Winning The Affiliate War

“How To Stay On Top Of The Affiliate Marketing
Competition!”

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Affiliate Marketing - How Really Competitive It Is 5

Offer Your Prospects Bonus Incentives 9

Don't Cut Yourself Short With Offering Rebates! 12

How To Win The Affiliate War 15

Recommended Resources + Bonuses 18

Winning The Affiliate War

“How To Stay On Top Of The Affiliate Marketing

Competition!”

Affiliate Marketing – How Really Competitive It Is

When you watch a football game on TV, you can easily see how games are won or lost

in the battle that takes place on the line of scrimmage. Offensive plays are designed to

protect the quarterback and/or to open up holes in the defense so that yardage can be

gained.

Defensive plays are designed to sack the quarterback or close holes that would allow

yardage to be gained. Quarterbacks and coaches get the credit for wins and blame for

losses but the battle is won or lost in the trenches.

Affiliate marketing is a lot like a football game just without the bruises and sore muscles.

An affiliate marketer must design offensive plays and defensive plays that will put him in

a position to win the affiliate wars.

When you are one of many marketers who are trying to sell the very same product to the

very same consumers, you had better have a plan to get at least your fair share of the

market or more.

Every niche market on the Internet is highly competitive. If it isn’t competitive then there

can’t possibly be much of a customer base to sell to. That is just the nature of all Internet

marketing and in every niche.

Maybe you do have a long and impressive list of paid customers. That’s great! It means

you have already won several of the affiliate marketing contests and come out on top.

The problem is there are always those up and coming marketers who want your

customers on their lists.

Your list and your competitor’s lists may well contain many of the same names and email

addresses. Just having a list will not be enough to assure you of a victory when selling

an affiliate product. You have to design some offensive plays that will assure that your

customers buy from you and not from your competitors

So, you ask, what is it that I can do that will assure that my customers will buy from me?

The answer is just one word... unique!

You have to be unique. You have to offer something that sets you completely apart from

your competitors. You have to make your offer for a product or service for which you are

an affiliate more attractive to buy from you than it is to buy from you competitors.

If you simply send out a marketing email advertising a product or service that you are an

affiliate marketer for, you need to remember that there are dozens or maybe even

hundreds of other marketers who are sending out marketing email advertising the exact

same product or service and many of them are sending them to the same people that

you are. You have to do something to make sure that your customers buy from you...you

have to be unique.

There are several ways to achieve uniqueness. One way is to have established yourself

as an expert in the field for which the product or service is being sold. You have to have

become not only visible but credible, as well. This visibility and credibility is not easily

achieved. It takes a lot of hard work, time and effort.

Visibility and credibility are established by taking such measures as writing and

marketing articles and E-Books, posting to blogs and forums, appearing as an expert on

teleseminars and webinars, etc. The fact is that when people know you and trust you,

they buy from you. They will buy from you even is your competitors are offering a better

deal or more incentives.

People do not like to buy from strangers. The Internet is a big impersonal and even

frightening place to many consumers. They want to feel like they know and trust the

people that they buy products and services from. The time, effort and energy that you

put into becoming visible and credible is the best time, effort and energy investment that

you will ever make. Reputation is everything in the world of Internet marketing.

Credibility makes you unique.

Another very important thing that you can do to insure that your customers buy a product

or service for which you are an affiliate marketer from you and not from one of your

competitors is to give them a very good and compelling reason to make the purchase

from you. Offer something extra or a lot of different extras that will enhance the value of

the product that you are marketing.

No matter what the niche or what the product is that is being marketed, there are free

gifts that you can find that will make the product a better value if it is purchased from

you.

For example: if you are marketing an E-Book about Internet marketing, you could add

several additional free E-Books concerning different aspects of the broad subject of

Internet marketing.

E-Books can be downloaded from PLR sites or even from E-Book banks and

repositories. Another free gift that people can’t ever seem to get enough of is free

utilities. There are many on the Internet and you can bet that there are some that will fit

right in with whatever product or service that you are promoting.

While other marketers who are selling the very same product that you are, simply send

out marketing emails that recommend the product to their lists, you will be adding value

to the product and doing it for free to boot.

Add extras! Add free gifts! Even better than extras and free gifts is additional help to

use the product or service that is being sold. You can offer a free teleseminar for those

who buy the product or service from you that will make the product or service better or

easier to use.

You can most likely even get the producer or the product or service to speak at your

event if you plan far enough ahead. People just love teleseminars... and they love

free...when you add teleseminar and free together, you will have a winning play that

might just score the proverbial touchdown for you.

Offer Your Prospects Bonus Incentives

What usually happens when an affiliate marketer goes to Clickbank or Commission

Junction and signs up as an affiliate marketer for a particular product or service that is

relative to his affiliate marketing business topic?

The first thing he does is usually to place a logo for the product on his website and send

out a marketing email to his list advocating the value of whatever the product or service

happens to be. If this average affiliate marketer has any zip at all, he will make his sales

letter as good as he can make it.

It will address each member of his list by name and there will be bullet points listing the

advantages provided with ownership of the product or service. Then he will sit back,

cross his fingers and toes, and hope to make a few sales. Well, that IS a plan but it isn’t

a very good one.

If this average affiliate marketer happens to get lucky and be included in the launch of a

new product, he does pretty much the same thing. He notifies his list of the upcoming

launch (the average affiliate marketer usually only sends one preparatory email) and

then he sends out the marketing email at the launch.

He will make a few sales...very few. Of course, he won’t be working very hard either and

maybe he is very happy being an average affiliate marketer. There is a problem,

however, with being average. Average is a very crowded place.

Average! Why would anybody want to settle for average anything? Doesn’t ‘average’

mean ‘common or ordinary...nothing special’? If you are not happy with being an

average affiliate marketer, then you need to keep reading.

What puts one affiliate marketer above the average affiliate marketer? The answer

is uniqueness.

Being unique is a quality that sets one apart from all of others. If you want to be better

than just average, you will need to develop some uniqueness in your marketing

techniques that will set you above just an average affiliate marketer.

Average affiliate marketers just don’t grasp the idea that in order to sell a lot of product,

their offer needs to be more valuable than the offers their competitors are making. Most

affiliate marketers won’t offer any incentives to their lists for buying a specific product

from then rather than buying the same product from some one else.

Some affiliate marketers will offer some bonus incentives but they will be pretty ordinary

and things that are really not of much value or even unrelated to the product that is being

promoted.

The really GOOD affiliate marketer will offer bonus incentives that are BETTER than

anything that is being offered by any other marketer and are directly related to the

product that is being promoted. The really GOOD affiliate marketer will give his

customers a very good reason to buy from him.

Actually, the whole idea of offering better incentives to customers is just plain old

common sense. If you can buy 2 ears of corn from vendor A for 20 cents or 2 ears of

corn from vendor B for 20 cents and vendor B throws in some butter to go on the corn

free of charge, which vendor are you going to buy from?

Affiliate marketing is the very same thing.

You have to offer bonuses and you have to offer better bonuses than those that other

affiliate marketers are offering.

For example: Let’s say that there is an E-Book about Email Marketing than you are an

affiliate marketer for. It’s a very good book that has been written by an Email Marketing

Guru. It is selling for $100 and your commission is going to be $50 per sale that you

make. There is an elaborate live launch for the product. Your competitors are offering an

additional E-Book or two as bonus incentives.

How can you get an edge here? The only way that you can possibly get an edge is to

offer something that your competitors are not offering. You could have set up a free

teleseminar that will take place within a few days of the launch for those who buy from

you or you could offer a free 30 minute downloadable audio tape that further explains

certain points in the E-Book.

The people who buy from you will be getting a better deal than they could get from your

competitors. The product will always be the same...but the bonuses that are offered is

where you get the edge.

Tip: Never underestimate the power of ‘free’. Everybody loves getting something for

nothing or getting something extra. They especially love getting something that

everybody else is not getting. And that brings me to another, finer point of offering bonus

incentives.

If you can offer something such as a free teleseminar that is related to a product launch,

you need to limit the number of people who will receive the bonus. That makes it more

exclusive and thus more desirable.

This is tricky.

You don’t want to make customers mad but you do want to make those who get the

added bonuses feel like they have gotten something others have not gotten. You might

phrase your offer to say that the first 200 people who buy the product from you will be

allowed to join the teleseminar live and others will receive a transcript of the teleseminar.

Like I said, this is tricky but it can be done.

The bottom line is just this: if you want to be a better than average affiliate marketer you

are going to have to offer more and better bonus incentives than your competitors offer.

All affiliate marketers for any product are all trying to sell to the same basic customer

base and that base is not unlimited.

In order to get an edge and rise above what is common, ordinary and average you will

need to get really creative with the incentive bonuses that you offer with your affiliate

product or service.

Don't Cut Yourself Short With Offering Rebates!

Rebates! Rebates seem to be all the rage in today’s market place. Rebates are

everywhere. Out in the brick and mortar world there are ‘mail-in’ rebates and instant

rebates offered on every product imaginable from computers to home appliances to

cars. In cyber space the rebate is everywhere. Rebates are offered on all kinds of

programs, software, products and services.

A rebate is simply a discount in fancy clothes. The principle is exactly the same. The

customer pays less than the list price for whatever the program, software, product or

service might be. The customer is getting a bargain. That’s true. The question, however,

is what exactly is the seller getting?

The answer to the question, what is the seller getting, is pretty simple. The seller is

getting less money than he is entitled to get on every sale he makes.

If the seller is giving a 50% rebate that means that he will have to sell twice the number

of programs, software copies, products or services to make the same amount of money

he would have made had he not offered the 50% rebate.

The seller is giving away his profit especially if the seller is an affiliate marketer because

any rebate an affiliate marketer offers his customers comes out of his commission. For

example: if you are marketing a product that sells for $197.00 and you earn $98.50 from

it, offering a rebate of $50 means that your commission is only $48.50 per sale.

You aren’t going to be earning very much per sale. That can’t be a good thing. There

has to be a better way than offering big rebates...and, fortunately, there is.

One of the big problems with offering big rebates is that the offer attracts what is

known in the business as ‘cheap customers’. Cheap customers are those who never

expect to pay the full price for anything, ever or under any circumstances. They expect

to get something for nothing and that something for nothing expectation will always

come out of your pocket. You are simply better off without cheap customers.

The answer to the rebate question is just this: give your customers a good reason to buy

from you at the full price. Even if you have to pay something for incentive bonuses, it is

better than offering a rebate to the customer.

You will attract a better class of customers who will continue to buy from you. Many

affiliate marketers think that offering incentive bonuses that are valuable enough to

entice people to pay full price for an item is just too much trouble. They will tell you, that

it is easier, quicker and just a lot less trouble to simply offer a rebate of a discount than it

is to find bonus incentives.

Okay. I agree. Offering a rebate or a discount is certainly easier, quicker and a lot less

work than finding bonus incentives that are of enough value to make a customer pay full

price for a product or service. However; it is simply not the best thing to do.

The customers that will be attractive by deep discounts and 50% rebates are the cheap

customers and once you discount or offer a rebate they are going to expect you to do so

with every product or service that you ever offer them. You are going to be working for

peanuts when you could be working for the whole peanut gallery.

Don’t waste your time worrying about lazy affiliate marketers who offer deep discounts or

big rebates. They will attract the cheap customers that you don’t want anyway and those

lazy affiliate marketers will never be any competition for you.

If you are willing to go to the trouble, put in the work, and make the effort to find incentive

bonuses that make it possible for you to sell products at their full price to your

customers, you will leave those lazy affiliate marketers eating your dust.

Before you even consider offering a rebate or a discount on a product or service think

about the reason that you became an affiliate marketer in the first place.

Did you become an affiliate marketer so that you could just barely scratch out a living or

did you plan on making a very nice annual income that would provide a very nice life

style for you and your family? I doubt that scratching out a living was the top reason that

you chose to become an affiliate marketer.

Look at it like this: every time that you accept less than you could get for a product, you

are giving away the lifestyle that you have been working for and you are settling for less

than you deserve not only for yourself but for your family as well.

It really is never necessary to settle for less. It just isn’t necessary to offer a large rebate

or a deep discount to sell a quality product or service.

People need, want and will pay for the products and services that they need. It isn’t

necessary to give away your profit if you will just work harder and finding incentive

bonuses that will entice your customers to buy the products and services that they need

from you.

Don’t discount the product or offer a rebate. Increase the value of the product instead.

Remember this; increasing value is better than cheapening the product or service that

you are trying to sell. People don’t always see a discount or a rebate as value. They

sometimes see it as an attempt to entice them into buying a product that wasn’t worth

the full price in the first place.

Only the cheap customers will go for a rebate or discount. The good customers will be

shopping around to see what the best incentives being offered are. If you make your

bonus incentives the very best, then you will attract the best customers and you can

charge the full asking price every time and for every product or service that you promote.

How To Win The Affiliate War

Winning the ongoing affiliate war isn’t easy but (unlike some wars) it IS winnable. The

affiliate wars cannot and will not be won by lazy affiliate marketers. The affiliate

marketing wars will be won by the aggressive strategists who are willing to work hard

and long.

Affiliate marketing is not for the faint of heart. If you had really known how tough the

competition is in affiliate marketing would you have joined the fray? It doesn’t matter.

You are in the midst of it now and quitting simply is not an option for a true warrior. The

only option is winning...and winning BIG!

Winning the affiliate marketing wars means winning the small daily battles and minor

skirmishes one at a time and winning them decisively.

You want to become one of those super affiliates. You want to become one of those big

earners that make an annual income that has more than one comma in that number on

the bottom line, right?

Then you need to be prepared to work hard. You need to be prepared to do more than

what is required. You need to be prepared to go that extra mile.

First and foremost, reputation counts in affiliate marketing. There are thousands of

affiliate marketers out there but the ones who make the big bucks are the ones who

have established high visibility and great credibility for themselves.

Establishing credibility and visibility go hand in hand and establishing both are critical to

your success and your victory over your competitors.

Credibility and visibility are established in several ways. Two of the most important ways

of establishing credibility and visibility are by writing and marketing articles and E-Books

that relate to the products and services that you sell. You must establish yourself as an

expert...a guru, if you will.

You need to become the guy or the gal that others go to when they need information or

need questions answered. Writing articles and E-Books (or having them written for you

by a ghost writer) is one of the very best ways of establishing your reputation as a

person who has answers.

Articles that you write or have written for you by a ghost writer will be uploaded into

article banks for other website owners of E-zine publishers to download and reproduce

free of charge. At the bottom of each 300-400 word, key-word rich article you will include

a resource box that has your name and your website address in it. This helps to spread

your name and news of your knowledge around the Internet to those who are the most

likely to be your customers.

E-Books should only be 10 to 12 pages long but a link to your website needs to be

included on every single page as well as in the resource box at the end. E-Books are

uploaded to E-Book repositories where others may download them and reproduce them

just like articles.

Because it is required that E-Books cannot be altered and that resource box information

must be included when E-Books are downloaded and reproduced, your reputation as an

expert in your field will be enhanced each time anyone chooses to use them.

Another way to build your visibility and your credibility on the Internet is to post to blogs

and forums that have topics related to the products and services which you sell. It is a

very simply matter to find these forums and blogs. Simply type your related key word into

the search box of your favorite search engine followed by the plus sign (+) and the words

blogs or forums. You will get many hits.

Choose the three or four of the ones that have the largest number of active members

and join those blogs or forums. Be careful here. Posting to blogs and forums effectively

is going to take several hours of your time every week so don’t choose too many.

Once you have joined three or four blogs and forums do not go in with guns blazing

posting blatant advertisements. The idea here is to build visibility and credibility.

Introduce yourself and behave as though you had just moved into a new neighborhood.

Your signature tag that appears at the bottom of each and every post that you make

should have your name as well as a link to your website.

Take you time to get to know the other posters in the community and become a valued

member of the group. You will be building a good reputation, visibility and credibility.

It takes time to build your visibility and credibility. While you are building them, you will

also be promoting and selling products and services and you want to establish a good

relationship with those who buy products and services from you. Be sure that you

provide good information, good service and a guarantee if one applies.

Go to great lengths to never appear to be a cheapo or corner cutter to your customers.

Always treat your customers like they are your most valuable asset...they ARE your

most valuable asset. Never discount products or services or offer rebates. You don’t want to build that kind of

reputation or that kind of customer base. Instead of offering discounts or rebates take

the time and put forth the effort to add bonus incentives to the products and services that

you promote to give them added value.

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The winners of the affiliate wars are the men and women who go to the trouble and take

the time to build excellent reputations as experts and as fair and honest merchants.

People buy things on the Internet from people that they feel like they know and can trust.

People buy things on the Internet from affiliate marketers who have the reputation as an

expert or a guru and one who actually cares about the people to whom he sells products

and services to. A positive and hard working, fair–dealing reputation will help you win the

daily battles and, ultimately the affiliate war

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MIND-BLOWING EBOOK “WINNING THE AFFILIATE WAR”