Part of the guide: Affiliate Marketing
We all know how to promote products. Whether as an affiliate, or vendor.
But do marketers really know how to deliver their promotions?
Most marketers use email. They’ll email their subscribers directly to their sales pages. The result is always the same; low conversions and a drop in subscriber responsiveness.
The solution is simple. Use different promotion delivery strategies. As long as you vary your delivery methods, your conversions will remain high and your subscribers won’t get bored of you. Here are the 6 strategies:
1. Direct Email
Direct email is obviously the most common strategy used by marketers. It’s promoting solely through email i.e. sending your subscribers directly to a sales page.
Marketers do this because they feel the more clicks they send through to a sales page; the more sales they will make. The opposite is true. You are better off sending your subscribers through 5 pages of content, before landing on your sales page. You may only end up with 10 clicks on your sales page from sending 100 people to your 5 page funnel; but several of the 10 clicks might buy.
If you had a list of 1000 subscribers and sent an email direct linking to a sales page, you might get 200 clicks to the page. Out of which maybe 5% purchase, so 10 sales. Let’s say you also setup a 5 pages funnel. 5 pages of pre-sell content subscribers had to read through in order to get to the sales page.
If you sent 300 clicks through to the pre-sell funnel (more people will click through if it’s to free content), only 40% might reach the sales page. Out of those 120 clicks, 20% might purchase resulting in 24 sales. The point is; directly sending subscribers to a sales page is a waste of perfectly good ‘promotional credits’ (you only have so many of them before you kill your list, and you earn them by giving away free content).
2. Blog Posts
This technique is simple, yet surprisingly effective when it comes to promoting affiliate products. Obviously you’ll need a blog to do this. If you don’t have one, you can set one up for under $10 (Google it). This method involves emails and blog posts.
As with all of these techniques, the key is to do the selling through valuable content. There are a million ways you can sell an affiliate product through your blog.
If selling an information product, simply teach some valuable information from the product, and pitch it at the end of your blog post ‘for more detailed information’. The basic blog formula for promoting through blog posts is:
- State The What
- State The Reason
- Show Some Results
- Give A Few Hints
- Sell The Product
Start with stating the what, what problem/strategy you’re teaching/solving. If you were selling a PPC guide, you could title a blog post ‘How I Got 5000 $0.10 Clicks’.
You could then go on to explain why paid traffic is essential in this volatile search landscape, how free traffic isn’t reliable. Next move onto the results, show with pictures the results you’re getting from using this guide.
If you generated 5000 targeted visitors for $0.10 a click, show that! By this point, your subscribers will be ready to purchase the product. If you can say ‘hey, look at these results, I got them from this product’ – that’s practically all you have to do to make sales. People buy results if they think they can re-produce them.
However, for the sake of boosting conversions, give away a few hints; reveal some of the information; then pitch the product.
3. Review Sites
Review sites work extremely well and are practically guaranteed money. Simply create a dedicated site for your promotion. On the site, talk directly about the product, list its features/benefits, review the product and offer bonuses to those of your subscribers who purchase it within a specified time frame.
4. Videos
We all know that everyone loves to watch videos online. Over the past few years, video marketing has exploded. It wasn’t too long ago when you’d only see text and images. Now creating and editing videos is easy.
You can record your screen using software like Camtasia or even a digital camera to record yourself offline.
You have been paid late before
You have watched the number on the dashboard not match the number in your account. What is different now is simple: it settles on a public contract you can check yourself, not a dashboard I control.
Read the contract →Most participants earn little to nothing. No income is guaranteed. You can verify every payout on the public smart contract.
The best way to use video is to either record yourself offline talking about the product you’re promoting and how it’s helped you, or actually create some kind of presentation with PowerPoint.
It all depends on the kind of promotion you’re running. The best technique is to create a physical video of yourself talking about the product with some back story, and then saying ‘let’s jump into the computer to see some of the results I’ve been getting’.
This is where your screen recording software comes in. Record yourself talking about the product and showing the results it’s gotten you. This is all pre-selling, after showing the results you merely have to state a call to action and display a link to the sales page. A simple, but effective way to deliver a promotion.
5. Tutorials
It’s hilarious how easy it is to sell through tutorials. All you have to do is teach something cool, and along the way recommend the offer you’re promoting. You can’t use tutorials for most products, but it’s best to use them to sell tools.
If you can physically show yourself using the product, you can sell it via a tutorial. Ideally you want to use tutorials to show yourself using the tool and displaying the results of doing exactly that; using the tool.
This shows subscribers how easy it is and makes them realize they can repeat the process and get the same results; and therefore happily purchase the product.
6. Webinars
Hosting webinars is by far the most effective strategy for selling online. People love webinars, it makes them feel part of an event. When they know they’re a part of a group of like-minded individuals, and the offer is live; they are far more likely to buy.
It also builds rapport with your subscribers by making them feel like they’re in the same room as you. It’s the whole event factor that really sells. If you’re promoting a product about setting up niche websites for example.
You could do a live webinar of yourself walking your subscribers through the process of building the sites. Showing them when they’re live and the money they’ve been making you. If you can do something like that, you just have to give a strong call to action towards the end and everyone will hand you money.
Instead of selling the product or service, you just have to sell what it can do for your subscribers and physically show them. Eventually, you’ll get to a point where you can invite product owners to do webinars with you. The product owners can teach your subscribers what their product will do for them. You just sit back and watch the sales flood in.
Webinars are powerful. If you use them correctly, they are the best way to run promotions.
Demonstrate using the product live and display real-time results, do that and your webinar attendees will pull out their credit cards.
In prosperity,
David Wood
P.S. Leave me your thoughts, comments and questions below. Also, opt-in to the email list on the right for more marketing tips, tricks, and content.
Comments (carried over from the previous site)
Tyronne Ratcliff, March 20 2013, 12:45
Tutorials always work well because most people are looking for that type of information online. YouTube is a great place to find tutorials because it’s easier to show someone how to do something with video rather than with text. Thanks for the helpful tips Dave!
(spam link removed)
Three posts a day. One email a day.
Everything I publish, in one short daily email. Real numbers, no hype, unsubscribe in one click.
Get paid 100%, on-chain, the second the sale clears
Most affiliates earn little, and that is disclosed up front. The difference here is not a promise about what you will make. It is that you can verify every payout yourself, on a public contract, in about twelve seconds.
See how the payout works →Most participants earn little to nothing. No income is guaranteed. You can verify every payout on the public smart contract.
Here’s an exercise worth trying instead of picking a favorite strategy from the list — pick the one you’re most resistant to, and ask what you’re actually avoiding. Usually it’s discomfort with being seen, not lack of skill. Which of the six would you avoid even if it worked better?
Simone’s exercise is worth sitting with properly. For me it was the webinar strategy — not because I doubted it works, the post makes a good case for the event feeling driving buying decisions, but because running a live session means being visibly wrong or slow or unpolished in real time, in front of however many people showed up. I noticed I kept telling myself the blog post strategy was ‘more efficient’ when honestly it was just the one where nobody watches you work. I think what’s being missed in a lot of strategy lists like this generally is that the resistance people feel toward a format is rarely about the format’s effectiveness at all — it’s about what the format exposes about the person running it. Worth being honest with yourself about which one that is before ruling any of them out on ‘strategic’ grounds.
Simone’s question is a good one, but I’d add a second layer to it — even among the ones you’re not avoiding out of fear, which would you be comfortable using on someone you actually respect? The video strategy’s ‘talk about how it’s helped you’ script only works cleanly if that’s true.
Does the post ever address what happens once subscribers notice you rotating strategies deliberately?
To condense: five of the six are the same mechanism — build trust through content, then ask — just with the delivery format changed.
The review site section reminded me of a supplier who used to come round the diner with samples before every big order — same idea, let the product speak for a minute before you ask for the sale. Difference is he never had six pre-built scripts for how the conversation should go depending on the format. He just came around when he had something worth showing.
Birdie’s supplier had one advantage this whole post is trying to engineer around at scale — he could read the room in real time and adjust. A blog-post-to-sales-page funnel can’t tell if you’re bored on paragraph three, it just keeps going. Maybe that’s the actual tradeoff hiding under ‘vary your delivery method’: automation for responsiveness.