All the gurus say affiliate marketing is so easy.
If that's true, why are there literally millions of affiliate marketers earning $0 month after month.
The thing is, affiliate marketing is NOT as easy as most gurus make it out to be.
You can't just pick a product or service at JVZoo, Clickbank, Amazon, ShareaSale or Warriorplus and start advertising your affiliate link. I don't care where you advertise — Google Adwords, Facebook, blogs or ad networks.
Do that and you will almost always burn through more cash than you earn in commissions every month. Unless you have very deep pockets you need to be a lot smarter about your affiliate marketing.
Over the years I've tried just about every affiliate marketing strategy known to man-kind. I now make a full-time income — mostly from affiliate marketing. I mix in a few other online income strategies as well, such as product creation and advertising income, but my favorite way to earn online is from affiliate marketing.
Today I'll share some of my secrets with you.
Secret #1: Focus Tightly On ONE Market
I see far too many affiliate marketers go way too wide. For example, they'll build a site around "ebooks" and then try to sell ebooks via amazon or wherever, on all topics.
That's a big mistake. You need to stick to ONE niche that you know and like.
If your thing is woodworking then build a site around woodworking. Share your best projects. Share your worst screw-ups. Show them you're human just like them. You can write all about it, make videos about it – however you are most comfortable sharing information.
Just don't stray off the topic of woodworking and try to sell affiliate products in the Internet marketing niche. Your audience will lose interest and see right through your sales pitch. But if you're showing them how to build a chair then you tell them you downloaded the plans from x site, well, that's different.
That's how you make lots of sales over and over.
Secret #2: Know And USE What You Are Promoting
The easiest products to sell are the ones you use yourself. When I go back through all my affiliate promotions I can easily see that the top performers were the ones I really liked and used myself. Not always, but usually.
That's why it is so important to promote stuff you would buy or have bought yourself. That way you can literally show potential buyers all the good and the bad of the product. That makes your promotions REAL and GENUINE.
Here's an example from my own promotions…
Awhile back I promoted a program about domaining. Basically buying domains for a few bucks and selling them for profit. So I wrote a blog post about domaining showing the actual results I had with the program.
Secret #3: Promote With Emotion
As I mentioned, when you are doing affiliate marketing you are going to need to create some content around the products you promote. I'm talking about emails, blog posts, videos and well… ways to help potential buyers make a decision.
This is where many affiliate marketers go wrong. They take all the emotion out and go into sales pitches like a bad used car salesman.
Instead of doing that, you need to keep it real. Talk to them like you respect them, want to help them and can relate to them.
Talk about real world things. Inject a little humor. Keep it light and don't pressure them. They'll appreciate it and want more.
And yes, they might even but from your link. If not this time, maybe next time.
Here's an example of an email I sent out to my list a while back that generated a BUNCH of sales….
I then went on to tell them about a great program I had been testing, and shared the affiliate link.
This type of affiliate marketing is not only more fun, it is more effective. More people will pay attention to you when you are not in their face screaming louder than the next guy about why they should buy.
I know for a fact that it works. Not only for me, but for all the affiliates that promote for me. On my most recent product launch, I looked closely at the top performing affiliates. All of them use this technique.
I had affiliates with tiny lists get conversion rates of 50% and land on my JV leaderboard, while others with list in the thousands make just a sale or two. The difference was the relationship they had formed with their subscriber and followers.
Try this technique and I guarantee you'll start getting better results with your affiliate marketing.
OK, let me wrap this up…
As you can see from today's issue, if you want to earn serious commissions with affiliate marketing, you need to put in some time and effort.
You need to be creative. And you need to take as many lessons from experience marketers as you can.
Follow the stuff they do that works. Copy them when you can.
In fact, copy ME if you want to.
I've just uploaded the 2022 version of all my "soft-sell" conversational affiliate promotions (like the one above) from the last couple years.
You can use them as email solos, follow-ups, blog posts and in your articles. Just use them! They generated a lot of great feedback and a ton of sales, and they can do that for you too.
If you want to start generating full-time affiliate commissions in your spare time, this is probably the easiest way to do it without doing all the work yourself.
Have a great weekend!
