Method - Profitable Every Time
I posted this on my blog www.getpassiveincome.net/how-to-create-a-profitable-affiliate-sales-funnel/ but figured that my fellow warriors would benefit as well. Below is my method for creating profitable campaigns.
Like everything, this method takes work, but it does lead to long-term residual income. I still have my share of Autoblog sites, but after the Panda slap, these sales funnels are where I am spending my time. Here is the method:
One of the things that I see internet marketers fail at continually is creating an effective sales funnel and media plan to drive sales and conversions that optimize revenue. I too am woefully guilty of this... In fact, how many times have you just posted an affiliate page, posted a link, thrown up a blog or site, or just wasted hours just creating online fluff? Instead of picking a niche, spending a few hours doing work, then moving on, it is much more profitable simply to choose a product, create an effective sales funnel, and spending time driving traffic and optimizing offers. So what does that mean and what are the steps to create an effective affiliate marketing sales funnel?
First and foremost, choosing a niche that is not only popular, but has a hungry audience. Jeff Johnson gave some great advice, when you target a niche, find one that has a lot of competition and a lot of passion, because that is where people are spending money. Too many marketers choose niches that have microscopic user-bases which won't pay off. So, when choosing a niche I use the following rules of thumb:
1) Will someone defend it or brag about it at a party?
2) Are there numerous high-value products to sell in the niche? Because
you are getting sales commission, a decent profit is needed.
3) Is there a dummies book written about the topic (Brittany Lynch's idea)
4) How easy will it be to precisely target your customers?
5) Can I add substantial value to the customer in this niche?
After identifying your niche, you need to understand your market. I recommend jumping into the forums and looking at the questions that have been consistently asked for your niche. A great way to streamline this is jump into a forum, identify the top three questions that are being asked over and over, then compile the answers into your giveaway report. The purpose of this is to identify what people in this niche want and the best way to answer their need.
Once you have identified your niche, and performed your market research, the next step is to develop your sales funnel, and I really recommend that you actually write this funnel out. The purpose of the funnel is to capture a prospect get them to start taking action immediately, then turn them into a customer, get them to spend money, then encourage them to buy more. The better the lifetime value of the customer, the more money that you will make.
The first step of your funnel is to capture your prospect so that you can turn them into a customer. I create squeeze pages using Optimize Press and going forward will be offering e-books and value-add products that answer those driving questions identified in the forums. When you set up your squeeze page, be sure to use google web page optimizer and create three versions of your landing page so that you can test and optimize. It is a lot easier to do this up front than to remember to do it after the fact. My two examples are my free traffic manifesto giveaway and my google sniper page.
Next, set up your giveaway and create your thank you page for the download. Now for this step you have two options, you can either add a one time offer before they proceed to the thank you download, or you can add the "Columbo Close." You remember Columob, he was notorious for almost walking away, then going... "oh, by the way..." then completely solving the case. For internet marketing this means giving away the product, but on the same page adding an exclusive special offer only for your subscribers.
After creating your landing page and first offer, you need to draft your autoresponder series. For this, the general rule of tumb is to add value, create a relationship, then after sufficient value has been given, ask for the order. There are a number of techniques that can be used to do this and you should experiment to see which ones work best for your niche. A classic technique is to add value, then offer a low-price product to get the customer started, then during the sale offer even more value for a little larger price. The best example of this is when you go to the movies and buy a drink. How many times have you been told that you can get the next size up for just a few cents more?
Once again, use systems to track click through and response. I use GetClicky for most of my on-site tracking to understand how each email functions. The goal for your autoresponder series is to create a relationship with your prospective customer, then sell them products that solve their problems. People buy from people, not computers; and people buy more from people they like. That means, be genuine, use stories to prove your point and to help your prospect get to know you. Whenever possible, test each message to get the best possible click through.
Regarding your autoresponder series, send at least 12 emails and in general mail every day for the first week. Keep in mind that more time between messages does not mean a better relationship, it just means a longer sales cycle. My recommendation would be to mail every day for the first week, then every other day following that. Once again, it all depends.
Finally, you need to drive traffic to your site. This is where a media plan comes in. A media plan is simply where you are going to market your product to drive traffic to your landing page. Even more simply, you need to answer the question, "where do my customers hang out?" What forums do they spend time in, what do they like, what don't they like? Are they male, female, old, young and everything else. The better that you understand your target demographic, the better you can target your customer and the more profit that you will make.
There is a term in marketing known as personification. This is essentially creating an avatar or individual that completely personifies your target customer. To create one, simply pick a name to represent your ideal heavy-user customer and write down everything you know about them.
A personification of your customer includes their age, gender, what they like, shopping habits, socio-economic status, friends, social networks, family structure, and everything else that you know about your demographic. Include how they access data, where they spend their day, whether they spend time online or on their phone, who their friends are, and what circles they run in. Once you have completely personified your target customer, targeting them online is actually quite easy. Subsequently creating an effective media plan is a snap.
So what is included in your media plan? You should strive for both free and paid traffic. You will be using both to optimize your squeeze page and autoresponder campaigns, but will spend most of your time optimizing your paid advertising. For your plan identify your target keywords, both for PPC and for SEO, then determine the best way to reach your target. In general there are three levels of targeting, precise, broad and free. Search engine and forum advertising is precise. It precisely targets your heavy user customer. In general, this is where your PPC text ads come into play. More broadly, advertising on sites where you target customer is likely to hang out. This is where your display ads and banners come in. Finally, free is free, and generally worth your time if it is targeted.
Finally, as part of your media plan, you need to create some assumptions on how much money you can afford to spend on traffic and how much you can expect to work. Calculate how much money it is going to cost to drive a customer through your funnel and how much you need to make to break even. If it costs you $2.00 to add a person to your mailing list, then you need to be sure that your average revenue per customer is greater than $2.00. As long as your cost per visitor is less than your revenue per customer you are making money.
Next, you simply test, optimize, rinse and repeat. Be aware that the optimize phase is where you need to be spending most of your time to really turn a profit.
Like everything, this method takes work, but it does lead to long-term residual income. I still have my share of Autoblog sites, but after the Panda slap, these sales funnels are where I am spending my time. Here is the method:
One of the things that I see internet marketers fail at continually is creating an effective sales funnel and media plan to drive sales and conversions that optimize revenue. I too am woefully guilty of this... In fact, how many times have you just posted an affiliate page, posted a link, thrown up a blog or site, or just wasted hours just creating online fluff? Instead of picking a niche, spending a few hours doing work, then moving on, it is much more profitable simply to choose a product, create an effective sales funnel, and spending time driving traffic and optimizing offers. So what does that mean and what are the steps to create an effective affiliate marketing sales funnel?
First and foremost, choosing a niche that is not only popular, but has a hungry audience. Jeff Johnson gave some great advice, when you target a niche, find one that has a lot of competition and a lot of passion, because that is where people are spending money. Too many marketers choose niches that have microscopic user-bases which won't pay off. So, when choosing a niche I use the following rules of thumb:
1) Will someone defend it or brag about it at a party?
2) Are there numerous high-value products to sell in the niche? Because
you are getting sales commission, a decent profit is needed.
3) Is there a dummies book written about the topic (Brittany Lynch's idea)
4) How easy will it be to precisely target your customers?
5) Can I add substantial value to the customer in this niche?
After identifying your niche, you need to understand your market. I recommend jumping into the forums and looking at the questions that have been consistently asked for your niche. A great way to streamline this is jump into a forum, identify the top three questions that are being asked over and over, then compile the answers into your giveaway report. The purpose of this is to identify what people in this niche want and the best way to answer their need.
Once you have identified your niche, and performed your market research, the next step is to develop your sales funnel, and I really recommend that you actually write this funnel out. The purpose of the funnel is to capture a prospect get them to start taking action immediately, then turn them into a customer, get them to spend money, then encourage them to buy more. The better the lifetime value of the customer, the more money that you will make.
The first step of your funnel is to capture your prospect so that you can turn them into a customer. I create squeeze pages using Optimize Press and going forward will be offering e-books and value-add products that answer those driving questions identified in the forums. When you set up your squeeze page, be sure to use google web page optimizer and create three versions of your landing page so that you can test and optimize. It is a lot easier to do this up front than to remember to do it after the fact. My two examples are my free traffic manifesto giveaway and my google sniper page.
Next, set up your giveaway and create your thank you page for the download. Now for this step you have two options, you can either add a one time offer before they proceed to the thank you download, or you can add the "Columbo Close." You remember Columob, he was notorious for almost walking away, then going... "oh, by the way..." then completely solving the case. For internet marketing this means giving away the product, but on the same page adding an exclusive special offer only for your subscribers.
After creating your landing page and first offer, you need to draft your autoresponder series. For this, the general rule of tumb is to add value, create a relationship, then after sufficient value has been given, ask for the order. There are a number of techniques that can be used to do this and you should experiment to see which ones work best for your niche. A classic technique is to add value, then offer a low-price product to get the customer started, then during the sale offer even more value for a little larger price. The best example of this is when you go to the movies and buy a drink. How many times have you been told that you can get the next size up for just a few cents more?
Once again, use systems to track click through and response. I use GetClicky for most of my on-site tracking to understand how each email functions. The goal for your autoresponder series is to create a relationship with your prospective customer, then sell them products that solve their problems. People buy from people, not computers; and people buy more from people they like. That means, be genuine, use stories to prove your point and to help your prospect get to know you. Whenever possible, test each message to get the best possible click through.
Regarding your autoresponder series, send at least 12 emails and in general mail every day for the first week. Keep in mind that more time between messages does not mean a better relationship, it just means a longer sales cycle. My recommendation would be to mail every day for the first week, then every other day following that. Once again, it all depends.
Finally, you need to drive traffic to your site. This is where a media plan comes in. A media plan is simply where you are going to market your product to drive traffic to your landing page. Even more simply, you need to answer the question, "where do my customers hang out?" What forums do they spend time in, what do they like, what don't they like? Are they male, female, old, young and everything else. The better that you understand your target demographic, the better you can target your customer and the more profit that you will make.
There is a term in marketing known as personification. This is essentially creating an avatar or individual that completely personifies your target customer. To create one, simply pick a name to represent your ideal heavy-user customer and write down everything you know about them.
A personification of your customer includes their age, gender, what they like, shopping habits, socio-economic status, friends, social networks, family structure, and everything else that you know about your demographic. Include how they access data, where they spend their day, whether they spend time online or on their phone, who their friends are, and what circles they run in. Once you have completely personified your target customer, targeting them online is actually quite easy. Subsequently creating an effective media plan is a snap.
So what is included in your media plan? You should strive for both free and paid traffic. You will be using both to optimize your squeeze page and autoresponder campaigns, but will spend most of your time optimizing your paid advertising. For your plan identify your target keywords, both for PPC and for SEO, then determine the best way to reach your target. In general there are three levels of targeting, precise, broad and free. Search engine and forum advertising is precise. It precisely targets your heavy user customer. In general, this is where your PPC text ads come into play. More broadly, advertising on sites where you target customer is likely to hang out. This is where your display ads and banners come in. Finally, free is free, and generally worth your time if it is targeted.
Finally, as part of your media plan, you need to create some assumptions on how much money you can afford to spend on traffic and how much you can expect to work. Calculate how much money it is going to cost to drive a customer through your funnel and how much you need to make to break even. If it costs you $2.00 to add a person to your mailing list, then you need to be sure that your average revenue per customer is greater than $2.00. As long as your cost per visitor is less than your revenue per customer you are making money.
Next, you simply test, optimize, rinse and repeat. Be aware that the optimize phase is where you need to be spending most of your time to really turn a profit.