Part of the guide: Affiliate Marketing
Everyone wants to know how to really sell stuff.
How to market their products, how to run affiliate promotions.
There’s been a kajillion books and articles published on the subject, but these 3 fundamental online marketing strategies never fail.
Teach The What And Sell The How
Teach The How And Sell The What
Teach The What, The How And Sell The Tools
Those are hands down the 3 most effective techniques for selling anything online.
Teaching the what and selling the how…
If you’re in the Internet Marketing niche, let’s say you implemented a new link building strategy and it skyrocketed your site to the top of Google.
You could tell your subscribers about your results and what you’ve been able to achieve since the increase in traffic. Then you could package up a simple PDF teaching the strategy and sell it to them.
It’s the most fundamental marketing strategy in the world. Show your subscribers a result; and sell them the method to achieve it.
Teaching the how, and selling the what…
Next let’s say you bought a brand new link building tool since we’re on the subject. You could set up a webinar and get your subscribers to register for it. Advertise it as “you revealing your secrets to free search engine traffic”.
During the webinar, walk your subscribers through the process of setting up a link building campaign with the software (teaching the how). You could then show a few rankings as proof that it works. To really kill it, display some other social proof like results other people have been getting.
Towards the end, say for a limited time you can get access to the tool, you then plant your affiliate link. To really destroy the promotion (in a good way), you could always give away some fast-action bonuses to the people who “buy now” (webinar promotions thrive on these).
Teaching the what, the how and selling the tools.
This strategy works best. You barely have to do any selling. You just teach a cool strategy, the what, and the how. Then you find a few tools that are “mandatory” that you can sell as an affiliate.
You just have to say, “I’ve taught you this cool strategy for generating vast amounts of traffic. To use this strategy, you have to buy this tool.” Or even several tools.
Teach people exactly how to do something, if it appeals to them, they will go ahead and buy the tools needed to do it. You could create a webinar tutorial showing subscribers how to set up a Google AdSense site.
A pretty basic process that will make money if you do it right, and you only need a few things to get started. It’s an attractive business model newbies can use to get their foot in the Internet Marketing door.
In order to set up a Google AdSense site, you would require a domain, hosting, and some SEO tools. Three components that are mandatory, that you can sell as an affiliate.
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.
This technique never appears like you’re trying to sell something. You just stick a video or webinar or whatever online teaching the strategy and using the tools.
Towards the end, use a strong call to action telling your subscribers where they can buy the tools to use the strategy. If you show the what, the how (and the result you get from the process), and your subscribers want that result, they will have no problems buying the recommended tools they saw you use to complete the process.
That’s it, the 3 most fundamental online marketing strategies for selling anything online. Know these 3 strategies, and you can sell just about anything to anyone.
In Prosperity,
David Wood
P.S. Leave me your thoughts, comments, and questions below.
Comments
Zorin Valtran
This is a great post! I’ve been struggling to find the right approach to online marketing, and these strategies are exactly what I needed. Thanks for sharing!
Alexander Rivers
This post is fantastic! I’ve been implementing the “teach the what, sell the how” approach, and it’s been working wonders. Thanks for the insight, David!
Natasha Wells
I’m not sure if I can fully trust the results here. Is there any actual evidence or case studies showing how these strategies have worked for others?
Michael Tanner
Can you explain more about how webinars can boost affiliate sales? I’m curious if this strategy works across different niches.
Victoria Silva
I appreciate the post, but I feel like the strategy of “teaching the how” might be a bit too aggressive for some audiences. What do you think, David?
Brandon Kerr
Wow, it’s been a while since I last read one of your posts. How have you been? Let’s catch up soon!
Angela Green
This reminds me of a similar strategy I used a few months back when launching a new product. I focused on teaching the basics, and the response was amazing!
Ivan Roberts
I recently came across a tool called ‘LeadFunnels’ that might help with the strategies you’re talking about here. It’s great for optimizing traffic and conversions.
Sarah Hutchinson
Thank you for the valuable information. I’ve learned a lot from this post, especially how to structure my webinars to increase sales.
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.
This is presented as teaching, but a webinar that walks people through “the how” and then drops an affiliate link at the end has a name in most places: a paid promotion, and it usually needs to be disclosed as one regardless of how it’s framed in the first half. Small point, but it isn’t really “barely a promotion” just because it’s dressed as instruction first, and the post is quite explicit that the teaching exists to set up the pitch. That aside, the third model, sell the tools, is probably the most durable of the three, since tools need buying regardless of who’s doing the teaching, which is presumably why the post calls it the strongest.
Priya’s right that the disclosure question is real, and on the company side we spent a lot of time on exactly that boundary, what counts as teaching versus what counts as a pitch. I can’t speak for every market, but where I worked, the moment an affiliate link appears the content is legally a promotion no matter how it was framed before that point.
The whole second strategy assumes you’re comfortable running a live webinar and building “social proof” in real time. Plenty of people have built an audience entirely in writing and have never once been on camera. The framework doesn’t break without that, it just needs a written version instead of a stage.
Teach the what, sell the tools. In other words, become the toll booth.
Look, the framing is too tidy. Three strategies, no overlap, no mention of what happens when the tool turns out useless. Selling the how and selling the what aren’t separate categories in practice. They’re the same play with a different order of operations.
Toll booth is the right image, though it made me think of the shop, half of what I sell is stuff people need regardless of who taught them to ride, tubes, brake pads, whatever. The trick this post is describing is just picking the built-in tolls that were going to get paid anyway and standing next to them first.
“Become the toll booth” says more in six words than the whole post did in six paragraphs. That’s exactly the mechanism.