How affiliate marketing for beginner blog 2

 How affiliate marketing for beginner

Chapter 3:
Time to Make Sales

As mentioned, there will be some cases where you can find digital products that are selling very well and that actually provide you with their sales page and even the e-mails they use. If you can find such a product then go for it. Especially if they share their conversion rate. This removes variables from your process thereby allowing you to fine tune your business model all the more quickly.

But that said, not all digital products will provide these materials meaning that sometimes you’ll still need to create your own sales page and email sequence. Likewise, there will be times when you see ways to improve the sales page you’ve received.

That’s where this section comes in: making things sell. By the end, you should know how to take your conversions from a measly 1% and boost them to a highly profitable 10%.

What is a Sales Page? Creating the Layout

The first question is: what is a sales page? The answer is that a sales page is an entire page on a website that is completely dedicated to selling one product. This means there will be no external links to other pages and no other products being promoted. The entire page is designed to draw people to the ‘buy now’ button and to convince them why they should in fact buy.

Chance are that you will have visited sales pages in the past and you’ll know them through their design. These pages are generally very vertical and have a very thin passage of text that encourages lots of scrolling. This is no accident – the act of scrolling down the page makes visitors feel as though they’re becoming more ‘committed’ to the product and the further they scroll, the less they will normally want to then come away empty handed – it feels like a waste.

There will meanwhile be no navigation and no links to other pages – for precisely the reason that they distract away from the ‘buy now’ option. Finally, these pages are very often designed to be either bright red or orange around the edges. There’s a reason for this too: red and orange are colors that actually cause the heartrate to increase and make us feel uncomfortable. These colors make us want to act quickly to leave or to buy which makes us more impulsive.

If you think of fast food stores, then you’ll find that often these are red or orange in terms of their interior design often too. The reason in this case is similar – they want to increase turnover and get people out of the store more quickly as that way they can serve more customers and make more money!

Finally, there’s one more key thing to consider when creating your landing page and that is trust and barriers to sale.

When someone lands on your website and sees you are selling a product, they will very often be suspicious of you to begin with and worry that it’s a scam. People still don’t like handing over their details online and so if they think your sales page looks dodgy, they’ll often just leave.

Your job is to make it as simple for them to buy as possible and to make them trust in the system you’ve set up to enable that.

This is one of the big advantages to selling products via Amazon Associates – here your checkout page is Amazon itself which makes the buyers much more likely to trust that their details aren’t going to get stolen. Likely they already use Amazon so they might even be able to use the ‘buy with one click’ option to save themselves a ton of time and to really encourage those impulsive buying decisions.

If you use JVZoo or Clickbank, then the sales page will be built by those sites and this will likely be a factor to consider when you choose which network to go with. Is their checkout page professional looking? Would you be happy to spend your money through it?

But the initial impression you make on visitors will be down to the landing page itself; so it’s worth making sure you put the time and effort in to create something that looks highly professional and trustworthy. One of the easiest and best ways to do this is to use a tool like Optimize Press. Optimize Press is a WordPress theme which you can install with a single click to make your WordPress site into a traditional sales page. When you do this, you’ll be using ready made layouts and images that have been optimized over thousands of sites and that are constantly being refined. Then all you have to do is to enter the text.

Remember what we said about not reinventing the wheel? Why make it more difficult for yourself when you already have the means to create something professional and proven.

Otherwise, consider using a third party developer who has a good track record. This is better than attempting to design the sales page yourself and coming up with something that looks less than perfectly professional.

Writing Your Sales Script

Really though, a convincing sales page is all about your sales script. The text you use to sell your product is going to be the single biggest determining factor when it comes to your conversion rates and this is something that is highly worth taking the time to learn.

There’s a lot to this though, so bear with me while I explain the ins and outs of good persuasive writing.

Grabbing Attention

The first and biggest challenge when it comes to making sales will be to grab the attention of your visitors and to communicate that there’s something here worth reading and that they shouldn’t navigate away from the site.

The unfortunate reality these days, is that most people are in a rush all the time, have lots of work to do and don’t have time to read through large amounts of text. That means you can’t expect your audience to stick around unless you give them a very good reason. You need to grab them with a hook right away and then reel them in.

One of the best ways to do this is to give your sales page a narrative structure. This means you need to turn your pitch into a story that your audience can relate to. The reason this is so effective is that we always want to know how stories end. Have you ever started watching a trashy program late at night that you don’t care about, only to find yourself unable to look away until the very end? In such scenarios you’ll often watch for hours even though you aren’t enjoying it! This is the power of narrative and it’s a very human impulse that you can use to your advantage.

Another advantage of using a narrative is that it makes the situation more relatable. By telling people that you used to be in the same position as them, you can get them interested and at the same time you’ll be much more convincing.

This in fact is the basic structure of many a successful sales page: introduce a problem and then offer a solution. If you’re selling a book on abs, then the ‘problem’ is a lack of fitness or inability to lose weight. The solution of course is your eBook and you’re going to frame all this in a first person narrative where you discuss how you were once overweight until you found this incredible strategy that they can read about in your eBook.

Obesity, tiredness and sluggishness are one type of ‘problem’. This is an emotional and abstract problem that you can make anyone to relate to.

The other type of problem is something specific and simple. For instance, if you are selling a book on stage lighting (as we discussed earlier) then you would look for a very specific and simple problem in this niche. Perhaps people struggle to afford the stage lighting equipment they need. Maybe the lights keep falling over… I’m not an expert in this field and that’s why it’s not a niche I would choose (remember we discussed picking a field you were familiar with?).

Anyway, the point is that selling a product that answers a very specific need is always a good strategy as it simplifies your job to finding people who have that problem. This should come into play when you pick your product: find a product that solves a clear and easily defined problem.

Other things that grab attention are bold statements and rhetorical questions. Rhetorical questions work well because they force the reader to think and reflect. This means they can’t just glance over the text and not take it in, but now have to actually engage with it and think about what it means for them.

Bold statements meanwhile grab attention simply through their brazenness. This could mean that you open up with an unbelievable figure, or with a controversial claim. You can later explain yourself but initially this is a great way to get people to stop what they’re doing and to read.

Flow and Break Points

Just as you need to quickly grab attention, you also need to make sure that you hold it and don’t let go – even for a minute.

This is where flow comes in and it’s very important to make sure that your text flows smoothly and without obvious breaks. The text should be so compelling that it pulls the reader from one line to the next without giving them the time to think to leave.This is another reason for the long narrow design that so many sales pages use – it naturally encourages flow.

The same is true with short sentences and lots of space. Ideally you want to make your content as ‘skim friendly as possible’, especially considering that most web users skim and don’t read.

You do this by spacing out your text but also by using lots of headers. In fact, it’s generally considered good practice to write your headers so that the entire narrative of the text can be discerned simply by reading the headings.

This is also a reason that sales pages will often underline and bold sections.

A massive, dense block of text will always be off putting and hard to read for someone in a hurry.

On the other hand though…

Imagine a text that spaces out its sentences…

That uses lots of bold statements…

And that engages the user with a strong narrative.

And rhetorical questions.

How much more effective might that be?See the difference?

Another consideration when it comes to flow is maintaining the interest of your audience and ensuring that your content is never dull or boring. If you start repeating yourself, or if the quality of your writing drops, you can lose your readers. A good solution here then is to read the text through yourself and get other people to and then identify the points where you occasionally lose interest. Once you do, just fix that section by spacing it out more or using more interesting language.

Finally, you can also make sure you hold attention by directly addressing any concerns of the reader. The big problem you’re contending with here is people saying ‘yeah, but’. If they have heard your pitch before then they’ll be cynical and they won’t engage with what you’re saying. That’s why it’s your job to anticipate the problems they’ll have and then answer them before they become an issue.

That’s why you’ll often encounter the ‘I know what you’re thinking’ line:

‘I know what you’re thinking – this is just another training program that you’ll never complete! You’ve tried countless just like it right? What makes this one any different? I had the same exact though but see that’s where Brutal Ab Training is so effective. Because it works so quickly and because it’s such a fun challenge, it incredibly easy to stick to!’

Appealing to Authority and Statistics

The above paragraph would be very effective at convincing people that your product isn’t just like every other. But if you want to take it one step further, you can also reference statistics or authority figures. While we all know that statistics are remarkably easy to manipulate, this doesn’t at all prevent them from being very effective tools for persuasion.

Follow that last statement up with a statistic then and you make it much more believable and convincing. For instance:

‘Because it works so quickly and because it’s such a fun challenge, it incredibly easy to stick to! Maybe that’s why the program has a success rate of 95% across over 3,000 users!’

Equally effective would be to quote an authority in your field as this can similarly lend weight and credence to your statements. Even just quoting a user can be effective – especially as social influence plays such a big role in decision making. If you have quotes from a bunch of people singing the praises of your program, then it not only makes the program sound effective, it also makes it sound like something that’s new and exciting that ‘everyone is trying’. In turn, that greatly increases the desirability associated with it.

Value Proposition

Most important of all though when it comes to your sales page is to keep in mind your value proposition. A value proposition is essentially the thing that you are promising to do for your buyer via the product. This is what gives the product its value.

This should be at the forefront of your sales pitch because it is what will give the product you’re selling its emotional hook – and most things we buy are based on emotion rather than logic.

The old saying goes that you don’t sell a hat, you sell a warm head. It’s much easier to sell a warm head because a cold head is a problem – and a warm head is something that will make people happier and make people comfier.

Likewise, if you’re selling an eBook on fitness then you aren’t selling a book. Instead, you’re selling fitness, you’re selling confidence and you’re selling a better love life – these are all the valuable things that having abs provides you with. Selling a book on making money online? Then you’re really selling financial freedom and you’re really selling freedom from debt or money problems. You can charge a lot more for great abs and a great love life than you can for a PDF!

This is incredibly important as it is ultimately what is going to get your readers to really want your products rather than just being interested. This creates the emotion that will then lead to the snap decision to buy – as long as you’ve made your sales page look professional and you’ve provided lots of opportunities for people to click your CTA button (Call To Action button).

Creating Urgency

When you get people reading your sales page, you’re really trying to stir up a nice little ‘neurochemical cocktail’ in their brain. You want to get them to focus with your bold statements, your narrative structure and the problem you’ve outlined that needs to be solved.

You’ve then focused on the value proposition and you’ve got them imagining what life would be like with those abs, or all that money. This then creates a real sense of desire and makes the reader feel as though they must have the item that you’re promoting.

Finally, you’re going to create anxiety. The anxiety comes from the thought that the product won’t be around forever and that it’s going to disappear/go up in price. You actually have no control over whether that’s true as an affiliate but that doesn’t mean your sales page can’t vaguely allude to the idea that the product won’t be in stock forever, or that the price will likely go up in the near future. This creates ‘urgency’ and that in turn prevents the user from wanting to leave the site and ‘think about it’. You need to make sure they act now rather than later. You can do this by offering a limited time discount (some affiliate schemes give you flexibility over the pricing), or by saying there’s only limited stock and thereby creating scarcity (this also makes the product seem more popular).

Now you’ll get that knee jerk sale you’re looking for.

Removing Risk

Finally, you should also try to remove any risk associated with the product. This is important because human beings are naturally ‘loss averse’. This means that we are more motivated by avoiding loss than we are by achieving gain. So if you let someone play a game where they had a 75% change of earning $100 and a 25% chance of losing $20, they may still not play.

When we’re buying, this comes into play if we think the product might be low quality or if we think that it could be a scam. This is why you should always offer a ‘100% money back guarantee’. Better yet, consider offering a ‘try before you buy’. All the big affiliate networks offer the former while there may be ways you can provide the latter (giving away the first chapter, after checking with the product creator).

Either way, this will help you remove any reason that the reader has not to buy.

Chapter 4: 
Platforms You Can Use to Make Sales

Of course your sales page is only one place where you can promote and sell affiliate products. One other place for instance is within the body of your articles yourself, which will be a more passive approach. 

Blog Posts

So for instance, if you’re running a blog and using this to create a big audience that you can drive to your sales page, you can also use those blog posts to make your sales. All you have to do to do this, is to embed URLs within the body of those posts. Here, you might just mention how ‘X product’ is really good for whatever you’re writing about and then leave the link there for a reader to click. If they’re really interested in your content and you’re doing a great job of demonstrating your knowledge and making it exciting, this can lead to a few extra clicks.

This is actually an especially good strategy to use when selling physical products as an Amazon affiliate and here you can even leverage the reader’s curiosity.

So for instance, you might write an article on certain dating and mention how some people will even use pheromones or oxytocin sprays in order to make themselves more appealing (and here’s a great product to check out). Clearly, this is something people might click on just out of sheer curiosity even if they don’t intend to buy. But because Amazon has a 24 hour cookie, you can then make commission on anything that they might subsequently decide to buy on the site – even if they come back later of their own accord!Likewise, you can use links to physical products in blog posts and then actively sell them. A lot of bloggers make their main income from reviewing Amazon products and linking to them. Many people will read reviews of laptops for instance before they buy and if they follow your link out of sheer convenience after reading your comments, this can result in a big chunk of cash!

Email Marketing

Something else that lends itself very nicely to affiliate marketing is email marketing.

Simply build a large mailing list from your blog and then pitch products to them.

Of course you’ll need to create a compelling blog and give your readers a good reason to subscribe in order to build this list large enough. Once you’ve done that though, you’ll then have direct access to a huge audience of people who trust you and who actively gave you permission to contact them.

You can now carry out your sales copy over the course of several emails. While also providing value via tips, entertainment or general information, you can begin building interest and anticipation for a product. The great thing about this is that your audience will have to wait before you send them the call to action before they know how to buy. People always want what they can’t have, so if you do this well then you can build excitement for a product to fever pitch before making your move.

Affiliate Marketing in Person

Believe it or not, you can even use affiliate marketing in person. Alternatively, you can do it by posting flyers just as you might if you were selling a product or service on commission as an employee.

Here you just need a simple URL that people can type into their browser. This could be achieved using link cloaking or using a sales page of your own creation. From there, you can then add the link to the flier and hand it out to people in the street, post it through people’s doors. You can even do a pitch in person to explain why the product is so good.

This is a strategy that works particularly well for lifetime membership programs. For instance, if you can find a bingo site with an affiliate program, print off some fliers, and then hand them out in an area with a large elderly population, you can quickly get some people to sign up who will subsequently earn you an income for the entire time they are members.

Notice how different strategies work better for different types of affiliate product and for different demographics? Once again, the key here is to have synergy between your product selection, your own blog and your routes to market. Think of everything before committing to your chosen first product!

Using Your Existing Routes to Market

As mentioned, there’s a good chance that whoever you are, you will have at least one good route to market – often it’s just a matter of thinking hard enough.

For instance, it might be that among your friends, you know someone who runs a magazine on gardening with a readership of 5,000. This is a fantastically easy route to market for you, especially as there’s probably a website with a forum involved too. Just ask nicely and see if they will cover your story.Another example might be your old college paper. If you’re alumni from a university with a particularly big fashion department, then this could be the perfect place to sell your eBook on ‘getting into the fashion industry’.

Essentially this is a form of influencer marketing, with the only difference being that you’re aiming for an influencer you already know versus trying desperately to find one.

Influencer Marketing

Plan B?

Try desperately to find one!

Another great way to accomplish the same thing as the above is simply to find an influencer that you can work with and reach out to them. You can either pay them to give you a shoutout or you can do something in return as a favor.

A great example is to write a guest post for a blog. This is a strategy commonly used to build links to a website, but it can actually be just as effective when used as a way to get direct sales. Find a blog that accepts contributions from other writers, then offer to write them an article for free that they can publish on their site, in exchange for including a link to your website (which is just a landing page with your affiliate product). If you can get on a blog with hundreds of thousands of people reading, then you can potentially get your link seen by thousands overnight which can be enough to fix you up for life! Yes, sometimes it really does come down to that one link on that one key site.

How do you reach these big influencers who are leading your niche?

There are two strategies that actually work:

Interact with them in person – Go to networking events or even hire their services. Either way, create an actual relationship in person.

Build your way up – Don’t approach Tony Robbins when you have a readership of one. Instead, aim for someone much smaller and then gradually look for bigger and bigger affiliates. This way you should always be ‘on a level’ with the person you’re asking for help which means there’s more likely to be something in it for them as well as you. It also means you’re less likely to get laughed out of their inbox…

Chapter 5:
Content Marketing - Marketing Your Email List, Blogs and Sales Page

The above strategies are what are known in the industry as ‘growth hacks’. That is to say that they’re techniques you can use to quickly increase your exposure to a much wider audience, rather than to grow slowly using the normal trajectory.

More often though, you’ll find yourself taking a more straightforward approach of gradually rising through the ranks via SEO (search engine optimization), social media and content marketing.

The Power of Content Marketing

The key here is the content marketing. Content marketing means simply creating lots of value on your website by writing high quality blog posts, articles and features.

The objective here is to give people a reason to visit your site – and content is the main reason we visit any website on the net. At the same time though, your content is what’s going to demonstrate your knowledge and you’re know-how. You can use this in order to build trust and authority such that any products you recommend will be more likely to be taken seriously by your audience.

This is also what will encourage people to sign up to your mailing list and what will make affiliates want to work with you. Generally, this is what will help you to go from 0 viewers a day to 10,000 viewers a day. Make sure that your content is long enough to offer real value (around 1,800 words according to research) and that it is unique and engaging. You can’t write articles that are derivative and old hat and expect people to rush to subscribe to your mailing list!

Another tip is to make sure that you are putting in the time and effort to create as much content as possible. The key here is that in order to make a full time living from a blog, you need to treat it like a full time living in terms of the work you put in.

Be on every social media site as well and make sure that you provide value on here as well so that you’re giving people an actual reason to want to follow you.

Do this consistently and you’ll gradually build an audience that trusts you and that you can sell to time and time again.

PPC

In terms of PPC (pay per click) advertising, there are two main networks you will likely choose from. These are Google AdWords and Facebook Ads. The former lets you place your adverts alongside specific searches right on the SERPs (‘Search Engine Results Pages’), the latter allows you to show ads on users’ home feeds.

The great thing about both these types of advertising, other than their pay per click nature, is the fact that they let you carefully target a very specific type of visitor. Seeing as you pay for each click then, your objective is not to get as many people as possible to go to your website but rather to make sure that only the people most likely to buy from you see the ads and click on them.

On Google AdWords, you accomplish this by targeting phrases that only your potential buyers would search for. So if you’re selling a book on getting abs, you might target phrases like ‘how to get abs’ but use Google’s ‘negative keywords’ tool to filter anyone who uses the term ‘free’ (seeing as they’re not looking to buy anything). You would then put the price of your eBook right in the description alongside your ad so that only people who are likely to buy from you will consider clicking it – thereby improving your ROI.

On Facebook you can do something similar by targeting your readers based on their age, their sex, their location, their job, their hobbies etc. This means that if you’re selling an eBook on wedding planning, you can target specifically women who are engaged. Again, this greatly reduces the number of people who will click your ads who won’t be a potentially relevant customer.

Once more, your key to success is to think of all this when you choose your product. Ask yourself: how easily can you target your visitors?

Conclusions

So there you have it: everything you need to know to be much more effective at affiliate marketing than about 90% of people who get into it.

We’ve covered a lot of information and a ton of secrets but all in a rather dense manner. To finish then, let’s highlight just a few of the biggest and most important tips that we’ve gone over:

Affiliate Marketing Takes Time

To be successful at affiliate marketing you need to approach it with the right expectations and intentions. To start with, aim to earn some money on the side. Don’t think you’ll be a millionaire overnight – but that’s okay. Aim to supplement your income doing something you love and in time you’ll start making your riches.

Copy and Paste Your Business

Don’t reinvent the wheel – keep it simple as much as possible. Choose a digital product that has lots of proven sales and use the exact business model as far as possible to benefit from that proven success.

To scale, just rinse and repeat.

Start Small and Climb the Ranks

If you don’t have lots of money to invest in PPC, then aim for a smaller niche to begin with. If you can find an affiliate product aimed at a particular industry that solves a specific problem for example, this will often be a great place to start.

Then you can reinvest the money you make here once you’ve saturated that smaller market.

Think About How You’ll Market Before You Choose Your Product

Don’t pick a product and then worry about how to reach an audience. Instead, pick a product with an idea of how you’re going to sell it.

What is the value proposition?

What routes to market do you already have?

How easy is it to target the specific demographic?

Use these strategies, be consistent and you will find that affiliate marketing really can make you rich and allow you to earn an entirely passive income. Stick with it, enjoy it and it will happen!