For many new marketers, one of the major roadblocks to starting to make money with an internet affiliate program is figuring out how the whole thing works.  It’s no good having the nitty gritty knowledge which can be gathered piecemeal from the Internet if we don’t know how to fit the pieces of the puzzle together into something that resembles a well oiled machine.

I remember when I first started out this used to drive me balmy.  I would stumble across some ‘brilliant traffic generation method’ but I needed to understand RSS feeds to use it.  Oh ok, I thought…I’ll go research RSS feeds.  Wait, I probably need a blog as a vehicle to deliver my content.  Crap…now I need content.  And you say I need to keyword optimize it…lemme’ just spend another couple of days figuring that one out.  And exactly how did you say having this traffic was going to make me money?  I need to monetize my blog you say?  Well how the *#%* do I do that?

You get the drift.  I just wanted someone to tell me…how do affiliate web sites make money?  Now you can have the answer, without having to undertake the research.  Affiliate marketing in particular can be a fickle creature, so let’s just take a quick peek at an overview that might at least help slot some of those puzzle pieces into a meaningful picture. 

Affiliate Marketing Model

Ok, so the basic model of affiliate marketing is as follows:

Affiliates direct traffic to a

squeeze page containing the

opt-in form to the affiliates autoresponder mailing list which

redirects the prospect to the

sales page of merchants, and the

sales page generates a conversion (a sale).

We of course, make commission on the sale, being the one responsible for sending the traffic which resulted in the sale.  Pretty easy right?  It is, but let’s also take a quick look at some of the steps in between.Firstly, we’re going to assume we’ve found an affiliate product to promote, for example from the Clickbank Marketplace.  How do we go about converting our traffic into sales? 

The Squeeze Page

Just in case you don’t already know, an autoresponder is a type of software which enables us to send emails to people automatically. A prospect has to sign up to be on our list (known as “opting in”) to start receiving our emails. We use a name and email capture form, known as an opt-in form, to get a prospects contact details. 

Why do we do this?  Why not just send the prospect to the sales page and not bother with trying to get their contact details?  The number 1 reason is because most people just won’t buy a product on their first exposure.  In fact, it can take up to 7 times for a person to be exposed to a product before they will consider pulling out the wallet.  By grabbing their details before sending them to the sales page, we give ourselves another chance to build a relationship with the prospect, and give them additional exposure to the virtues of the product we are promoting.  So how do we do all this?  With a squeeze page.

Components:-

1.      A compelling headline;

2.      An autoresponder opt-in form; and

3.      A call to action.

4.      A sign off. 

Headline

·         Uses curiosity to encourage a prospect to opt-in.

·         Stuck for a headline? Use the headline on the sales page of the product being promoted. 

Opt-In Form

·         List the benefit of the product we are promoting in dot points before the opt-in if desired.

·         Ask only for the prospects name and address. 

A Call To Action ·         Ask the prospect to opt-in.  No really, ask them for it.  Don’t be shy!

·         Tell them to put their name and email in your opt-in form and submit.

·         Remind them to confirm their subscription. 

A Sign Off

·         Include your name and signature.

·         Include your photo. 

We can set up our autoresponder to redirect prospects who opt-in to our email list to the sales page of the merchant.   Want some visual stimuli to figure out what I’m yapping about?  Check out this Squeeze Page example.

The Follow Up Emails

Ok, so assuming the prospect doesn’t buy the product right off the bat, we’ll need to do a little convincing.  We don’t want to just spam them with sales drivel though, we want to build trust.  We write our follow up email before sending subscribers to our opt-in page.We want to provide quality content or bonus material to our subscribers to build rapport and trust in our list. Then they are more likely to purchase products on our recommendations.  This might take some time, but if we can give to our list, there is a greater likelihood we will experience positive returns.  Email marketing can still be one of the most powerful tools of affiliate marketing. 

Quick Tips

·         Use our autoresponder function to refer to our prospects by name in our emails.

·         Use your prospects name in the email heading, and remind them when they subscribed to our list.

·         Use questions in subsequent follow up emails to prompt our prospect to purchase.

·         Offer bonus items as an incentive to be on our list.

·         PLR products make for easy, and affordable bonus items.

·         Remember to include our affiliate link in your emails (3 times for long emails).

·         Continue to give give give quality content to build a responsive list.

The system works on the basis that our prospect will either be find the sales page of the merchant compelling enough to buy the product, or will over time be impressed enough by our email series that they are motivated to purchase the product on our recommendation.  This is the classic affiliate marketing model, but is in fact only one method of affiliate marketing.  We’ll look into this and other options in more detail, but I hope you’ve found this preliminary answer to how do affiliate web sites make money helpful.