Hey! In this blog post, I'll be talking a little bit about a topic that you will be hearing much more about in the coming week or so through my blog, social media, and other outlets of media you might follow me on, like my awesome newsletter!
And by the way, if you aren't on it yet; I'm a little sad! Jump into the action with my digital entrepreneur community below, at the bottom of this post.
But regardless, back to the matter at hand; Affiliate Marketing.
Affiliate marketing is a style of marketing both online and partially offline that consists of selling a vendors product for them, and receiving a percentage commission in return for affiliating that sale.
Some products or services you may affiliate may land in the range of thousands, while others may be small, fashion accessories. But whatever it is that you're affiliating for, you need a few key components to make that sale go through for your vendor, thus earning you your commission. Here is a basic list breakdown of the things you'll want to make sure you implement into your online selling efforts;
Traffic
Sales Funnel/Landing Page
CTA With Affiliate Link To Product Page
Now, bear in mind; there are literally hundreds of plausible and profitable ways to utilize the power of sales automation and affiliate marketing products hand in hand to become rich online, while spending minimal amounts of time managing or changing your business model. But the 3 points above are absolute must-haves; things that you won't be able to successfully affiliate without in most cases.
Let's go through and break down each individual component one-by-one!
First off, we have the traffic. This is bar-none probably the most difficult part of this process, and this step is what puts the word "marketing" in the term affiliate marketing. Even if you had the best landing page or sales funnel system set up, you won't make a single conversion (traffic to lead to sale) off of any of your visitors unless you have visitors in the first place. This is traffic. You need a reliable, cost-efficient method of generating leads and traffic to your website, in the hopes that a small percentage of them will convert into sales for your vendor, and again, sale commissions for yourself. I will be going into this vast topic of traffic generation in a couple blog posts to come, and I will also provide some valuable strategies you can swipe from my own practices to generate your sales funnel traffic.
Secondly, we have the sales funnel, or landing page. This is essentially a system or singular web page that represents your persuasive, selling efforts. There are a lot of factors that go into a successful, high converting landing page or funnel, and I will elaborate on both of these in future blog posts up and coming soon here for you. These factors are among copywriting, graphic optimization, social proofing, and more. This is a very important step, because if you don't have a landing page or funnel, you'll essentially be sending your valuable traffic straight to a checkout page, without even explaining in-depth why they should be purchasing what they're then looking at. It is absolutely essential that the traffic you manage to acquire is sent to a highly converting, aesthetically pleasing, and well-thought out page that will greatly increase the amount of sales commissions you receive.
Thirdly, you have the CTA (Call-To-Action) function, that contains a hyperlink to the product/checkout page for your affiliate product. This is a page that the vendor set up to represent their product, and provide a place for the consumer to check out and acquire that item. Some vendors will allow you to take your own landing pages and sales funnels, and itnegrate this checkout feature straight from your pages instead of making the visitor go to yet-another website before finally getting what they've been looking for.
It's a proven fact through countless A/B Split Tests for conversion rates on landing pages and sales funnel systems that if you overload the potential consumer with options (such as multiple websites they have to go through to finally arrive at checkout), the less likely they are to stick it out and make the purchase that you are looking to achieve from them.
As I mentioned, I will be going into depth regarding these concepts more so in future posts, and in future courses to come. But please, stay tuned and start dipping into this realm of affiliate marketing carefully, as you will encounter countless "gurus" and "mentors" that claim to be able to make you millions right out of the gates. It is certainly possible; but have high-caution when approaching or interacting with these characters or their "systems" and "training courses".
Now, that isn't to say that there aren't legitimate affiliate marketing trainers out there; quite the opposite. There are many very reputable sources and authority figures that can guide your journey; but there are tenfold that amount of people that are either scammers, ameteur marketers that haven't gotten results, or courses that have useless and repetitive information. I was victim to many of these, to the tune of thousands of dollars lost personally from my collective investments in these programs. Heed my warning!
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Stay tuned for more upcoming posts about affiliate marketing!