PROMOTING PRODUCTS THROUGH AFFILIATE NETWORKS
This is my second article on affiliate marketing. The first one was on how to promote products through businesses or companies that have an affiliate program, such as Amazon, Home Depot ,Walmart, etc.
CLICK HERE FOR
“Making Money Online With a Business That Has an Affiliate Program”
This article will be about how to promote products through an affiliate network, such as Clickbank, Shareasale, Commission Junction, etc. . Most of the products that you will promote through affiliate networks will be “digital” products although some products may be physical products.
Promoting “digital” products is often very lucrative. Because digital products don’t have to be “warehoused” or physically shipped and once created can be sold over and over again, the commissions are normally higher. Commissions are sometimes 50% or more. And as with other affiliate marketing products, you don’t have to create the product, you don’t have to stock or ship the product, you don’t have to collect payment for the product and you don’t have to deal with customer complaints or returns.
Your job is to market the product.
The cycle of events are different when working with a network. The affiliate will advertise the product for the network in various ways. Some of the advertising may be paid (examples of paid
ads could be Facebook ads or Google ads) and some of the advertising may be free (It could be a page on your website).
You will create a “sales funnel”.
The sales funnel is a cycle of events the customer will go through while making his purchase
The customer sees an ad placed by the affiliate (you) and then clicks a link that will send the customer to a webpage the affiliate has created, called a “landing page”. The landing page will contain some information about the product and an offer of a “free report” or “valuable PDF document” or an “e-book” as an enticement to fill in the form on the landing page. The customer will fill in the form with their name and email address (maybe more information, depending on the product being sold).
Be careful not to request too much information as this might discourage the customer from submitting the form. At this point their name and email address will be sent to you (usually through an autoresponder). This collection of names and email addresses could be the start of a future email campaign or for various products you create or other affiliate products.
You will set up an autoresponder to facilitate your sales funnel.
An autoresponder is a marketing tool that automatically sends a reply when an email is sent to you or when a customer sends his email information to you from
your landing page. The autoresponder will send a series of pre-written emails, based on guidelines that you have created, to people who enter their email
information on your landing page.
Emails can also be sent automatically to people that have subscribed to your blog or website. You can keep customers up to date with your news and offers. Your autoresponder can make stronger customer relationships .
In this case we will be using the autoresponder to move the customer through the marketing funnel.
Some of the best autoresponders are: SendX, Sendinblue, GetResponse, Hubspot, Mailchimp, AWeber, and SendPulse . They offer you instructions on how to create your response letters, building landing pages and other marketing features.
The pricing on autoresponders vary. Some have free plans and some of the plans go to over $100 depending on the autoresponder, number of emails you send and number of subscribers you have.
When the customer fills in the information on your landing page, his email info will be sent to you. This information will be compiled into a list. This list will be used for follow-up emails that you create and sent to your customers at pre-determined times for various purposes (additional attempts to generate a sale if not sold at first attempt), news from your blog or website, for you to wish your customer “happy birthday/ happy anniversary”, for other email campaigns or for other products you may offer.
The customer will then be sent to a “thank you page” (the thank you page is one of the emails sent by the autoresopder), where you will introduce yourself and tell him a little about yourself and your business. The customer will then be sent to the advertisement of the network for the product.
At this point, the customer will make the purchase or decide not to. If the customer makes the purchase, then the cycle is complete. The network will send the
product to the customer and send you your commission.
If the customer decides not to make the purchase, you will have his email information so you can send him additional pre-written emails at pre-determined times to attempt to make the sale.
It is important to maintain and add to your email list. This list will become invaluable to you as you start your affiliate marketing career. Be sure to see and
understand the above illustration describing how the sales funnel functions. There a many other images of flow charts on how sales funnels work. I recommend that you check them out and read literature from autoresponders to fully understand how the process works
I hope you enjoyed this article on “PROMOTING PRODUCTS THROUGH AFFILIATE NETWORKS”. Affiliate marketing was one of my first ventures into making money online and I’m sure it was for many others. There are a lot of articles and videos and other information on affiliate marketing and I hope you read the articles and watch those videos. Thank you for reading this article and please send in any comments or questions you have and please share this site with your friends.
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