I was rudely awoken by a small fluffy cat licking my nose. Not, I should add, a particularly pleasant experience! But it did make me reach for my iPad and sleepily check out Facebook.
On a JVZoo FB Group a guy called David asked a question that I thought deserved more than the usual glib answer.
He wrote:
Hi I am David and am new to this affiliate stuff.
I have a few questions:
Does it really work (pay)? After getting my affiliate link and whitelisting the email addresses sent to me…what do I do next? How exactly do I make the profit here if question 1. is yes? Thank you.
My initial answer was this:
Affiliate marketing is actually quite simple – IF you follow a consistent strategy. Putting it at its most simplistic, the way to make money as an affiliate is to put the affiliate link in front of as many eyes as possible. But that glib explanation glosses over the parts that most new affiliates get wrong.
To succeed, you have to work out not only HOW to reach those eyes, but how to ensure that they are the most receptive eyes possible for the product you are representing.
That’s called finding an eager audience.
In marketing terms, finding an audience is lumped under the heading of traffic generation. Learn how to drive traffic to an offer, and better, how to find traffic that may actually be interested, is key to everything.
Affiliates tend to work in one or more of the following ways to generate traffic and put affiliate offers in front of that traffic:
- Using their own email list. If you don’t yet have a list, make building one your priority because THAT is the only traffic you can really rely on.
- Blogging.
- YouTube video creation. There are lots of products available on how to make review videos.
- Building authority websites to attract quality search engine traffic.
- Ad swaps.
- Buying traffic (be careful with this as your costs can easily outweigh your profits).
- Building your own ‘tribe’ via Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest or such things as podcasting.
- Creating your own products that have affiliate links in them.
- Building a list from the buyers of your own products.
For every one of the methods I have listed you can get plenty of how-to books and courses from any of the usual places. My advice is to pick one or two that appeal to you, read as much about it/them as you can to see if that method REALLY fits with your personality, and then focus on doing it until either it works for you or it doesn’t.
And if it doesn’t – because although affiliate marketing IS simple, finding the right strategy for YOU can be a hit and miss affair – don’t dismiss the whole thing. Just accept that another method may work better for you.
Very few people who are successful affiliate marketers, myself included, became successful fast. We all took our hits, failed a lot and didn’t start making real income for a lot longer than most like to admit.
We succeeded because we believed it worked and kept going until we found how it could work for our unique personality profiles.
He followed up with:
Martin Avis, with respect to no. 1, you mentioned using their own email list…I don’t have one so how do you think I should build one?
Thank you
My reply:
David, building your own email is normally the number one piece of advice you get. Rightly so, because your list, if properly used, is a license to print money.
There are lots of ways to build it – all of the traffic generation methods I listed can lead to a list if you capture the names and email addresses into an autoresponder.
Try Googling ‘How to build an email list’. Ignore the ads that come up at the top of the listing and you’ll find a lot of useful advice and tips.
The way I started building my own list, nearly 20 years ago, was to write a useful book – it was actually a series of interviews, so it was mostly written for me – and give it away free, in return for an email address.
That got nearly 2000 people on my list, but it still took almost a year of building a rapport with them to turn consistent profits.
Phew! When I started typing at 7.30 I didn’t expect to write an essay! But nonetheless, I hope it helped a bit to clarify things.
That’s why I have reproduced it here: there is so much confusion around, I think it helps to outline the steps so people can see what might suit them. This is NOT a one-size-fits-all business.
I never heard from David again, but I hope my advice helped him in some way. If not, I hope it helps you.
