Tag Archives: Affiliate

Affiliate Marketing: What Should You Recommend?

Affiliate MarketingAffiliate Marketing for New Online Entrepreneurs

Knowing which products and courses to promote as an affiliate marketer needs careful consideration. When I was just getting started I was taught to choose the most popular products and those that paid the highest commissions. But that did not feel right to me, so I abandoned that advice in favor of the strategy I still use today. I only recommend the products and services I have used and benefited from. I refer to this as “recommending what you love” and it has served me well over the past decade with my affiliate marketing efforts.

When I work closely with new online entrepreneurs and I share this method of affiliate marketing, they ask me where to find these products and services. The answer is that exactly what you need is already stored securely on your hard drive or in your cloud storage. Go through your purchases and downloads to see what you have that you are using and getting real value from and that will be the start of your inventory.

These days I am inundated with emails from people who would like for me to recommend their products to my community. But seldom are these ones that I would share. I prefer to find valuable products, services, and courses organically, and to then go through them and implement what they have to offer. Then I can make a knowledgeable decision as to whether or not I will recommend them.

Also, remember that I make purchases almost every single day. But this does not mean that I will share them with others. I am at a different level in my business than most of the people on my list, so it would not be in their best interest if they were to make similar purchases. Instead, I’m always looking for simple and straightforward products that will help the people in my community to move forward in a logical way.

If you are on the product creation side of this equation, think about the target audience you are serving. Then look for the people who also serve the same or a similar market and approach them about promoting your products to their list. Many times I shake my head in disbelief when product creators approach me with something that my list and community would never be interested in hearing about from me. I often joke that most of my people could stand to drop a few pounds and love animals, but that doesn’t mean they would want to purchase products on weight loss or dog training from me. It isn’t how they think of me and not what they signed up for when they opted in to my list.

Choose the products and services that make the most sense for your market. Make sure you have purchased, used, and benefited from them first before recommending them to others. This advice will serve you well over time and just makes good sense for all affiliate marketers.

I’m Connie Ragen Green, online marketing strategist, bestselling author, and international speaker on the topics of entrepreneurship and inner game mind shifts. Let’s connect to see how I may best serve you in the near future. And please be sure to check out my Really Simple Affiliate Marketing training courseAffiliate marketing tips will help you to achieve the success you want and deserve. And be sure to pick up a copy of my bestselling book, Huge Profits with Affiliate Marketing: How to Build an Online Empire by Recommending What You Love.

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Affiliate Marketing Tips: Recommending What You Love

Affiliate Marketing TipsAffiliate Marketing Tips: Recommending What You Love

When I made the decision to leave my teaching job and part-time real estate business to come online back in 2005, I had no idea how I was going to earn a living. Looking back I realize that I took a leap of faith and believed in myself and my ability to figure everything out in due time. But it was affiliate marketing that made my dreams turn into reality.

I have always described affiliate marketing as recommending what you love in exchange for a commission on whatever is sold. I even wrote a bestselling book on this topic, entitled Huge Profits with Affiliate Marketing: How to Build an Online Empire by Recommending What You Love where I explain exactly how to do this successfully. But I’m getting way ahead of myself and the points I wish to make here with some crucial affiliate marketing tips.

Think back to the last time someone asked you for a recommendation for a restaurant, movie, or anything else. More than likely you shared a story about whatever it was, along with some details that made the story more personal. The example I like to use is one in where I was walking one of my dogs and ran into my next door neighbors, Michael and Valerie. They wanted to go out for pizza and asked me if I could recommend a good place locally.

I proceeded to tell them a story about a place in the downtown section of our city. I told them to park in the lot in the back, to enter through the back door, and to ask for Joey once they were inside. If you ask Joey for a table near the front of this pizzaria you’ll be able to see other patrons coming in through the front door as well as the city lights once the sun goes down. Then I reminded them to ask for the garlic rolls slightly warmed up because they are so scrumptious. Valerie is a vegetarian, so I told them to look at those selections on the menu to get a half and half pizza. I also shared that asking the waiter to have the pizza prepared a little well done would make it even more mouth-watering and added that if they wanted to take whatever was left of their pizza home with them this restaurant would put it in a box that could go directly into the oven when they got home.

By this time Valerie and Michael are ready to go, their eyes wide and their mouths watering. I have recommended something that met their criteria (good pizza, close to home) and I have personalized it by sharing details about parking, where to sit, and the ambiance once they are there. I went above and beyond by providing bonus information about the warm garlic rolls, having the pizza extra well done, and the convenience of the box they could put in the oven if they took any of it home with them.

All of what I have shared with you here is crucial to successful affiliate marketing. Tips like these will make all of the difference in your level of success. Also, another point that might be the most important of them all is that the only reason I am able to recommend this restaurant in this way is that I have actually eaten there and had these experiences firsthand. My recommendation to you is to only tell others about products and services you have purchased, used, and benefited from personally.

I’m Connie Ragen Green, online marketing strategist, bestselling author, and international speaker on the topics of entrepreneurship and inner game mind shifts. Let’s connect to see how I may best serve you in the near future. And please be sure to check out my Really Simple Affiliate Marketing training courseAffiliate marketing tips will help you to achieve the success you want and deserve.

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Making Affiliate Offers to Prospective Affiliates

Making Affiliate OffersMaking Affiliate Offers That Are Worthy

If you really want to get the best affiliates then you need to make affiliate worthy offers. Make smart affiliates want to promote everything you have because they know that you provide a great product, good customer service, and amazing creatives for them to use to market your programs. Making affiliate offers is worth your time and effort.

In order to attract the right affiliates, it’s important to share certain types of stats with them so that they know what to expect with your program. Keep in mind, you will not have any stats to show, but as time progresses, you will. As soon as you have this information, start sharing it.

 

Important Stats, Information & Figures to Share with Making Affiliate Offers

Some statistics are more important to share than others. If you just consider what’s important to you about your affiliate program it’ll be easy to see what you need to share.

  • Conversion Rate: They like to know how often a visitor to the sales page converts to a buyer.
  • Commissions: They want to know how much they’ll make per product and whether or not there is potential to make more due to your deep funnel.
  • Upsell: Let them know if you offer an upsell or not and what the commission is on that as well as the conversion rate for that too.
  • Recurring Commissions: If any of your products offer
  • Incentives: Let them know what type of enticements you offer for successful sales.
  • Product Reviews: Do you allow affiliates to review your product free? Hint: Once you have stand out affiliates it’ll pay off to let them have a free copy.
  • Visitor Value: Let them know the target market for the product and the value it offers.
  • Training: While affiliates aren’t your employees and aren’t on your staff, you can still offer a lot of training to help them make more money promoting your products.
  • Collateral: Ensure that you have plenty of professional graphics, copy, and information that enable your affiliates to promote your product.
  • Program Description: Ensure that you’re very succinct and inclusive in the description for your program.

Anything you can let them know at a glance is important to share. You can offer more in-depth information as well but the information right up front should include what they need to know to figure out if your product is what they want to promote to their audience.

 

Keeping Affiliates Happy

Once you recruit affiliates, it’s also important to keep them happy. Happy affiliates will be more likely to promote your products. They may even tell other people about you too. That’s why developing relationships, communicating, and following up with your affiliates is so important.

 

Making Affiliate Offers that Build Relationships

In business one of the most important things you’re going to do aside from creating amazing products that your audience needs, is building mutually beneficial relationships with other people. In order to build relationships with affiliates, you need to understand them as a separate audience. They have different needs from the people that buy or get your products. To help you build your affiliate relationships, here are a few things you want to do.

  • Communicate – Use email, webinars, teleseminars, and other forms of communication with your affiliates. Some of them will prefer email and others will like the one-on-one feel of webinars. When you keep your affiliates abreast of new products to come, changes in old products, sales, and other information they’re going to be that much more likely to stick with you and promote you because of the trust that you develop.
  • Listen – Communication is a two-way street. Therefore, it’s imperative that you also open the lines of communication in reverse. Ask them questions, conduct surveys, and connect one on one with your highest sellers. For example, you can have a trigger number of sales that elevates your affiliates to your affiliate inner circle where you can help them with all kinds of things.
  • Ask for Feedback – When you send out new products to your affiliates, ask for feedback so you can make the product better before launch. You don’t have to send it to everyone who signs up for your program. Choose a few affiliates for feedback, based on your knowledge of them and their reputation in the business.
  • Show Your Personality – People do business with those that they like, know and trust. The more you can connect with your affiliates and find ways to show your character, the more you can enhance this effect. Add a little personal information in your emails, webinars, and live videos, and live events. Seeing and hearing you can make a huge impression.
  • Be a Helpful Resource – When you really want to have a real relationship with someone, you seek to be helpful. Even if the assistance has nothing to do with your business, being helpful and pointing people in the right direction will go far in helping you solidify your relationships. While you may not be able to pay as close attention as you’d like to each individual affiliate, you can use the information and tools at your disposal to build relationships that will stand the test of time and encourage even more sales if you’re open to it. Use email automation, set up training series, host live webinars to talk about your new products and to get ideas, and otherwise be open to new ways to connect with your affiliates. Remember that your business is about more than just making affiliate offers.
  • Keeping Track of People you talk To — When you are seeking to impress people, one way to do that is to remember who you’ve talked to and what you talked about. A good way to do this is to use some sort of customer relationship software or help ticket software. This is true even if you aren’t really providing customer service to your affiliates due to a product they bought. The help desk software will keep track of all your conversations so that you can easily stick to your promises.
  • Hosting Contests – A good way to kick off some relationship building is to plan and host a contest for your affiliates. Give away some iPads, cash, and depending upon your price range, perhaps a free trip. The more outrageous you can be with your contest the more attention it’ll get.
  • Do What Needs to Be Done – Affiliate’s needs depend on their audience too. Suppose an affiliate contacts you and asks you to do a live webinar with them. It is to be played “live” multiple times. This is a good promotional item to offer your top affiliates. It will help you develop relationships as you get to know each other as you work together on the webinar and get other people involved.

Finally, the most important thing of all is to follow up. Even if affiliates contact you infrequently, make sure that you do contact them. Connect, encourage, and connect more. Always deliver top-notch services, products, and tools while making affiliate offers.

I’m Connie Ragen Green, online marketing strategist, bestselling author, and international speaker on the topics of entrepreneurship and inner game mind shifts. Let’s connect to see how I may best serve you in the near future. And please be sure to check out my popular training on affiliate marketing.

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Online Marketing Tips Podcast: Affiliate Marketing Tips Online

Affiliate Marketing TipsAffiliate Marketing Tips for Online Entrepreneurs

This most recent podcast is a discussion of affiliate marketing tips that will allow you to have a stream of online income as you build your business as an entrepreneur. I explain this business model as one in which you “recommend what you love” to others who would most benefit.

Affiliate marketing is a type of performance-based marketing in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought by the affiliate’s own marketing efforts. In other words, affiliate marketing is recommending what you love in return for a commission. My all new course on this topic, Really Simple Affiliate Marketing, will be available by the first week of April.

I shared exactly what you need and what you don’t need as an affiliate, and which platforms are typically used by product creators to attract the best affiliates. This episode also includes a Study Guide, which you may download here. It’s the one dated March 18, 2016 and is two pages long. I recommend printing it out and saving it for a reference guide.

The first step in affiliate marketing is to make the decision to pursue this as a business model, and the next step is to choose a niche to work in and promote products. Next comes the process of carefully selecting the people and products you will recommend. We also discuss the importance of creating and marketing content regularly to build your credibility and visibility as an affiliate marketer. It was in 2009 that I was first referred to as a “Super Affiliate”, a term used to describe someone who can help you launch your product or course in a major way. I was in Austin at the time for the Traffic & Conversion Summit and that impacted the way I thought about my online business in a way that changed my thinking forever.

Are you ready to be surprised? Recently, I have introduced a new feature during these podcast training calls. I will always have the latest course or program, either one of my own or one offered by someone I highly recommend, at my Surprise! link. Check it out today and see what I am recommending this week. If it’s not my own program, product, course, or live event then it’s always from someone I know, trust, and highly recommend as a great value to you as an online entrepreneur.

I certainly hope these affiliate marketing tips will be beneficial to you as you grow your business. Online entrepreneurship is most definitely a worthwhile goal.

Are you already a part my list community and receiving my daily email updates and training? If not, please give me your first name and primary email address in the form on the right-hand side of this site. If you are brand new to my podcasts, you will be interested to know that this specific training call, as well as all of the calls in my podcast series is intended to teach you and other new online entrepreneurs how to take your business to the next level quickly and effectively, and as a way for me to share my exact methods, techniques, Case Studies, secrets, and advice on creating a profitable and lucrative online business using the ‘multiple income streams’ approach. People on six continents have now discovered that starting an Internet business is the very fastest way to achieve both time and financial freedom, as well as to great success in all areas of your life, and you need help to get there quickly. That’s why I started this online marketing tips podcast for my community.

You will see that each podcast session is first recorded live as a teleseminar, and then repurposed into a podcast to extend my reach to the world. Please join my list (opt in on the right) to be included on these calls, and be sure to introduce yourself and share your site for optimal exposure for years to come! Also, check out my Podcast Show Notes site to see how you can subscribe at no cost to both of my podcasts, and please leave me a review on one or both of them if you are so inclined.

If you would like to get started earning income online right away then I recommend affiliate marketing as the stream of income that will allow you to “earn while you learn” You may now pick up my popular training on winning affiliate contests and other online marketing tips for only seven dollars at Affiliate Contest Secrets. This training regularly sells for $27. Use the discount code CONTEST to bring the price down to $7. This training has been completely updated for 2016 with the latest information, strategies, and Case Studies for you to use in your own business.

Please be sure to leave your comments below so that I may get to know you better and to serve you as you continue your journey as an online entrepreneur. Getting started with an online business will change your life forever and my reward is your massive success!

Subscribe To My Online Marketing Tips Podcast Today!

 

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