General Marketing - Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is the best business system there is. Bar none. Make money whilst you sleep rest and play and simply check your bank balance to see how much you've made.

Other systems require you to actually do work constantly to maintain the flow of funds. A business based on ebay means you have to constantly keep wrapping things and organising deliveries and this can turn into a lot of work very quickly if you are a good ebay trader.

Ecommerce stores mean you have to deal with all of the issues that affect all companies that trade with the public - cashflow and stock control being the main two culprits that need constant attention.

Companies that use the internet as a shop window for their high street store or warehouse have to maintain the store or warehouse to keep functioning - they still have to turn up pronto in the morning to open the shutters. This in effect is trying to maintain two businesses, man managing the high street store and overseeing control of the online shopfront and merging the two together is no easy task, especially if you have advanced database systems to integrate.

So affiliate marketing is the way to build a business system for individuals who want to escape the rat race. No stock, no management, minimum time investment to maintain it - so why doesn't everyone do it?

Because not everyone can.

Many people "give it a go" but this requires more than lip service to make it work properly. Make it work though and you have your own personal cash machine depositing funds into your bank account every day of the week 365 days of the year.

There are two parts to building an affiliate business that you need to separate out and understand.

The first part is the actual mechanics of how the affiliate offering is provided and how it is presented to the target and the second is how to generate enough traffic to make enough conversions that make the exercise worthwhile. Splitting it up this way makes complete sense and you can focus your efforts depending which part of the affiliate lifecycle you are in.

So first of all I'm going to show you how to put together an affiliate offering and then look at ways of generating the required traffic to make it work.

Bear in mind that this is just one way of doing it. What I'm showing you is just how I do it. There are many more ways of doing it and some are much better than others.

When you choose your affiliate offering you need to drill down into the needs of the target. Why would they buy this product or service? Exactly what is it they need? How is that you are fulfilling that need? Understand exactly how you fit into the purchasing loop.

There are essentially two different types of affiliate site that you can build and which you choose depends on where you are prepared to focus most of your effort. You only have a limited amount of time to devote to this, especially if you have a dayjob and so making this choice is an important one.

The first type is the offering where you build a complete informational site around the affiliate offering. This type of site can take anything up to three months for a beginner to build and so it's extremely time consuming to set up, but it's the best type as you get more opportunities to generate revenue. This type of site works better with pay per click as well as you get more data to work with.

The second type is where you take shopping feeds from different affiliate platforms and integrate them all together into one site. This requires more technical knowledge to be good at it and you'll probably need to understand how xml feeds work to make a good job of it. You can get by by producing an average site but what's the point in average? Everybody else does average and it always results in average earnings.

I like the first type best and this is why:

When you build an informational affiliate site you get multiple kickbacks for your efforts if you do it properly. If you do it averagely you'll be disappointed with the results and blend in with the rest of the average crowd.

Your first benefit is that if your affiliate offering get's withdrawn or the company offering it goes bust then you can replace it with another similar offering without destroying the make up of your site. It's your site that is the main attraction here and not the affiliate offering. You are creating Added Value.

Benefit number two is that if your site is of sufficiently high quality - people will link to it. Webmasters are always linking to stuff they come across because there is so little high quality material available to link to.

Number three is that webmasters will pay you for links. It can often amount to 300/400 per month income even for a small site so it's not to be sniffed at.

Number four is that because you have quality content it's easier to gain search engine rankings. The more content you produce the more traffic you will gain.

There are more benefits to producing a bona fide site but these are a good start and you can begin to see why doing it properly and putting initial effort into your site is well worth the hard work.

Now, let's look at how to structure your site around the offering so that you have the most chance of converting visitors to sales.

To do this I'm going to take a site that I built last year as an example. It was intended to be used with pay per click but my initial tests showed that competitors could out muscle me easily because they were working with bigger margins but that's not to say that this site won't work with natural search engine traffic so let's resurrect it.

This is all part and parcel of the affiliate marketing game. You build something, you test it, you learn something and then you have another go. Rinse and repeat. This is how to make it as a successful affiliate marketer, sitting on your hands or waiting for someone to show you exactly how to do it is not going to make it work.

Let's analyse the site and see why it is built like it is:

Warning! Adult Content.

This site is a Penis Enlargement site so I wouldn't load it up if you are in a crowded office.

There is nothing offensive here but it's not the type of site you want your friends to know you surf at.

This is such a massive massive market. I know, I know, I've heard all of the jokes before but the fact of the matter is that these products sell and they sell in huge numbers. The margins are fantastic and it's an easy sell.

Examine the left hand menu.

This is constructed in a way that makes complete logical sense. First of all we ask "does this process work" and then we attempt to answer all of the questions that any sane person would have. See how the headings are laid out clearly and the calls to action (CTA) are clearly highlighted.

So, we've established that the process works - in that case, how does it work? And we explain in depth how it works.

Next we show that out of all of the different solutions to this problem there is one that stands out (can't help myself) and so we show in detail how an extender works.

Now that we've convinced our target that an extender is what they should be buying we show them the recommended products with a mini review page and it's pretty obvious which product we recommend here but by giving a choice you are opening up the possibility of getting sales from your comparison reviews.

Hopefully by now we have done the job of drawing the target in and they can home in on the "clicnically proven methods" link which is highlighted to draw attention and links to the same recommended reviews page above.

On each page you see a clear CTA. The target is asked to do something at each stage of the selling process, whether it's to click to move on to the next page or to "buy now" everything is designed to get action from the target.

Designing a site in this fashion, with a logical thought process also has another benefit:

You can now use google analytics goal funnels to set up a buying funnel and assess your drop out rates.

So for example typically 80% of traffic will move from the home page to the "how does it work page". But if then only 20% of total traffic that get's this far then moves on to "how it works" then you know you have a problem within your sales funnel. The how does it work page is not functioning properly because people are either getting bored, the content is not strong enough, the headline doesn't mesh properly or the final call to action isn't strong enough to lead them onto the next page.

If you design your site with a logical menu structure so that each page naturally follows from the other then you can begin to make sense of your analytics data and refine your cash machine.

In this case the problem with this cash machine is that there is not enough content in the "more articles" section to draw search engine trafiic and not enough links to make it all happen. Five visitors per day is not going to feed man or mouse and it needs to be up in the high hundreds to become an effective income generator.

So over the next few days we'll examine how we rectify that and get it spitting out the cash.