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The affiliate marketing secrets I’m sharing here aren’t really “secrets” to some affiliates. But for me, when I started affiliate marketing in the early 2000s, it would have been helpful to know about them. I would have saved myself several years of hard work if I had known about these factors in an affiliate business.
I spent a lot of time trying bad strategies and promoting low paying products. It was immensely frustrating to not only get struggling results as an affiliate, but finally got to see commissions so small that it was hardly worth all that fighting!
The first idea I am going to share is to get an email autoresponder. An autoresponder is software that allows affiliates to collect emails from a website and automate the delivery of emails to their list.
For a long time I did not have an automatic response. I just tried to drive people to my websites and sell affiliate products directly from there. But there is the problem that customers will often need multiple touchpoints before buying something. Therefore, a single landing on a website will rarely lead to a sale. On a website, a visitor only has a small window of opportunity to make a purchase decision. But once you get your visitors’ email information, you can extend this time period by months, years, even decades.
You can give them many more “touch points” with which to showcase their offers, add value, and help their subscribers with any issues they face.
The next problem I faced was choosing the affiliate products I would sell. The products I chose as an affiliate were the ones I would have purchased myself. This is a good policy because you can more easily create content around something that interests you. But I choose low value products and used affiliate programs that paid less! I didn’t know this was a problem until much later, when I discovered subscription affiliate programs that paid ongoing commissions on each sale.
With a low-value product from eBay or Amazon, for example, you only get small amounts, usually less than 10% commission. Digital products pay more than 30% to 50% commission. Then there are the high-priced products that have a much higher value. One sale of high priced items can earn you the same as selling hundreds of lesser value items.
With a range of products, you can benefit from subscription products, one-time commissions and high ticket sales. In addition to this, you can also benefit from a built-in sales team, who close sales on your behalf. With most affiliate products, you refer a sale and only get paid once. So you need to keep selling more and more products. With the subscription and high ticket, you can continue to earn from your referrals, potentially for years. So the same work is rewarded much more with a strategy of this type.
Another great benefit of using such a product range is that paid marketing strategies are much more widely available. I struggled with free marketing tactics, making sporadic sales that represented very little income. With a range of high-priced products, it is much easier to make a profit while doing paid marketing.
Plus, once you’re profitable and running paid ad campaigns, you can scale quickly. Just increase the marketing budget! With cheaper, organic marketing strategies, this is much more difficult. I was struggling for years because I was selling low value products and using free marketing strategies that couldn’t scale.
Another affiliate marketing secret that I didn’t discover until after a few years of struggling is getting help. In the early 2000s, it was much more difficult to build an online business from scratch. You needed more technical knowledge. You needed to be able to build your own websites. Today, software takes much of the technical wizardry out of building online businesses. You can push a couple of buttons and have a website up and running in minutes. You can also join a group of other affiliates who can help tremendously with your mindset and personal growth.
Going solo as an affiliate is tough, especially when well-meaning family and friends try to talk you out of it and tell you it’s a scam. Once in a community of online entrepreneurs, my confidence grew. I was able to ask questions and get things done more easily. Other people had similar questions to me, and joining groups where coaches and mentors were available shortened the learning curve.
Above all, joining a community of online business owners helped me believe that I could make money with affiliate marketing. Before this, I struggled with mindset issues and lack of confidence. If you doubt that you are going in the right direction, it is much easier to give up or waste your time. It’s easier to procrastinate and lose your way.
In short, these are my affiliate marketing secrets:
1. Get an autoresponder – an email marketing service made a huge difference for my affiliate business
2. Use subscription products, high-cost products, and a range of products, instead of low-value products that only offer one-time commissions.
3. Get Help – Join an online community where you can build trust with a coach, find responsible partners, and get your questions answered.
Affiliate marketing is a tough business to crack and the churn rate is around 95%. Remember why you are doing it and find a good program and stick with it.