2. CONTENTS
3
CHAPTER 1
What is affiliate marketing?
5
CHAPTER 2
What makes affiliate marketing so great?
7
CHAPTER 3
The 4 steps to building a successful affiliate website
8
CHAPTER 4
Tips for succeeding as an affiliate
9
CHAPTER5
Affiliate marketing pitfalls you need to avoid
12
CHAPTER 6
Picking a niche
16
CHAPTER 7
Building your website
19
CHAPTER 8
What to put on your website?
23
CHAPTER 9
Email marketing
26
CHAPTER 10
Getting visitors to your website
29
CHAPTER 11
How to make more sales
32
CHAPTER 12
Where to from here?
3. Welcome to Affilorama
By simply signing up for our free membership, you’ve taken
a huge step forward in your journey to becoming a successful
affiliate marketer!
In the following report, we will carefully guide you around
common obstacles faced by fresh affiliate marketers, saving you
both time and money.
CHAPTER 1
WHAT IS AFFILIATE MARKETING?
Affiliate marketing is a way of making money online by promoting someone else’s
products.
As an affiliate you’re essentially a commission salesperson for the products you’re
promoting: You earn a commission for every paying customer you send to the
merchant selling the product.
It’s kind of like being a real estate agent: You don’t own the home you’re promoting,
but you get a nice commission for promoting it and finding the right buyer.
To see how it works, let’s imagine that Batman is an affiliate for a website called
“GetFancy.com”, where customers can buy top hats, monocles and other accessories
to make themselves more “fancy”. See how Batman earns his commission on the
next page...
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4. Everyone wins here. The customer finds what they’re looking for, the merchant gets a
customer he wouldn’t have found otherwise, and Batman gets paid. So, with so many
ways of making money online, what makes affiliate marketing great? Keep reading...
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5. CHAPTER 2
WHAT MAKES AFFILIATE
MARKETING SO GREAT?
If you’re brand new to making money online, affiliate marketing is a great place to
start for a variety of reasons:
Reason #1: It’s easy to get started
As an affiliate, you don’t have to create the products you’re promoting. You just
promote something that already exists. This is a lot easier than building and selling
your own physical or digital product:
• You don’t have to spend time and money on building the product
• You don’t have to buy stock to sell, or store it anywhere
• You don’t need to figure out how to run a shopping cart
• You don’t have to handle customer support
You basically get many of the benefits of having your own product, without all the
annoying parts. And the best thing is... you can even end up earning MORE than the
product owner for each sale! Commissions of 70% are quite common..
Reason #2: It’s easy to grow
One of the best ways to make more money is to add new products to your lineup.
When you’re selling your own products, it can take months to develop a new product.
But as an affiliate, it’s as easy as putting up a new advertisement, or writing a few
paragraphs talking about the new product.
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6. Reason #3: No special skills required
You don’t need any particular skills or experience to get started as an affiliate. Most
affiliates start out with no knowledge, and just learn as they go. Of course having
a background in web design, writing, graphic design or marketing doesn’t hurt, but
it’s not necessary. Some of the best affiliates we’ve seen started completely from
scratch.
(In some ways it’s even BETTER to have no previous knowledge. It means you don’t
need to unlearn any bad habits!)
Here are the things you actually DO really need to succeed:
• Basic computer skills and an internet connection.
• Determination and perseverance.
• A willingness to learn new things.
• Patience: It’s not a get-rich-quick scheme!
Reason #4: Low, low startup costs
One of the biggest benefits of affiliate marketing is that you don’t need to invest a lot
of money to get started.
Imagine buying a bricks-and-mortar business: You’d probably spend tens of
thousands of dollars on it, before you’ll make a single cent!
But for a bare-bones affiliate website, your initial costs will be tiny: Just $10/year for a
domain name, and around $50/year for web hosting.
You can do pretty much everything yourself without spending any more, but a lot of
affiliates choose to hire people to do things like write articles, design graphics, etc. It
can often be a good investment to stop yourself from getting stuck on things you’re
not good at.
So what are the steps involved in building your own money-making affiliate website?
Keep reading.
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Do I need to build a website?
Most of the rest of this guide is going to talk about how to build a website to make
money as an affiliate. There are certainly ways to be an affiliate without building a
website, but in our experience, building a website is more effective at generating a
long-lasting passive income.
7. CHAPTER 3
THE 4 STEPS TO BUILDING A
SUCCESSFUL AFFILIATE WEBSITE
There are lots of smaller steps involved in building an affiliate website and getting it
making money. Generally they’ll all these are the four main “phases” you’ll go through:
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Market research
The first step is to figure out what affiliate products
you’re going to promote, how you’re going to promote it,
and whether it will be profitable! This is market research.
This is a really important step, because if you get it
wrong you could end up devoting months of effort to
something that won’t ever make you money.
Build your website
Having decided the topic and products you’re going to
focus on, the next step is to build your website. This isn’t
as difficult as it might sound. There are a lot of simple
tools these days that give you a professional looking
website.
Get visitors to your website
No visitors = no sales. This is likely to be where you
devote most of your efforts after you’ve built your
website. There are lots of strategies for getting people to
visit your site. Some will give you an instant traffic boost,
while others are longer-term strategies.
Optimize your website for sales
A few tricks can make it so that visitors to your site are
more likely to buy something.
8. CHAPTER 4
TIPS FOR SUCCEEDING AS AN
AFFILIATEE
To succeed as an affiliate marketer, you need to equip yourself with the right mindset
from the word “go.” Here’s how:
1. Set a goal and keep it in focus
Give yourself something to aim for. Write down where you want to be in six
months: How much passive income do you want to be generating? How many
websites do you want to create? How many articles do you want to write for your
blogs?
2. Balance research and action
There are a lot of resources, websites and experts on the topic of making money
online. There are also hundreds of different ways to do it, but the only way you’ll
ever succeed with any of them is to see ONE through to the end.
We’re not saying to keep a closed mind to new ideas and strategies, but make sure
you balance your research with real, tangible action. Try to spend 20 percent of
your time learning, and 80 percent of your time actually DOING.
If you purchase a course, or subscribe to a particular strategy, make sure you
actually go through with it. Don’t fill your computer — or your head — with courses
you’ve never completed.
3. Be patient and enjoy the ride!
Your affiliate empire will not come about after a few days sitting in front of your
computer. Give yourself a chance! Stick with it.There is no point worrying about
what might or might not happen in the future. If you hit a setback, take it in your
stride.
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9. CHAPTER 5
AFFILIATE MARKETING PITFALLS
YOU NEED TO AVOID
We’re not meaning to be negative here, but there are a few common traps that new
affiliates often fall into. If you’re aware of them, you can nip them in the bud before
they sabotage your business.
Pitfall #1: “Analysis paralysis”
The Pitfall: When you’re a rookie affiliate marketer, it’s easy to get stuck on tiny
details Maybe you spend two weeks researching domain names, or you get bogged
down and confused by keyword research. Your momentum stalls, time ticks by, and
you may end up giving up before you even get started!
The Solution: Maintaining momentum is much more important than getting things
exactly right. Treat your first affiliate site as your “test” website, and don’t expect it to
be 100% perfect. If you find yourself getting stuck on something or procrastinating
over something difficult, try to find a way to move past it. You can even jump into the
Affilorama forum and ask, “is this important?” We’ll let you know!
Pitfall #2: “Shiny object syndrome”
The Pitfall: Almost every new affiliate can admit to suffering from this! It’s the habit
of getting distracted by every new product or system that comes along. You might
start a project, but you never end up completing anything because you’re dragged off
in a new direction by the next “bright shiny object”. You end up with a whole bunch of
unfinished projects, incomplete knowledge, no money and no income!
The Solution: If you start a training course, make sure you work it all the way to the
end. This is the only way you’ll really get any benefit about it. If you’re following a
system... finish it. Half-finished systems won’t make you any money! If necessary, cut
down on the number of mailing lists you’re on, or the number of blogs you read. There
are hundreds of ways to make money on the internet, but at this point you only need
ONE. Choose one, and then give it a chance to work!
Pitfall #3: Unrealistic expectations
The Pitfall: Many affiliates dream of becoming millionaires overnight. (A lot of people
will tell you overnight riches are possible — because they want to sell you something!)
Building a great passive income as an affiliate is absolutely possible, and it’s much
easier and faster than building a traditional business. But it still takes time and effort.
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10. The Solution: A little perspective adjustment is all you need here.
Think about it this way: Traditionally if you wanted a great income, you’d study to
become a doctor (or some other highly-paid professional). You wouldn’t give up
within your first month of study, complaining that you weren’t making any money yet,
would you? You’d realize that getting to that high salary requires years of study.
As an affiliate, there’s definitely the possibility of earning as much as our doctor
friends. (You might even earn more.) And you won’t need to study as long, or incur
a crippling student debt along the way. But you will need to put in SOME work and
spend SOME time before you get it right. It’s not a total piece of cake, but it’s easier
than putting yourself through medical school!
Stick with it, set realistic goals, and view success as a marathon, not a sprint.
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11. Pitfall #4: Going for the “quick buck”
The Pitfall: Trying to find “loopholes” or fast ways to get results. You may see
products that claim to be “the secret XYZ doesn’t want you to know about,” or that
promise to get you onto the front page of Google with just a few quick automations.
The risk here is that you’ll invest time or money into something, and it won’t actually
help you. It may even hurt your business.
We’ve seen affiliates hop from one dirty trick to the next, always looking for the “easy
way”. It never ends up working long-term, and it’s extremely disheartening for them to
have to start from scratch every time another quick trick fails.
The Solution: In this case it’s best to stick by the old mantra, “if it sounds too good to
be true, it probably is”. If something promises you fast results that you probably don’t
really deserve, it will either a) not work, or b) be a temporary boost that won’t work for
very long — and then you’ll be back where you started.
Be wary of claims that a particular tool or strategy will result in money pouring into
your accounts overnight. Take all sales pitches with a good dose of skepticism. If in
doubt, jump online and ask for other people’s opinions in forums. (Don’t trust review
sites. The reviews are often written by affiliates!)
Pitfall #5: Building too many sites too quickly
The Pitfall: Building multiple sites straight away thinking, “more sites will make more
money.” Then, when none of the sites have been given the full attention needed, they
flop.
The Solution: Start with just one affiliate website, and build it like a home. Would you
haphazardly lay the foundation? Would you slop the dripping paint brush widely all
over the wall so that the carpet is stained? Of course not! Build your website to last.
Once it is established and optimized, then move on to the next one.
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12. CHAPTER 6
PICKING A NICHE
Now we are ready to get started and dive into one of the most important aspects
of affiliate marketing — choosing your “niche” and deciding on the affiliate products
you’re going to promote.
Niche research
Your “niche” is the general topic for your website. Like “dog training” or “online dating
for women”. You’ll usually build a website around this topic, and promote affiliate
products related to that topic.
Don’t make the mistake of choosing your niche topic without checking if there are any
good affiliate products first. No matter how fantastic your website is, you’re not going
to make money if there’s nothing to promote!
Instead it’s best to approach it from the other direction: Look at the available affiliate
products first, and then zero in on a niche based on these products. For instance,
if you see a lot of affiliate products for paleo recipes, you could decide to build a
website about how to adopt a paleo lifestyle and become a “modern day caveman”.
A good place to start looking for affiliate products is at ClickBank.com.
ClickBank is an affiliate network with thousands of digital products you can promote
as an affiliate.
For more information on exactly what you should be looking for here, the free
Affilorama lesson “7 Steps to Finding Profitable Affiliate Niches” covers this chapter’s
topic in much greater detail.
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Lots of products
Not many products
Look at categories and
their sub-categories
Use the gravity filter to
check for viable products
13. This product has an “Initial $ per sale” of $38.04, but an “Average $ per sale” of $85.49. This
means that an affiliate will usually earn more than twice the initial commission amount!
Finding good affiliate products to promote
The first step in finding good products to promote is to look for products that are
already selling well for other affiliates. This means that those products will probably
sell well for you, too!
This is really easy to check in ClickBank using the Gravity filter. This is basically
a measure of how many different affiliates are making sales of this product. We
suggest setting this to a minimum of 6 to exclude all the products that are not selling
well.
Next, take a look at how much you’ll earn from a product. ClickBank gives you a range
of numbers to look at:
• Initial $ Per Sale: This is how much you earn per sale before any “back-end”
purchases are included. It’ll be your cut of the purchase price that you see on the
sales page for the product.
• Average % Per Sale: This is the commission percentage that you earn.
• Average $ Per Sale: This is the important figure. It can be significantly higher
than the “Initial $ Per Sale” because products will often make offers to their
customers who have bought the first product. They might upsell them to a
“professional” version of software, or offer great deals on their other products
to purchase as a bundle. Products might also sell a subscription, which earns
you monthly commissions rather than a one-off commission. All these come
together to give you the “Average $ Per Sale”. You might not earn this much from
every customer, but this is what you can expect on average over time.
When you’re looking for products to promote, we recommend you look for products
with an average $ per sale of at least $15, and a commission rate of at least 50%.
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14. We also recommend looking for at least three products that you could imagine
promoting on your website. It doesn’t matter if not all your products meet all these
criteria, so long as at least a couple of them do. (But of course, the more products you
can find that meet these criteria, the better your chances of making good money!)
Can you succeed by promoting just one product?
We get asked this a lot, and while it’s possible, but not really recommended. This
would be a case of “putting all your eggs in one basket.” If that product doesn’t end
up selling well and you don’t have any others, you hurt your chances of making good
money.
Another reason it’s good to have a few products to promote: You can make multiple
sales to your visitors! This becomes especially lucrative if you run a newsletter, where
you regularly email people about different products - more about that in Chapter 9.
Once you’ve found at least three good products you want to promote, and they’re
all around a certain topic, you’ve found your niche! The next step is to have a look at
what else is going on in that topic, so you can see how competitive it is.
Getting around competition with sub-niches
New affiliates are often worried about how competitive a niche is. Is it so tough that
you’re going to be fighting an uphill battle just to get any visitors to your website?
It’s true that where there’s a lot of money to be made, there will usually be a lot of
other people trying to get their slice of the pie. But this doesn’t mean you should stay
away! On the contrary — lots of competition is a sign of a great niche!
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15. A lot of competition simply means that the more obvious marketing strategies will
be a bit tougher — especially if you’re trying to get visitors to your website through
search engines like Google.
The easiest way to dodge the competition in a competitive market is to get a little
more specific. Instead of focusing on a topic like “weight loss” (a very lucrative and
very competitive niche), you can focus on “weight loss after pregnancy,” or “weight
loss for men.” This is called a “sub-niche.”
A sub-niche of a massive niche can still be wonderfully profitable, and still have a
LOT of interest. So if you find a niche that seems to be ridiculously competitive, see
whether you can dig a little deeper.
Is your niche evergreen?
Imagine that a while ago you built an affiliate site promoting VCR repair guidebooks.
Do you think you’d still be making a lot of sales?
Imagine you built a website about creating great Halloween costumes. Do you think
you’d get many visitors to your website in February?
When we talk about “evergreen” niches, we’re talking about topics that are ALWAYS
going to be popular.
We strongly recommend that you pick an evergreen niche to focus on, so that you
can have an asset that will continue to make you money throughout the year (unlike
your Halloween site), and for years and years to come (unlike your VCR repair site).
For instance, people are always going to need to lose weight, so a weight loss
website is “evergreen”. There will always be badly behaved dogs, so a dog training
website is “evergreen”. There will always be people with relationship troubles, so a
dating or relationships website would be “evergreen”.
A good test of whether a topic is evergreen is to ask yourself: Were people interested
in this topic 10 years ago? Will they still be interested in it 10 years from now? If the
answer is “yes”, you’ve probably got an evergreen niche on your hands!
P.S. If you are looking for a huge range of evergreen niche ideas, AffiloJetpack
features 18 profitable evergreen niches, and gives you a whole lot of niche research
and content to help build your affiliate site.
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16. CHAPTER 7
BUILDING YOUR WEBSITE
The next phase of affiliate marketing involves building a website from which you will
promote your affiliate products.
These days it’s actually pretty easy to get a website online, even if you’ve never done
it before. There are a lot of tools available that make it a lot less daunting.
Step 1: Register a domain name
The first step is to decide on a name for your website, and purchase a domain. A
domain name is your website address, as in www.yourdomain.com.
The good news is that domain names are inexpensive (typically around $10/year),
and help give your website an air of authority and credibility. The bad news is that a
lot of the good ones are already taken.
Choosing a domain name is an important step since it is essentially your business
name from here on out, so a lot of people end up getting stuck on this step — analysis
paralysis strikes! If you need a little help brainstorming and buying a good domain
name, check out this lesson, “How do I choose a domain name?” on Affilorama.
Step 2: Get some web hosting
If you imagine that your domain name is like the signage on the front of a shop, your
web hosting would be the actual shop building. It’s the place where you store all your
website’s files, images and content, so that people can view it on the web.
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17. A lot of people get stuck on choosing a web hosting company — don’t let that be you!
At the end of the day, most web hosts will be perfectly fine for getting started. Once
your site gets bigger and more popular, you might want to think about whether you’re
happy with your hosting.
If you’re nervous, opt for a month-to-month payment plan (rather than buying for a
whole year up front) until you’re sure you’re happy. If you do decide you hate your host
later on, you can move your site to a new host. Often your new host will be happy to
help you migrate everything over.
A few things to be on the look out for when selecting a web hosting provider:
• What is the web host’s advertised uptime? 99.9% uptime is the minimum you
should accept.
• What is the quality of their customer support? Submit a few queries or try their
live chat (if they have it) before handing over your money.
• How much storage space will you have? Aim for a minimum 5 GB of storage
space.
• Cost? You can get reasonable hosting for $5/month or less (for one website).
You can also get plans where you can host multiple sites for no more than $10/
month. Shop around!
For more information on web hosting, as well as how to register your hosting and link
your domain name to it, look at the “What to Look For in a Hosting Provider” lesson.
Step 3: Set up WordPress to build your site
WordPress is one of the most popular and user-friendly ways to get a
professionallooking website online — even if you’re not very technically savvy.
It’s essentially a software that you can install on your website that allows you to add
content and change the way your website looks.
WordPress is free, and it has a huge community behind it, so you’ll find a lot of tools
and support to help you.
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18. How to install WordPress? Most web hosts will have an easy way for you to install
WordPress on your website. If you’re not sure, this is a good question to ask a hosting
company before you sign up. Test their customer support team! Just ask them if
there is a WordPress installer inside your hosting control panel, and if they have any
tutorials.
Important: There are actually two kinds of WordPress: There’s a free version that you
install yourself on your own hosting and domain, and then there’s WordPress.com
which costs a monthly subscription to use. Don’t get them confused!
Learning WordPress: We recommend that you spend some time on the official
WordPress lessons database: These lessons cover every topic imaginable related to
WordPress.
If you get stuck, you’ll also find a lot of WordPress tutorials everywhere on the web.
You could try YouTube or Udemy for video lessons, or a regular old Google search.
(P.S: One of the great things about using WordPress to build your website is there are
LOADS of tutorials out there already!)
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The help and lessons database on WordPress.org. There’s lots of technical information here for
building your WordPress site. You can also search for tutorials in Google — There are lots!
19. CHAPTER 8
WHAT TO PUT ON YOUR WEBSITE?
Once you’ve got your bare-bones website set up, it’s time to flesh it out with some
content. The content on your website serves two main purposes:
1. To attract people to your website
2. To convince people to purchase the products you’re promoting!
How does content attract people to your website?
There are two important ways in which having good articles, discussions, reviews
and other content can help attract people to your website:
1. Sharing and referrals: If you make something really good and interesting, people
will share your content with their friends. They might post it on Facebook or
share it on Twitter. People will click on it, and visit your site. Success!
2. The search engines: Your content can also be found by people searching on
Google or other search engines. If you have an article on dog aggression on your
website, someone who searches for “dog aggression” in Google might find your
website. If your website is full of lots of articles on different topics, you have lots
of chances to be found in the search engines.
The science of making your content more visible in the search engines is called
“Search engine optimization” or SEO. There are lots of things you can do to
improve your “rankings” in the search engines, and it’s a really big topic with quite
a lot to learn. The problem is... nobody really knows EXACTLY what the search
engines are looking at. So a lot of it is guesswork too. Fun!
Regardless of whether you’re trying to get shares/referrals or search engine rankings,
the one thing that will help you most of all is creating really good content. Your
visitors aren’t going to share your stuff if it’s boring, ordinary, or doesn’t make sense,
and the search engines can tell when people are enjoying your content and finding it
useful. So make it good!
... And then how do you convince people to buy?
The trick here is to attract the right kinds of people. If you attract the kind of people
who would be interested in buying the affiliate product you’re promoting, then all you
really have to do is mention the product. The likelihood that someone will be
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20. interested in buying something is what we call “buyer intent”. You want to attract
people with HIGH “buyer intent”.
The easiest way to attract people with high “buyer intent” is to create content on your
website that they’d be interested in.
For instance, if you’re promoting a book called “Dog Training 101”, then you could
create some articles on your website about dog aggression, barking, digging, and
other dog behavior problems. These articles will attract people who are having
problems with their dog’s behavior, and these people are probably going to be
interested in buying a dog training book to help them. (These people are HIGH buyer
intent!)
Inside your articles you could suggest that if the reader wants more help with solving
their dog behavior problems, you highly recommend they buy a copy of “Dog Training
101” — and you link to the book with your affiliate link. If somebody buys it, you get a
commission.
In addition to attracting people with problems, you can also try attracting people who
are already interested in buying the product.
How? By creating product reviews. Often when someone is thinking of buying
something, they’ll look for reviews. If your review is the one that seals the deal and
convinces them to buy... you can make an easy sale!
There is a free Affilorama lesson where you can learn about writing product reviews.
How do you create content if you can’t write?
Not all of us have enough writing ability (or time, or knowledge of the topic) to be able
to write our own articles. But it might surprise you to know that most professional
affiliates won’t write their own stuff either! They hire a writer to do it for them.
There are a few good places to hire writers. Check out the sites below, or see
our article '‘But I’m not a writer!’ Easy ways to get content for your site” for other
suggestions.
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21. Posting your articles
Once you’ve created your website content, the final piece of the puzzle is to get them
onto your website. Go to “Add new post” in WordPress, enter the title and content for
your post, and you’re ready to go!
It’s a good idea to add some nice pictures to your articles as well. You can search
Google for “free stock images” or “free stock photography” and a lot of sites will pop
up for you to explore.
You can also go to sites like iStock to can buy images. Comparatively, sites like
Creative Market supply fewer images, but they are in general very nice and artistic, as
well as large and inexpensive. Sometimes you will be able to find what you need at
Free Images or Morguefile.
A word of warning: Don’t “steal” images from other websites without permission. This
is unethical, and can get you in trouble. Likewise, don’t use images from Google’s
image search. These are also subject to copyright, since Google is just displaying
images it has found on other websites.
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iWriter.com: Specifically
for writers.
Fiverr.com: A site where
everything costs $5 to start
with.
Upwork.com : Usually a
higher calibre of writer.
22. Other types of content
Articles and blog posts are the most common content types for affiliate marketing,
but feel free to branch out and experiment with other media types if they appeal to
you. You could look into more visual formats such as:
• Infographics
• Comic Strips/Cartoons
• Video Blogs (Vlogs)
The main goal is to give your audience something of value to them. Do they want to
be entertained? Do they want a solution to a problem? Is there something they could
really use?
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23. CHAPTER 9
EMAIL MARKETING
(“THE MONEY IS IN THE LIST!”)
Once you’ve got your website set up, dipping your toes into email marketing can be
a great way of increasing your earnings. It allows you to make more sales to more
people, and even generate a huge flood of commissions just from an email or two!
How does email marketing work?
The goal with email marketing is to build yourself
a “list” of people who you can email. You could
do this by telling people to subscribe to your
newsletter, or by offering people a free book or
download — all they have to do is enter their name
and email.
Once someone is subscribed to your list, you can
email them to talk about other affiliate products
they might like. So even if that person never
returns to your website, you can still keep talking
to them, and keep selling things to them through
your email newsletter.
Why should you do it?
• You make more sales because you build a relationship with your subscribers.
They trust your opinion, and they’re more likely to buy the things you recommend.
• You make more sales because you can sell multiple things to the same person
over a long period of time. You keep talking to them, they keep buying!
• You can do all this even if the person never comes back to your website. You’ve
“caught” them, and you can keep talking to them!
• You can let people know when you add new content to your website. This can
give you a boost in publicity, and help that content really take off.
• If your traffic sources dry up (e.g., if your search engine rankings drop and you
stop getting visitors from the search engines), you can keep making money.
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An example of a sign-up box
for building an email list
24. • You can let your subscribers know when there are promotions and
launcheshappening, and make HUGE commissions when everyone rushes to
buy!
• You can team up with other websites for some mutually-beneficial
backscratching: You promote them to your subscribers, and they promote you
right back.
• You could (eventually) sell advertising in your newsletter, and make a little extra
cash that way.
• Best of all: It’s easy to set up your emailing so that it is totally automated. Your
emails can go out automatically, and make you money automatically. Easy!
What do you need to get started?
Email marketing doesn’t take much to get started, but here are the basics:
• An incentive: You need to give people a good reason to sign up to your
newsletter. Simply saying “sign up for my newsletter!” isn’t enough! Your incentive
could be a free ebook, free “report”, interview, mini-course, video, or something
else.
• An sign-up form: This is the form on your website where people can enter their
email address to join your list. You can see an example on the previous page.
• An autoresponder subscription: An autoresponder is a service that drip-feeds
your emails to your subscribers so that you don’t need to manually send out
each email. The most popular services for this include Aweber, GetResponse,
MailChimp and FlutterMail.
• The content for your emails: This is the hardest part: You’re essentially creating
a bunch of new articles, and it can be time-consuming or costly to get them all
written. We created AffiloJetpack to get around this problem: It gives you a full
year’s worth of emails written by expert marketers, with affiliate promotions
already built in.
Want to learn more?
• Check out the free lessons on Affilorama to help you with email marketing
• Affiloblueprint shows you how to do it in detail.
• AffiloJetpack does most of it for you, so you can start earning faster!
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25. Final words on email marketing
Newsletters must be really good to be effective: Remember that you’re trying to build
a relationship with your readers, so you need to give them real value so that they trust
you. This is especially important in the first 10 emails.
Your subscribers can unsubscribe if you annoy them, so try to be subtle when you’re
promoting products. Nobody likes a sales pitch. Blend your promotions into your
emails as casually and seamlessly as possible.
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26. CHAPTER 10
GETTING VISITORS TO
YOUR WEBSITE
Getting people to your website is essential to making money as an affiliate. No
visitors means no sales, which means no money for you! You’ll find that a lot of your
energy as an affiliate is devoted to getting more visitors to your website. Here are a
few strategies you might try.
1. Search engine optimization (or SEO)
As we mentioned earlier in this book, SEO is the art of getting your website to appear
near the top of the search engine results when someone searches for a particular
word or phrase. When you “rank” well, you get more visitors from the search engines.
Pros: It’s free. You can get a lot of visitors if you rank well for popular search terms.
It’s easy to “target” particular kinds of people or problems, so you can attract the kind
of people who will buy what you’re promoting.
Cons: It can be difficult and slow. This is definitely not a get-rich-quick strategy! You
could be waiting months to see any movement in where your website ranks in the
search engines. It can be competitive and occasionally near impossible for some of
the more popular topics.
With SEO you’re also vulnerable to search engine algorithm updates: Sometimes they
shake up the way they calculate rankings, and you can drop down to the bottom of
the list overnight. (The easiest way to avoid this is to refrain from taking the “easy
route” with sketchy tools, services, “loopholes” etc. If it sounds too good to be true —
it is!)
Where you can learn: Affilorama has a whole section of free lessons all about search
engine optimization.
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27. 2. Paid traffic
If you don’t have the time or patience for SEO, then paying for advertisements to get
visitors to your website might be a better way to go.
Pros: It’s instant, so you can start getting traffic sooner. Like SEO it can be very
targeted: You can see which ads and keywords perform best, so you can focus on
those. It’s scalable… basically, once you find something that works, you can just buy
more ads to earn more money. You can often get by with less website content, and
just focus on the parts that make you money. This means it can be faster to get your
site set up.
Cons: It costs money! For a lot of affiliates starting out, this is a big problem. It can
also take some trial and error before you find something that works well for you,
and you should expect to burn through a bit of cash figuring it out. If you’re not very
experienced as an affiliate it can be hard to zero in on what’s going wrong (or right!).
Note: The main type of paid advertising you will come across is pay-per-click
advertising (PPC). This is a large topic, so for more information check out the series
of free lessons on PPC at Affilorama.
3. Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is marketing on platforms like Facebook and Twitter. It can
be fast like PPC, and (mostly) free like SEO. Sound great? Let’s see...
Pros: There’s huge potential to reach a lot of people on social media. We’ve all heard
of things “going viral” — social media is how that virus spreads. People are much
more likely to be interested in your content if it has been recommended by a friend.
It doesn’t cost anything to tweet your content out there, or share it on Facebook
(although there can be some costs involved in promoting your posts).
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28. Cons: The hardest part is creating content or coming up with commentary that
resonates with your audience. People don’t share things they find mediocre, so you
need to be clever, interesting, funny, or mind-blowing to get people’s attention. Social
media also works best if you can do it regularly, so it can be time-consuming. It’s not
a setand-forget method of promotion.
The main social media platforms are as follows:
• Facebook: Facebook is the big boy on the social media block. It is the second
most-visited website in the world (only Google receives more visitors than
Facebook). Start a page for your website as a brand, and then get active!
Mediarich content such as images and videos do well on Facebook, alongside
interesting comments. The goal is to entice targeted traffic from Facebook
through to your website. For more information, take a look at the Affilorama
lesson, “How to Use Facebook for Affiliates.”
• Twitter: Twitter is the home of bite-sized information sharing. There’s a
maximum of 140 characters per tweet. Create an account for your website as a
brand, and make use of #hashtags and @mentions to get your website noticed.
For more information, take a look at the Affilorama lesson, “How to Use Twitter
for Affiliates.”
4. Kindle E-Book Traffic
You can write or outsource short reports and ebooks to attract traffic from the
Amazon Kindle marketplace. You will place links to your website within the content
wherever relevant, and mention your brand in the header or footer notes.
This strategy is especially powerful when you partner up with the Amazon KDP Select
program, where you grant Amazon exclusive rights to distribute your ebook for three
months. With this program, Amazon allows you to give away your ebook for free for
the first five days, which can do wonders for your traffic. Everyone loves a free ebook!
More information on both brand-building and Kindle strategies can be found in the
free Affilorama lesson, “5 ‘forgotten’ traffic methods you can use today.”
When your website is all set up and your articles are ready to go, your virtual property
is 95 percent finished — the scaffolding has just been removed. Now it is time to
optimize your website for sales!.
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29. CHAPTER 11
HOW TO MAKE MORE SALES
Getting people to your website is one thing, but as an affiliate you’ll only make money
if you can get those visitors to actually go and purchase something. So how do you
get the most money out of your visitors?
1. Make sure you add your affiliate link
First things first: Make sure you’ve got your affiliate link in your page, and that it is
clickable. Your affiliate link is what lets the merchant know that you sent them that
visitor. You can grab your affiliate link by visiting the affiliate program website (or
ClickBank, if it’s a ClickBank product). Here’s what a ClickBank affiliate link looks like:
In this case, you can either grab the top (black) website address and add it into your
website using the “insert link” button, or you can grab the bottom (blue) link and paste
it into your page when you’re in “text” (or “source code”) view. Just change the words
“Click here!” to say whatever you want the link to say.
That being the bare minimum, if you want to increase the chances of making more
sales, there are a few extra steps you can take…
2. Build your link into your articles
Do you have an article on your website that talks about how you can stop a dog from
digging? Do you know of an affiliate product that ALSO talks about good ways to stop
dogs digging, and a whole lot more besides?
Why not try casually mentioning this in the course of your article? Like this: “I’ve given
you a few tips to help stop your dog digging, but since digging can be a sign of
deeper issues in your dog’s behavior, I highly recommend DogTrainerProExpress.
It gets the root of your dog’s behavior problems, and offers a much more detailed
guide to stopping digging problems.”
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http://ef494bjvc01n1q401bblx5zzdx.hop.clickbank.net/
Copy the following HopLink HTML code and add it to your web page:
<a href=”http://ef494bjvc01n1q401bblx5zzdx.hop.clickbank.net/”
target=”_top”>Click Here!</a>
30. In one little paragraph, you’ve made the connection between the problem your visitor
is having, and the product that will solve it. Your audience is much more likely to click
on that link than a big flashing banner at the top of your page.
3. Be careful with banners
Speaking of banners and other ads, these are one of the less effective ways of
promoting an affiliate product on your site.
Why? Well it’s safe to say that most web users will have seen a banner or two in their
lifetimes. There’s a term, “banner blindness,” that describes how we’ve learned to tune
out those banners, no matter how much they flash and pulsate and (occasionally)
sprawl across the screen. So if you put a banner on your page promoting a product,
there’s a good chance people will just ignore it.
If you really want your visitors to pay attention to the product you’re recommending,
you need to show them why it’s relevant to what they need RIGHT NOW. The best
way to do this is to just to tell them, in words. Explain to them like you’d explain it to a
friend. “You’re having this problem? Oh, here are some things you can do, but if you
really want to get to the bottom of it I’d recommend [product name].” This is much
more effective than a banner.
4. Have a link toward the top of the page
Don’t put all your affiliate links at the end of your article. This assumes that visitors to
will read all the way down to the bottom. A lot of people are in a hurry, or just don’t like
reading, so don’t be afraid to put a link closer to the top of the page as well as at the
bottom.
You can word it like, “I’m about to give you some great tips, but if you want even
more advice I highly recommend you check out [product name]. These guys are the
pros on this topic, and this book is superb.”
5. Give people something to do at the end
When someone reaches the bottom of a page on your website… what do you want
them to do next? Many affiliates waste this opportunity by leaving it empty. Visitors
finish reading an article and then just hit the “back” button because there’s nothing
else for them to do!
If you’d like people to click through to an affiliate product, have a quick blurb (like the
ones above), telling them about the product.
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31. If you’d like them to sign up for your newsletter, have a signup box (and explain why it
will help them with the problem they’re currently having).
Whatever you do, give them something to do!
6. Target the people who already want to buy
As mentioned earlier in this book, it’s a good idea to focus on attracting the kind of
people who will buy the product you’re promoting. So have a think about the kinds of
people who would be interested in buying, and then create content to attract them.
There’s a particular kind of content that does a really good job of attracting people
who are ready to buy something: Product reviews.
People who already know about a product and have probably already seen the
product’s sales page will often search for “Product X review” or “CompanyName
review” before they buy. You’ve probably done this yourself in the past.
So, as an affiliate, if you can create a review of that product that reassures them that
the product is good, there’s a good chance you’ll make an easy sale.
There’s another group of people who are also easy to sell to: People who know they
need something but are not yet sure which product to buy. These people will often
search for things like “best dog training books” or “best online Spanish course”.
They’re looking for someone to tell them which one they should buy.
If you could create a list of good products, with a blurb about who they’re suitable for
and why they’re great, and then link to the merchant’s website, that’s an easy sell.
A lot of affiliates make a fair proportion of their sales from product reviews. It’s
usually relatively easy to rank well in the search engines for product reviews too.
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32. CHAPTER 12
WHERE TO FROM HERE?
This report is only the beginning of the knowledge to be gained on Affilorama. So what
happens from here?
Don’t just sit there — take action!
Remember that the biggest obstacles to success are things like procrastination,
distraction, “analysis paralysis” and losing motivation. You need to keep that momentum
going!
Expect that some things might be trickier than others, and that you WILL make
mistakes. Each mistake is a hugely valuable learning experience for you, so don’t be
scared of them!
The people who get the most success as affiliates are the ones who just keep bashing
through, making mistakes and learning. Hopefully that will be you!
We’re here to help!
Affilorama has a great community of people just like you. If you’ve got any questions or
you need help with any aspect of affiliate marketing, just drop us a line.
You can chat with Affilorama staff and other members in the Affilorama forum, or have
a chat to our friendly support team.
Get faster results with further training
If you need more guidance for building your first affiliate site, AffiloBlueprint gives you
a complete, step-by-step video guide to the entire process. Just follow along and do
exactly what we do, and you’ll be amazed how quickly your site gets up and running.
If you want us to take care of all the hard stuff for you, AffiloJetpack is the fastest and
easiest way to get up and running. Choose from 18 guaranteed-profitable niches, and
you’ll get all the ingredients for building a hugely effective affiliate site — including a
1-year email newsletter, with all the promotions built in! We’ll even build and host your
website for you.
If you just want some free tools to get started with, grab your free AffiloTools account.
You can dig deeper into your search engine rankings, check up on your competitors,
build better backlinks faster, and check the health of your website, all in the one place.
Best of luck with everything, and we hope to see you around!
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