How to double your affiliate sales / commissions
Here is a free training article from my blog that I wanted to share with my fellow Warriors:
So you set up your squeeze page. You have driven traffic to it. Your finally starting to build a list and your ready to start sending out some affiliate offers and start making some money for all the effort you have put in. Life is good right? Well not necessarily.
You see having a squeeze page and a list does not make you a marketer. Marketing makes you a marketer. What is marketing? In its simplest form its selling things. So you actually have to sell things to be a marketer. However all to often I see people with a bit of a list fail to make actual sales, or if they make sales they make a low number with a poor conversion rate. Well today I want to go over some of the common mistakes people make when promoting affiliate products that kill their sales as well as one thing you can do that can double your conversion rate.
When you start looking for affiliate products to promote your going to notice that just about every single vendor provides you with ‘swipe copy’. For those that dont know what swipe copy is, its pre-made emails that the vendor writes that you can just fill in with your name and your affiliate link and send out to your list. For a lot of new marketers this sounds like a dream come true. You dont even have to write your own emails. Awesome! Well actually not really, and here is why.
1) Sending a potential buyer directly to a sales page is not the most ideal way to get sales (more on that later in the article)
2) You need to understand that people on your list are also on other lists, when multiple people send out the same swipe copy to the same person it just makes you both look bad. You both sent out the same exact email? Its obvouse that you did not even write it.
3) How can you expect people to trust your recommendation when you dont even respect them enough to write a personal email for them? I mean really you should be trying to build a relationship with your list. How can you build a relationship when you wont even take 10 minutes to type up your own email?
Want to see the results of a vendor that uses swipe?
Sure this vendor made money. $611 to be exact. But look at those stats. He sent 808 clicks to this offer and only got 13 sales with a 1.61% conversion ratio. The average conversion for this product was 9.7%. What this means is that this vendor should have gotten 78 sales. So what some people may say he made $611! But thats not how I think, I say he lost $3055 by under performing.
Why was his conversion rate so low? Well it was not just because he used swipe when he promoted this product, it was because he used swipe for all his promotions. What this means is he had no relationship with his list. He had no relationship with them because he put in no effort.
Ok so now you know. Forget the swipe. Take the time to write your own personal email in your own words. If your bad at writing you can use the swipe for some ideas of ‘angles’ to use when pitching the product your promoting but for sure write your own email yourself. But this is actually just a part of the bigger whole. You need to build a relationship with your list.
Another thing new marketers dont understand is something I touched on earlier. The people on your list are also on other marketers list. If your promoting a great product chances are other people are promoting it to. So how do you make sure that people buy from you and not from other people? Well the first thing as I said is to make sure you have a great relationship with your list. The second thing is to make sure that you give a value that no one else does.
So what kind of extra value can you give? Well their a couple of things you can do to give extra value.
1) Only promote products that you have actually tested. When your testing always ask yourself this simple question “Would I buy this?” If the answer is not without a doubt no then dont promote it.
2) Consider offering bonuses to the products you promote. These are extra ‘goodies’ that people get when they buy through you. It adds extra value to the sale and makes it more likely that people will buy through your link. In fact this is a good use for PLR such as plugins, themes, graphics packs, etc. PLR is great for bonuses.
Ok so if you think about what we have gone over so far we can see that we should not be using swipe emails, we should be testing everything we promote personally and we should consider giving a bonus. This leads us to one conclusion. We should be sending our list to a bonus / review page instead of sending them directly to the offer. Before we get into exactly what a bonus / review page is and how to make I first want to show you what kind of results you can get when you use them compared to the guy above who just sent out swipe emails with no thought.
Here you have a different affiliate promoting the same product as the first, overall traffic is very similar with only 105 clicks difference but the rest of the stats are on two ends of the spectrum. Where the first affiliate was way below the product average this second one was well above it. This results in a huge different in sales and in commissions. In fact affiliate two made nearly 10X what affiliate one made even though their traffic was very similar. The difference? Affiliate two used a review / bonus page.
So how do we make a bonus page?
There are a couple of ways to make them. If you know HTML or have someone who works for you that knows HTML then you can make it manually. If you have WordPress there are some plugins that you can use to create bonus pages. Another option is to use a service like LeadPages or SqueezeMatic. These services will allow you to quickly create bonus pages with ease and without knowing HTML.
However you decide to create your pages keep in mind that it should have a few things in it.
1) A walk though video of you actually testing and using the product. In the video you should show how things are done, how the product works, you should also give commentary as you demonstrating the product explaining to the viewer why you like it and how you can see it being of benefit to them. Making the video should be no problem since you should be testing the product anyway. Dont just read the sales page in the video. Thats silly. Yet I see people do this every day. Buyers dont need you to read them a sales page. They need to hear what YOU think.
2) A bit of text that quickly summarizes the content of the video for people who dont want to watch it. Your not writing a full article here, just a couple of sentences (3-5) is fine.
3) A large and easy to find button for the user to click, this will be your affiliate link and will redirect them to the product sales page.
4) A list of any bonuses you are giving to people who buy this product through you. You should list the bonus products title, what it does (or is for) and what its value is. If possible you can also have a related graphic.
A lot of people think that you have to have a huge email list to make decent money online. People often quote that $1 per email per month standard. Well I can tell you for a fact that this is a very bad metric. While people are naturally inclined to try to take the quick and easy way out the simple fact is that the quick was is not really the best way to make money. Case in point the two affiliates above. Similar traffic, same product, but one made $600 where the other made $6000. Tell me isn’t taking an hour to make a quick bonus page and a 5 minute review video worth making thousands of dollars more?
Next time you consider emailing for an affiliate product, forget the swipe, forget the fast method. Do yourself and your list a favor. Review the product and make a quick bonus page. You just might be surprised how much your conversions will increase.
So you set up your squeeze page. You have driven traffic to it. Your finally starting to build a list and your ready to start sending out some affiliate offers and start making some money for all the effort you have put in. Life is good right? Well not necessarily.
You see having a squeeze page and a list does not make you a marketer. Marketing makes you a marketer. What is marketing? In its simplest form its selling things. So you actually have to sell things to be a marketer. However all to often I see people with a bit of a list fail to make actual sales, or if they make sales they make a low number with a poor conversion rate. Well today I want to go over some of the common mistakes people make when promoting affiliate products that kill their sales as well as one thing you can do that can double your conversion rate.
When you start looking for affiliate products to promote your going to notice that just about every single vendor provides you with ‘swipe copy’. For those that dont know what swipe copy is, its pre-made emails that the vendor writes that you can just fill in with your name and your affiliate link and send out to your list. For a lot of new marketers this sounds like a dream come true. You dont even have to write your own emails. Awesome! Well actually not really, and here is why.
1) Sending a potential buyer directly to a sales page is not the most ideal way to get sales (more on that later in the article)
2) You need to understand that people on your list are also on other lists, when multiple people send out the same swipe copy to the same person it just makes you both look bad. You both sent out the same exact email? Its obvouse that you did not even write it.
3) How can you expect people to trust your recommendation when you dont even respect them enough to write a personal email for them? I mean really you should be trying to build a relationship with your list. How can you build a relationship when you wont even take 10 minutes to type up your own email?
Want to see the results of a vendor that uses swipe?
Why was his conversion rate so low? Well it was not just because he used swipe when he promoted this product, it was because he used swipe for all his promotions. What this means is he had no relationship with his list. He had no relationship with them because he put in no effort.
Ok so now you know. Forget the swipe. Take the time to write your own personal email in your own words. If your bad at writing you can use the swipe for some ideas of ‘angles’ to use when pitching the product your promoting but for sure write your own email yourself. But this is actually just a part of the bigger whole. You need to build a relationship with your list.
Another thing new marketers dont understand is something I touched on earlier. The people on your list are also on other marketers list. If your promoting a great product chances are other people are promoting it to. So how do you make sure that people buy from you and not from other people? Well the first thing as I said is to make sure you have a great relationship with your list. The second thing is to make sure that you give a value that no one else does.
So what kind of extra value can you give? Well their a couple of things you can do to give extra value.
1) Only promote products that you have actually tested. When your testing always ask yourself this simple question “Would I buy this?” If the answer is not without a doubt no then dont promote it.
2) Consider offering bonuses to the products you promote. These are extra ‘goodies’ that people get when they buy through you. It adds extra value to the sale and makes it more likely that people will buy through your link. In fact this is a good use for PLR such as plugins, themes, graphics packs, etc. PLR is great for bonuses.
Ok so if you think about what we have gone over so far we can see that we should not be using swipe emails, we should be testing everything we promote personally and we should consider giving a bonus. This leads us to one conclusion. We should be sending our list to a bonus / review page instead of sending them directly to the offer. Before we get into exactly what a bonus / review page is and how to make I first want to show you what kind of results you can get when you use them compared to the guy above who just sent out swipe emails with no thought.
Here you have a different affiliate promoting the same product as the first, overall traffic is very similar with only 105 clicks difference but the rest of the stats are on two ends of the spectrum. Where the first affiliate was way below the product average this second one was well above it. This results in a huge different in sales and in commissions. In fact affiliate two made nearly 10X what affiliate one made even though their traffic was very similar. The difference? Affiliate two used a review / bonus page.
So how do we make a bonus page?
There are a couple of ways to make them. If you know HTML or have someone who works for you that knows HTML then you can make it manually. If you have WordPress there are some plugins that you can use to create bonus pages. Another option is to use a service like LeadPages or SqueezeMatic. These services will allow you to quickly create bonus pages with ease and without knowing HTML.
However you decide to create your pages keep in mind that it should have a few things in it.
1) A walk though video of you actually testing and using the product. In the video you should show how things are done, how the product works, you should also give commentary as you demonstrating the product explaining to the viewer why you like it and how you can see it being of benefit to them. Making the video should be no problem since you should be testing the product anyway. Dont just read the sales page in the video. Thats silly. Yet I see people do this every day. Buyers dont need you to read them a sales page. They need to hear what YOU think.
2) A bit of text that quickly summarizes the content of the video for people who dont want to watch it. Your not writing a full article here, just a couple of sentences (3-5) is fine.
3) A large and easy to find button for the user to click, this will be your affiliate link and will redirect them to the product sales page.
4) A list of any bonuses you are giving to people who buy this product through you. You should list the bonus products title, what it does (or is for) and what its value is. If possible you can also have a related graphic.
A lot of people think that you have to have a huge email list to make decent money online. People often quote that $1 per email per month standard. Well I can tell you for a fact that this is a very bad metric. While people are naturally inclined to try to take the quick and easy way out the simple fact is that the quick was is not really the best way to make money. Case in point the two affiliates above. Similar traffic, same product, but one made $600 where the other made $6000. Tell me isn’t taking an hour to make a quick bonus page and a 5 minute review video worth making thousands of dollars more?
Next time you consider emailing for an affiliate product, forget the swipe, forget the fast method. Do yourself and your list a favor. Review the product and make a quick bonus page. You just might be surprised how much your conversions will increase.