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Navigating the Article
Concluding Thoughts
Learn by Copying
There is nothing so effective as a 'worked example'.
Simply seeing how the real pro's do it is amazingly effective as a learning tool.
The best way of doing this is to join a top program as an affiliate. Even if you NEVER sell any of their products, you will get access to their Affiliate Sites where you will find all the promotional materials they provide.
Perhaps the most professional such program is the Internet Marketing Center. This is a $60m plus business with up to 100,000 affiliates. You'd better be they're professional!
If you want to find out more about the Internet Marketing Center and how to join their Affiliate program - it is FREE - you should click on the link below.
International Marketing Center
Internet Marketing Center
Sell some of the top-selling internet offerings. IMC is a $60m dramatic success story that is growing quickly.
Become an Affiliate now! |
Links from Traffic Swarm
On each page of HBB Review we have links for business opportunities drawn from Traffic Swarm. They are there to give subscribers a chance to browse (HBB Research gets no gain from any link), and also to build our SEO position. Go to Traffic Swarm and check it out...it's a neat idea!
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Affiliates Programs
If you have your own product then creating an affiliate program could be THE most effective way of generating traffic and then sales. Affiliates are about leverage; getting 10s or 100s or 1,000s or 10s of thousands of people to spend their money in the hopes of making a few dollars off your product - all at no risk to you. Is that a no-brainer, or what!? The principles behind an affiliate program are straightforward – find affiliates, give them the tools, pay them a commission, close the sales and move forward. In practice, of course, there are tips and tricks.
In our chapter on positioning we focused on the end user as the customer. In affiliate marketing, there are two customers – the end buyer and the affiliate intermediary – these are known technically as ‘customer tiers’. You need to think about both.
The end user is concerned about the product, its functionality, support, and any psychological etc values they possess.
The affiliate is IN BUSINESS. They are commissioned persons concerned to sell the product at the lowest traffic cost and in the highest possible volume. Their issues are business issues. Tools to sell, commissions, prices, being held free of any risk, payment terms and frequency, in fact any business and sales issue. The more you can meet the affiliate’s requirements the better your sales will be.
There is even a body of thought that says the affiliate may, in some circumstances, be the PRIMARY customer. This is an interesting thought. It says, in effect, you should design products for the affiliate. To build their position with THEIR customer (remember many affiliates have very extensive email customer lists). The affiliate is always looking for a continuing flow of new offerings that provide another income stream. Building for the affiliate could be a good route to take in your business development thinking.
If we look at affiliates as customers, the same techniques apply to serving them as to serving your end user customers.
Attracting Affiliates
Before you can analyze your affiliates you have to have some! So where do you find them? Here are a few thoughts:
Look across the web for businesses that complement your own. So if you are selling unique insights into photography, you may wish to approach photography sites. This is no different from any sales agent approaching stores in their category in the physical world.
Look for sites that are in the ‘content or advice’ business. These sites may not have any products of their own, but may be willing to take on your offering if it doesn’t clash with theirs
Look at your existing customers. Or the new ones you are attracting to your product sales site. Every one of them is a potential affiliate. Most sales sites today have an ‘Earn Money’ link on the bottom of the sales page
Get your site and offering listed on one of the catalogs of affiliate offerings to be found on the web. These can be found on Google.
Segmenting an Existing Affiliate Group
So you have affiliates, now you need to classify them.
De-Averaging
One of the classic traps in all market research is thinking in averages. You know how it goes. “Our sales per click are 0.73 on average”. Well, whoopee! If you are the accountant and you are building next year’s budget that information is really interesting. You can plug it into your Excel worksheet and multiply it by other averages and build your budget. From a marketing point of view, it is virtually useless.
What you really want to know is what constitutes the average. Is it formed of 6 big affiliates who sell 85% of your product and the rest sell nothing? Where do the sales come from? The questions are endless. Thinking in averages is the death of imagination in marketing. |
There are endless ways you can segment your affiliates:
Try by size
I can practically GUARANTEE that at least 70% of your sales in a mature product come from 20 to 30% of your affiliates. This is called Zipf’s Law (similar to Pareto’s Law or the 80/20 Rule) 80/20 works for a lot of the world’s phenomena, but for distribution systems (and affiliates are a distribution system) I have found that 70/30 is more accurate.
This bit is for the mathematicians: I can also tell you the following (almost guaranteed), if you rank your affiliates by size of sales and then plot them on log/log graph paper they will come out as a straight line. This is a reflection of Pareto’s Law. But that the line will turn flatter at the top and will drop off at the end. This is because distribution systems tend to have a few big players who self-limit at the top (they have other things to do), and there are huge numbers of people entering and leaving at the bottom and selling virtually nothing.
What this tells us is that there are a few heavy hitters that we MUST stroke and help. There is a middle group that will push your product and there is a ‘turnover’ group that are coming and going. The turnover group needs ‘fast start’ help to encourage them.
Try by type of business.
Go to the sites of your affiliates and see what types of business they are in. What industry they are representing. What format are they using? Are they stores, malls, specialists etc. Then break them up by format and look at what you can do for them.
The analyses are endless. But once you have chosen a segment, you need to put sales against it and profits and traffic figures. Perhaps you are getting lots of traffic from the financial services sites, but the conversion to sales percentage is low. Perhaps you should ask of your sales message is turning them off. Perhaps you should think about multiple sales letter sites, and allowing your affiliates to link to different sales messages?
There is no shortage of things to find, once you de-average! Don’t be overwhelmed. This is easier than it sounds. I am writing this down and you are reading it quickly. In real life you have forever to pick at the problem.
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Top Clickbank Sellers on Traffic
Type the word Affiliate into the search box below and find the best selling books and tools on traffic sold through Clickbank
For those of you who are not aware, Clickbank is the web's leading supplier of digital products and is an enormously powerful affiliate engine. If you join nothing else, seriously consider becoming an affiliate of Clickbank.
To find out more
If you have a digital product, CLICKBANK is the place to sell it with over 100,000 affiliates and a strong administrative system to deal with returns.
Leading Lights
The Rich Jerk
A phenomenon on the web, the Rich Jerk is well worth going to for knowledge on how to be successful withor without affiliates. If you haven't visited his site, you've missed one of the experiences of web business.
Click on the picture
Rosalind Gardner
Read the amazing true story of how one woman, with no previous business experience earns 400,000+ per year ... selling other people's stuff online!
In her down-to-earth, sincere and often humorous style, Rosalind Gardner guides you through the entire process of building an affiliate marketing business on the 'Net. In over 300 pages, and more than 68,000 words, you'll learn how to pick the best programs, negotiate a commission raise and save time, money and effort on everything from affiliate software to web hosting.
To learn exactly how she does it click the graphic.
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