recommended Sources -
How to Succeed In Niche Marketing.
Article Marketing – how to use articles to build traffic.
So what if you don’t have a product?
Wha???? Gasp, choke… Damn, you don’t have a product?
How in the world are you going to make profit?
As you can guess, I am one of those who believe everyone should have a product of their own to sell. When you create a product you automatically become an expert. You only need about 1% conversion with a $30 product with a traffic of 100 unique visitors to get decent income per month (about $900). It’s hard to achieve that kind of figures with adsense or with affiliate marketing.
But we are not talking about products. We are talking about how you can make money without products.
2nd best thing you can do is jump into affiliate marketing band wagon.
Frankly speaking, it’s little harder to sell affiliate product rather than your own. On plus side, you have no inventory, no customer hassles, no worry about credit card processing. In this article I am going to show you how you can succeed as an affiliate marketer.
The secret behind successful affiliate marketer.
Focus – errr… really?
Can you remember the first time you’ve heard about affiliate marketing and what was your first reaction?
I remember mine. I read about it from another top marketer’s website. My first reaction was to become his affiliate and start promoting his products. Bad idea that.
I made only 6$ in first 3 months. Ouch. It still hurts.
So how can you use focus and succeed?
First thing you have to worry about is finding a good product. If you are promoting a good product, it’ll go a long way.
Second thing you need to do is write a pre-sell page. That’s it. One pre-sell page. Don’t try to copy the sales letter of the product. Write your own.
If you own the product, then you can see and discuss the quality of material and other stuff.
Now Last thing you have to do is, promote the heck out of this single page. You can use any number of traffic building techniques. Wherever you go, promote it.
I know of a guy who wrote 3–4 articles a day to promote a single product.
I also know of a guy who spent 4–5 hrs a day in forums promoting it.
I also know of a guy who regularly used Yahoo chat rooms and sold weight loss pills to people (now this was surprising even for me).
When I talked about focus. I wanted you to focus on single product. Do not spread your efforts too soon.
This way you can start making some money in next 30 days. In next 60 days, you’ll get used to regular checks in your mailbox. After that you can implement many strategies to add the leverage.
Follow this 5 step process of Vision – Strategy – Action – Results – Celebration to Succeed in Internet marketing.
Affiliate Marketers – Can You reduce Your Time/Money expenditure by 70%?
In one of the online research, it said, more than 80% of the affiliate marketers do not making more than $200/month. Often they are spending too much time, effort and money and yet are not even close to their financial goals.
Goals – How can affiliate marketers achieve them while reducing their time, effort and money?
There are many tips on increasing productivity, which often talks about “not check emails, your adsense/affiliate accounts every few minutes”.
But I am going to take a different approach to them. If you want to be productive, it’s easy and you can follow the tips (Read Darren’s Blog post on productivity). I am going to tighten some lose ends, strengthen the structure and Marketing process more efficient, and so on.
The way to to efficient your marketing structure is by testing and streamlining. I know testing sounds a LOT complicated to a beginner, but What I am going to do is show you how to use the simplest of testing. I call it self-testing.
Odd name for a testing methodology. As you know, I like to keep things simple. The idea behind self testing is “Find out what is getting you result and do more of it”. Now I know most people are wondering “Isn’t that’s what testing is supposed to do?”
Yes, you are right. But for you to figure out you need to install software and stuff like that. Which is time consuming process. If you remember my earlier blog post on testing advertising concepts, then you know I tested without any script or software. Do you know the basic process of affiliate marketing?
Affiliate marketing process –> Find the market -> Find a Hot Selling product -> Get Traffic -> Promote The affiliate product.
It’s 4 phase process. And what I am suggesting is going to be implemented in 4th stage. While promoting your stuff you are going to take notice of your results. Find out at what time period, you are making a sale.
For example – If you are promoting a Product X and you make a sale at around 100 Unique targeted traffic, then what does this tells you? It basically give you green light to put all of your efforts to promote this product.
Even if you are making a sale per 200 unique visitors, you are actually doing a lot better than others.
This is what I meant by Self-testing. You notice when you are making a sale. When you start out, chances are you won’t find the kind of results I talked about.
Here’s what to do when you are not satisfied with results?
Let’s take an example where You’ve created a 1 Pre-sell Page and You are bringing traffic to this page to promote a Brand X product.
Now you have brought about 500 unique visitors and still no sale. That’s a bad-bad equation in front of you.
Now Here things get hairy and you have to make an intelligent decision.
Find out why people are not buying it?
- Bad Traffic – Product Match : This happens more than often you’d imagine. Most of times, the traffic you bring in is not a good match for the product. Now if you are getting traffic to a product called “Make money online” and your traffic is targeted (make money online type). So what’s the big deal here? Can you guess?Now chances are you are bringing crowd that belongs to affiliate marketing niche and your product is all about using your product and stuff like that. This is slight disconnection which goes almost un-noticed between your traffic and Product. And your conversion will DROP significantly. The moment you bring the right crowd (for this example, people who create their own products), you’ll see jump in sales.
The major difference between you and myself is the experience to judge this kind of situation immediately.
- A Disconnection between traffic and your pre-sell page : Every market has a Lingo or style or manner of speaking. If you are out of element in this department, it’ll create a HUGE disconnection in your pre sell page. (BTW, If I haven’t said it before, ALWAYS CREATE PRE-SELL PAGES).If you think this is the reason, Find couple of High traffic forums in your product/market and spend some time there lurking. You’ll get a heck a lot about the demographics of your market.
- Bad Promotion from Brand X product: This stuff happens too. Bad Marketing. Do you know there’s rare breed of marketers who spend most of the time finding this kind of situation and write their own pre-sell page to promote the product from clickbank.
- Disconnection between Traffic and Product page : Actually this should also comes into 3rd angle here. But Again this disconnection is pretty much like the disconnection we talk about in 1 and 2nd point. In this case, Your only option is to create a better pre-sell page or find a better marketed product.
As you can see, just by judging your traffic and sales, you can start making decisions that’ll reduce your time and effort by making it more efficient. I am of belief that you should spend more time doing things that brings you money rather than doing useless stuff Like designing the web page, trying 10 different things.
Focus on doing 1 single things and do it effectively. If you are getting only 100 uniques visitors a day, you can find out if you are going to make money in 5 day or less. It’s about making a proper decision.
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