Today I am going to talk about the tremendously powerful traffic method that is AFFILIATES. I wrote this as a follow up post to Matt’s great one The Beginners Guide To Affiliate Marketing. If you are a product creator or are thinking about creating a product for the online marketplace then you need to know this amazingly free traffic source. I have released a few products into the marketplace and am planning more – but the products would not have been half the success they were if it wasn’t for the affiliates that promoted the product.

Affiliate marketing has been around for years and many people make a living off of doing this without ever producing a single product of their own. The two largest affiliate networks I am aware of are Commission Junction and Amazon. Yes, Amazon – you can promote anything on Amazon and they will pay you around 4% for your conversions. Does not sound like a lot but if you are successful at it and you make a large volume of sales this can soon add up.

So, What is An Affiliate?

So, to summarise then as Matt covered it as I said with his post.

An affiliate is somebody or a company that will promote or offer to sell your product in the return for a commission. This is a fair and great way to do business. So, essentially you make the product and the affiliates will do all the marketing and selling for you. This is great because you can get amazing hits to your product page all for free, so you would not mind paying them a commission of say 50% for this would you? I know I would not, in fact I offer up to 70% in some cases as a “thank you” for driving the traffic, the sales and potential further leads onto my email list.

Some affiliates may have huge lists that you are unaware of, in fact just recently one of my products started to fade off with sales and then a certain Andi Leeman put in an affiliate request which I naturally accepted and then he promoted it through the leverage he has with another marketer and the sales took off again!

So here you see a classic example of the benefits of having affiliates drive traffic to your product. It can be and should be win-win for both parties. Your affiliate makes some nice commissions through the front end by promoting your product and you also get a slice of the profits, but you also get buyers onto your email list which you can promote to on the back end. You set the affiliate commission, bear in mind that you have to make it worth their while or else people will not be interested.

Also, make sure your product is top quality and serves some great purpose. Once you conduct a background check and are ready to recruit some affiliates you should always offer them a free copy of your product. Straight away this shows that you trust them and often has a positive effect when trying to get them to promote your product. Sometimes people will buy your product and then decide to promote it, other times people will just ask to become an affiliate. I have had all three – it’s usually the affiliates with a proven track record that have the most success.

What kind of results can you expect?

Obviously you cannot expect all affiliates to have the same success as one another. In fact, every time I have released a product to the marketplace I have had affiliates come on board and do nothing, not make any sales. Some new, inexperienced affiliate marketers may just think that sending a tweet out to their 300 twitter followers is enough – usually this method has weak results.  If you are lucky or if you have created such a buzz about your product that you have got some big affiliate marketers on board you could make a lot of money very quickly. Imagine an established marketer has a list of over 10,000 subscribers and he sends out a weekly newsletter with a recommendation to check out your product. Even with a low click through rate of just 5% that would be 500 visitors to your product, now even if your product coverts at a low 2% this would be 10 sales from one email.

Let’s go through those numbers again, which by the way are very modest. You need to understand the power of this. Let’s say your product sells for $37.

Your product is recommended on an email list of 10,000 subscribers

Only 5% click on your product link (the affiliate’s link) = 500

Your product converts at 2% = 10 Sales

10 x $37 = $370

You pay the affiliate 50%, you both make $185

From ONE email. All the traffic to your product was not driven by you at all. In fact you did not do anything.

Where can I get affiliates?

Well, first of all you probably have people in your direct marketing circles who will be keen to promote it for you, ask these people first. They are your closest allies and will most probably support your product.

You can also list your digital products through JVZoo, Clickbank, PayDotCom just to name a few. These networks are also very good at getting affiliates to promote for you, I often find if I use these networks the affiliates come to you rather than you having to pitch to them.

But the real “gold” comes if you can get on a well known marketers list. No doubt you are already on a few marketing lists, well if you are start engaging with them. Buy some of their products, give them some good testimonials. Then when your product is due for launch ask them if they would not mind promoting it. What is the worst that is going to happen? They will say, sorry – not right now.

Remember though – your product has to be top quality and relevant to what they do. They are recommending you and your product to their hard earned list of subscribers so they do not want to promote any old rubbish.

So there we have it, I hope this post has given you a good insight into using affiliates to drive traffic to your offer.

If you want any more advice on the topics mentioned above contact me here on the blog. Do you have any other networks you like to use? We would love to hear from you in the comments section.