You down with OPP? We don’t mean the classic Naughty By Nature jam. We’re talking about OTHER PEOPLE’S PRODUCTS! There’s no need to freak out about creating your own stuff to sell. You can make a pretty comfortable living in the online marketing space if you are down with promoting other people’s products.
The mechanics of Affiliate Marketing are pretty simple, you basically get paid for referring customers. That’s the gist of it. You tell someone about a product online and if they buy it on your recommendation the vendor agrees to pay you for the referral. This referral payment is what we call a commission and in this scenario, you are the AFFILIATE. JVZoo is a platform where both affiliates and vendors can conduct this sort of business and make BANK together.
Many people from all walks of life and all around the world make money through affiliate marketing. Today’s technology makes it much easier for regular people to earn money online by promoting OPP (Other People’s Products). Did you know that *U.S. affiliate marketing spend nears $5Billion and UK affiliate marketing drives ~1% of the country’s total GDP that’s more than the industry of agriculture according to sources cited by AMNavigator.
Affiliate marketing accounts for over 5 billion dollars in commerce and that means one thing for you… OPPORTUNITY. There is a formidable earning potential in affiliate marketing that requires little if any “techy” skill. Like with any sort of online work, you definitely need to have an aptitude for working with a computer or a mobile device. If you can type, tap or click you’ve pretty much got that part covered and the rest is just learning the steps.
Many affiliate marketers start learning the process part time at home, after work or even on breaks. Some of today’s most successful marketers start by just googling and watching YouTube videos. There are also lots of training courses and eBooks that teach various approaches to affiliate marketing. As long as you have a persistent desire to succeed and you’re willing to learn something new, your success will come down to connecting a person in need with a product they might not even know existed.
FINDING A HUNGRY AUDIENCE TO SELL STUFF TO
Don’t put the cart before the horse. One of the biggest mistakes that new affiliate marketers make is that they start setting up a campaign BEFORE they have an audience to sell it to. That’s kind of like performing on stage before anyone has shown up to watch. The most successful affiliate marketing campaigns are the ones put in front of a CAPTIVE audience. You’ve got to assemble the audience BEFORE you put on the show or else you’re just relying on “luck” to attract your buyers for you.
Like birds of a feather, humans tend to stick together. Humans are creatures of habit, hunter gatherers that flock together into tribes since the beginning of time. The same holds true today on the internet. People form groups and gather in places to share information on subjects of mutual interests. An affiliate marketer sees those “meeting places” as traffic sources. So what exactly are these meeting places where people congregate online? How can you find them?
Blogs
Forums
Social Media Sites
Facebook Groups
Fan Pages
Twitter Feeds
YouTube Channels
Pinterest Boards
In a nutshell… you find them on WEBSITES, your future customers are all currently on websites enjoying content on the subject or “niche” at hand. Your job as an affiliate marketer is not to spray the web with affiliate links and pray that someone eventually clicks. You’ll have much better success by using some strategy to locate places where people are talking about a subject. More importantly, you should try to “infiltrate” these meeting places and learn about the target audience. Specifically, what are their needs? The more you learn about them the better you’ll be able to recommend a solution (through your JVZoo affiliate link of course!)
Find these meeting places through research. Use google, learn to love google searches because that’s the key to finding the traffic sources you’re looking for. Google can point you to the Blogs
Forums, Social Media Sites, Facebook Groups, Fan Pages, Twitter Feeds, YouTube Channels, Pinterest Boards, and not just Google but also Facebook.
SELECTING THE RIGHT PRODUCTS TO PROMOTE
Once you’ve got an audience, the product selection is all about picking something that they’ll drool over. You’re just the middle man, you’re making the connection between a person in need and a vendor with a solution. That connection is made when the prospect clicks on your affiliate link
JVZoo has a product library that is overflowing with valuable digital resources in dozens of niches. You can log in to your free account and search by category, name, vendor or a variety of keywords to narrow down the best-suited product. Once you find some possible options you should take a look at few things to select the best fit.
The product’s description is a good place to start but then you’ll want to also check out the stats and the sales page. Does it have a sales funnel? Are there other products that will be offered to your prospect?
What’s the offer look like? Here are some things to consider…
- The OFFER is what they get for the amount they pay. The keys to identifying a good offer are congruency and value. Does the offer appeal to the target audience and will they see VALUE in what they’re getting for the price being asked?
- The Price Point is the amount of money being asked for the sale. We can break this down to Low / Mid / High ticket and the thing to remember is that the higher the price the more trust and TIME are usually required to make a sale.
- The Conversion is the ratio of visitors that convert into buyers. This percentage is usually affected most by the elements of the campaign and the sales page pitch.
- The EPC is the dollar earnings on the product divided by total clicks to achieve them. Earnings Per Click EPC hinge on key factors mentioned above in relation to how targeted the traffic source is.
Keep in mind that once you have a traffic source you can offer them more than one product. Some people may not purchase one thing but they may absolutely LOVE the second one. Create a list of alternatives that you can promote to the traffic source tomorrow, or next week or the week after that!
GETTING APPROVED TO PROMOTE SOMEONE ELSE’S PRODUCT
As you begin to request approval for products to promote you might feel a bit like Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody because nobody knows you yet. It can be tough to get approved for certain products at first because you haven’t established a history for yourself in the network yet.
Just like you can log in and look at a products statistics to chose what you want to promote, a vendor can see your performance stats before they decide to allow you to represent them. Vendors have an option to approve or deny an affiliate that applies to promote their product. A vendor can also choose to pay an affiliate with instant commissions (at the point of sale) or manual commissions after the sale legitimacy has been confirmed.
It’s a good idea to add a note for the vendor when you request to promote their product. Show them that you are a legitimate business person and tell them about how you plan to promote their product. Let them know that you’d appreciate even delayed commissions until you prove yourself. Offer to send them references or further contact details if necessary. This will help to build trust with the vendor and begin to forge a business relationship.
Don’t worry if some people don’t approve you, try again after you have some more sales under your belt. Reach out to them via email or social media. Seek to build a relationship with them before you apply again. Keep looking for more products to promote. The JVZoo product library is teeming with hot selling products that you can promote to the targeted audience that you’ve identified!
You can communicate directly with the vendor by entering a message when you request to promote their product. This is a great way for you to introduce yourself and tell the vendor how you plan to promote his her product. You may also want to supply them with contact details to help inspire trust.
Remember that many vendors are selective when deciding who they will allow to represent their brand and promote their products. They may choose to put you on delayed or “manual” commission payments at first and then change you to instant payment after they done business with you and gotten to know you better.
5 DEPENDABLE STEPS FOR MAKING CONSISTENT COMMISSIONS
Lots of good people try to make money online but they quit JUST before their big payday. Everything in business takes work and patience before you see real success. Even if affiliate marketing is just part time gig for you, it’s gonna take some planning and some strategy. There are many methods you can try as well as many experts you can learn them from but making consistent commissions is going to require a process.
Here are 5 steps that will serve you well regardless of the specific product or traffic source you chose to work with.
#1 Identify your audience. Find the people first then put the product in front of them. Doing this the other way around will likely lead to lots of wasted time and frustration.
#2 Select your product. JVZoo has tens of thousands of products for you to chose from and you should do your research to find the best one to suit your TRAFFIC’s needs.
#3 Create your campaign. Create a strategic effort to put your affiliate link for the product you selected in front of the TARGET prospect. Campaigns are a coordinated effort of various traffic sources.
#4 Drive the traffic. This is where a lot of people get hung up but you can conquer it by selecting ONE method and dedicating 20 minutes per day to mastering it. YouTube, Facebook, PPC… just focus your learning one at a time.
#5 Automate, Scale, REPEAT. Once you start getting favorable results you should identify the winning moves and document them into a repeatable process.
It’s a very shiny internet out there. Focus, don’t allow yourself to get sucked into a million different directions while you’re trying to master the process. Keep at it and wait till you start making some money consistently before you diversify. There are a lot of ways to make money online and most millionaire marketers are only good at a few. You don’t have to know all of them or do everything to make a reliable income online.
DON’T BECOME THE AFFILIATE THAT EVERYONE HATES
The internet has no chill. Everyone makes mistakes, we’re all human after all but the internet is a very unforgiving place. There is an unspoken social etiquette online that harshly looks down upon spammers and the like. Spamming (emailing without permission) and spagging (tagging without permission) are two of the many annoying tactics chastised by social media users on the web.
Anywhere that an overbearing or deceptive tactic is used to present a product for sale to an otherwise unsuspecting web surfer will be met with harsh resistance and abrasiveness. People that arbitrarily “spray and pray” with their affiliate links all over the place are just playing the numbers game and hoping they can make a few pennies before they lose their account. Don’t be that guy
Perry Belcher once called it the “Party Principle” when people visit social media sites to have fun, connect with old friends and browse through picture albums. Pushing an unexpected sales pitch on them here is like showing up to someone’s backyard barbeque and whipping out a whiteboard for an MLM presentation. It comes off sneaky, shady and unwanted.
Seth Godin called it “Permission Based Marketing” when you essentially get someone’s consent to be pitched. Social media sites are not where people go to shop but people definitely BUY things while they’re on there. It’s all about the way you APPROACH them that determines whether you are a hero that solved their problem or a spammer that tried to push an ad for sunglasses down their throat by tagging them in a picture they’ve never seen before.
Do your research, find or ASSEMBLE an audience with a need or a problem to solve then FEED THE NEED. That’s what affiliate marketing is all about. Affiliate marketing can make you consistent cash on the side or a lot of money running your own business right from where you’re sitting now. Whichever the case is for you, JVZoo can help you get there.
