A few money making guidelines for affiliate marketing
Before we delve into the nuts and bolts of marketing, here are a few guidelines I’ve developed along the way that have exponentially helped my own business, but didn’t really fit into any specific category for this book.
BRANDING MAKES MILLIONAIRES
Affiliate websites are notorious for having terrible branding, while a solid branding strategy can add thousands to the average affiliate’s bottom line. Because of this, I’m leading the charge on bringing branding back to affiliate marketing. Branding an affiliate site is not hard to do and the reward is HUGE.
A brand, in short, delivers your users/readers a cohesive set of experiences that they can expect from your business. Basically, your brand image acts as a symbol of the positive, unique and trustworthy experience they have with you.
A cohesive branding campaign can build immense value into your business and gives your customers the confidence that when they deal with you, they’ll get something special.
There are numerous underlying psychological aspects of the importance of branding. But, for our methods here, we’ll stick to the one that is important to affiliate marketing:
TRUST
Your main job with your branding is to earn the trust of your readers. When they trust you, they buy from you.
So, your affiliate sites, freebies, emails and anything else they come into contact with must have continuity in their message. Your name, logos, brand image, attitude and ethos must be ubiquitous in everything you do. When it is, your readers will know exactly what to expect when they see your site, emails and any promotions from you. This means better open rates, more trust and more sales both through your site and to products you upsell in emails.
SPEED IS YOUR FRIEND.
The ability to address burgeoning markets quickly is extremely important. Of course, it would be nice to be able to spend 6 months on the promotion of one site/market. But this is a luxury you don’t have.
While you’re spending all of your time doing a GREAT job promoting 1 market, another guy is doing a solid job promoting 10.
The chance he’ll make a respectable income from a number of his markets is much higher than the chance you’ll make a GREAT income from yours. Reasons for this are many – you may not choose a great market, competition in paid and organic search is thick, etc. So, the speed at which you’re able to get your websites up, running and marketed is very important.
I’ll be discussing some methods below that will drastically reduce your ‘time to market’ and greatly increase your chances of making commissions faster.
PLAY THE NUMBERS GAME.
You can pretty much guarantee that a number of your projects and websites are NOT going to take off. You may choose an unproductive market, it may be too competitive, etc.
To combat this, successful affiliates use the ‘throw as much as we can at it and see what sticks’ method. The idea being, not everything you do is going to work, so get as much as you can out there so at least some of it does. So, you want to build and market as many affiliate sites as you can handle. (Again, a couple methods I mention later will help you significantly with this.)
It’s akin to differentiating your investments. Some of your projects WILL tank. Work this into your strategy and you’ll come out on top.
SPENDING PAYS DIVIDENDS.
Affiliate marketing is one of the easiest businesses to get into, largely, because of the low upfront cost. But, this doesn’t mean you should spend NO money on it.
Expect that at some point, you’ll be spending money on domains, hosting, freelancers, bonuses, advertising and more. Of course, to every rule there is an exception, but most affiliate marketers end up spending money on at least some of the above.
In addition to initial expenses are the tools that will help you make money. Research and site building tools are the ones I’ve found give the most bang for their buck. There are a number of tools out there that aggregate data in a way you could NEVER do manually, and these help you make better, more informed, more-likely-to-make-you-money decisions.
Good luck and prosper
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