Read Ling’s Affilorama Mini-Course: Introduction
Read Mark Ling’s Affilorama Mini-Course titled “Introduction”. [Watch Video]
Mark Ling’s Affilorama Mini-Course is reprinted here.
Introduction
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Mini Course 1a Notes: Introduction Hello and welcome to the Affilorama.com 6 part mini course! My name is Mark Ling, and I’ve been doing affiliate marketing for nearly a decade. My companies also run piles of top-notch affiliate programs that pay out 75% commission to our affiliates. You can check out examples by going to the links at the bottom of this lesson. I’ve even traveled around the world talking to the best affiliate marketers out there today … guys like Stephen Pierce, Tom Hua , Derek Gehl and others who are legends in their field. And I’m going to share everything I know with you right here in Affilorama: Your Essential Guide to Becoming a Super Affiliate. Now, why is my approach different from everyone else’s? Most of the people teaching you affiliate marketing have been highly successful selling their own products but not necessarily selling other people’s products as affiliates themselves. As a result, what they teach you doesn’t cover everything. It’s very rare that you see an entire package dedicated to affiliate marketing. Affilorama is going to teach you everything having to do with being an affiliate, and it’s going to teach you in a better way. During the course of these lessons, I’m going to show you the step-by-step systems that I use to make PILES of cash from affiliate programs! Are you ready to learn how to make some money? But first…. What is an affiliate? Seems like a simple question, doesn’t it? Basically, an affiliate is someone who promotes the products or resources of others for part of the sale price. In other words, an affiliate gets a commission on every product that he or she sells … kind of like an Internet salesperson. The great thing about being an affiliate, though, is that you don’t work for anyone. You’re your own boss. You don’t have to know how to create a product that sells. Better yet, you don’t even have to own your own website! Can being an affiliate be THAT simple? It can. In fact, being an affiliate is one of the best ways to make a profit online. You won’t believe the benefits! You get to:
These are just a few of the many, many great benefits of making money from affiliate programs. Now, I’m going to answer a question that I get asked, time and time again, by people who want to get started making money online… Should I be making money via affiliate programs, or, should I be making money by making and selling my own products? What do you think the answer is? Really, it comes down to your strengths and talents. If you have a vision of a specific product or niche that you know could make big bucks online, and you’ve got the time and resources to invest in creating it, then you could create your own product. You’ll get the satisfaction of owning what you sell. You’ll also have creative control to be able to change the product based on what your customers want. Better yet, you’ll reap the rewards from affiliate marketers who will help promote your product for you. On the other hand , you’re going to face challenges such as breaking into the market, going up against the greater experience and resources of larger players, and getting traffic to your site. If your product doesn’t take off, for whatever reason, you’ll be out your investment. And that can be a pretty big risk to take. Becoming an affiliate marketer involves hardly any risks! If you choose to sell other people’s products rather than your own, you can take advantage of their greater experience, web presence, and quality products to deliver exactly what customers want. You don’t have to worry about customer support. You don’t have to fix the product when someone complains. All you have to do is make the sale. If you choose to go with selling other people’s products, you’ll find that you’ll start making money right away. There are fewer start-up costs. Better yet, when you sell other people’s products, nothing is keeping you from selling competitive products. There’s no clause in the implied affiliate contract that says you can only sell a certain company’s products. You can own the market by selling their products and their competition’s as well! I strongly recommend that if you are getting started, you should start with making money from affiliate programs. Here’s why… If you were to spend a month making your own product and putting it online, you’d probably either have to spend a couple thousand dollars’ worth of your own time, or to pay other people to do things for you. And that is really at the bare minimum. As an affiliate, however, you can start with a much, much smaller investment, and you start getting your money back right away. For example, if you were to invest $4,000 dollars into Google AdWords to promote several high-converting affiliate products, you could expect to receive $8000 back within a week! Even considering the time it will take to receive your check in the mail for your affiliate sales, you’ll receive your $8,000 within a month. Right there and then you can take back your initial $4,000 investment and start promoting affiliate programs with the $4,000 that you earned from your initial investment. What a great system! Now you’re probably wondering, hey, why don’t people just go ahead and spend $1000 one month, make $2000, and then spend $2000 the next month, then double that to $4,000, then $8000, then $16,000, and so on all the way to million dollars a month and more? It is certainly possible, because Google alone is aiming to rake in over 3 billion dollars in AdWords revenue. That means that people out there promoting on Google AdWords are also making a heck of a lot of money! However, from my experience, it will get more difficult for you when you get to the stage where you are trying to increase from the tens of thousands to the hundreds of thousands a week. Why? Because as you double your income, you double your spending. And, most importantly, you also double the amount of work you do. Even though the work in promoting affiliate programs is very small at first, as you keep doubling and doubling and doubling the numbers of products that you are promoting, it adds up. So as long as you can keep pace with it, you can keep increasing your income from affiliate programs. But I recommend that you stick with a baseline initial investment and keep working with that amount until you’re familiar with the process. OK, you understand what affiliate marketing is all about now. You know what it can offer you and the financial rewards. Now, let’s find out … how exactly does someone become an affiliate? If you are new to affiliate marketing, you need to focus on the rest of this lesson and the next few lessons. They’ll take you through the very basic steps of getting set up as an affiliate. On the other hand, if you already know a lot about affiliate marketing, then you may want to skip straight to the meatier stuff beginning in member’s area. Taking the first step So you’re now ready to become an affiliate marketer. The first step you need to take is to register with an affiliate network. Affiliate networks are online transaction companies that provide you with a list of products that you can potentially sell. These companies provide a service by connecting the people with products to sell online with people who’d like to help sell those products for them. Being an affiliate is quite different from being a regular salesperson. When you sign up to sell a product as an affiliate, don’t expect a free copy of the product to try out. And don’t expect that you’ll have to take charge of a certain amount of stock to sell and distribute yourself. Instead, all you’ll get when you sign up for being an affiliate is a code. You’ll use that code to create “hoplinks” to send customers to the online company’s sales page. If that customer then makes a purchase, you get credit for that sale. In fact, you don’t have to do ANYTHING as an affiliate aside from sending traffic to the company’s sales page. That’s it. That’s one of the nifty things that makes affiliate marketing so much easier than being a regular salesperson! The great thing about affiliate networks is that they take all the hassle out of dealing with individual internet companies. If you sell a particular’s company product through your affiliate network, you won’t get paid by the individual company. You’ll get paid by the affiliate network. This secure system means that you’ll never have to worry about getting paid your fair amount. Better yet, once you’ve begun marketing through a particular affiliate network, that network will record all your transactions, process them, and keep statistics so you can check up on how well you are doing at any time. There are heaps of online transaction companies, but my favorite affiliate network is Clickbank, and I’m going to take you through the sign-up process now. Clickbank Clickbank has a whole variety of different products you can promote – from books, special reports, collections of articles, to physical products. Helpfully, Clickbank’s marketplace is divided into categories with all the commissions listed upfront. It’s important to realize, before you choose your product, that Clickbank merchants can change their commission rate at ANY time. So when you choose a product to promote, check back with Clickbank frequently to make sure the commission rate hasn’t decreased. You don’t want to get a nasty surprise at the end of the month! Joining Up This will take a few minutes of your time, but it won’t cost you a thing. 1. Type www.clickbank.com into your browser. 2. On the Clickbank homepage, click on ‘promote products’ on the left-hand side of the page. 3. You are now in the Clickbank marketplace. Click on ‘sell’ at the top of the page. The page that opens will explain how Clickbank works and give you the option of signing up. 4. A new window will open with a form to fill out. Fill in your personal details as required. During the sign-up process you’ll be asked to select a nickname. This will be your unique Clickbank ID that let’s Clickbank track your commissions and credit you money. 5. Once this is completed you will be emailed a password that you will be required to confirm before you can start. Clickbank offers a number of payment alternatives. Commissions are posted to your account within 2 minutes. They mail out checks twice a month and you can set a threshold value. If you haven’t earned as much as the threshold value since your last check, you won’t get a check. The default threshold is $100, but you can set it for anything from $10 to $10,000. Choosing a product And now comes the fun part! Choosing which product you will promote! 1. Go back to the Clickbank marketplace. If you’re not signed in, you’ll have to do that now. There are 9 basic categories – each with subcategory listings. When you click on a category, a list of products is shown, listed in the order of popularity by other affiliates. For example, if you click on Health & Fitness, the top product in this category at the time of writing is ‘Burn the Fat Feed the Muscle’. 2. To the right of each product title, you can see a percentage in square brackets. For example [earn 51%] for ‘Burn the Fat Feed the Muscle’. This is the commission rate that you would recieve from a sale, should you choose to promote this product. A purchaser would click through the affiliate link on your site and purchase the affiliates product, and you would recieve 51% of this product’s price, $39.95. In this case, $20.37 would go into your pocket for each product you sold. When you have found a likely looking product, click on the square-bracketed earn rate. A new window will appear requesting your Clickbank nickname. Type this in and click submit. A code appears which you can cut and paste into your web page. This will be the link to this merchant’s site on your webpage. Check out the example below: And here’s a tip: Before you choose a product, it is a good idea to check out the affiliate page at any site you sign up to. Sites often have extra information for their affiliates and sometimes enable you to send people to a page more specific to their search. Why is this important? Sending visitors to a more specific page to their search will make a big difference to your conversion rate (the amount of visitors who end up buying). The more relevant the information you provide when they click through, the more likely they are to stay with your site, rather than going back to the Google results page. For example, in the Business to Business cateogry, take a look at Salehoo. On Salehoo’s site (www.salehoo.com), you can find a specific hoplink for ‘footwear’, rather than just sending someone looking for wholesale footwear to the homepage. How does the merchant know the sale is yours? Well, it’s actually very simple. The code which you cut and paste into your web page creates a link to your affiliate site. When someone clicks onto this link, and through to the merchant’s sale page, a hoplink is added to the address with your unique ID on the end. This is the hoplink example from above: If the visitor who clicks through buys the product, then Clickbank can tell from the unique ID where to credit the cash. And it doesn’t matter if the customer doesn’t buy that day. After you make a referral, you will earn a commission if the customer purchases any product from that site up to 60 days later. Other Affiliate Programs Of course, you’re certainly not limited to Clickbank’s product range! There are tons of other online marketplaces and transaction companies out there. And they all offer different benefits. Which one you choose to join will probably depend on the type of product you want to promote, as each network as a different range on offer. When you consider joining other networks, make sure you ask yourself these questions: 1. Do they provide a good product range? 2. How often do they pay out? What is the minimum payout amount? 3. What restrictions (if any) do they have? Some programs don’t allow email marketing. 4. Do you need to have a website? 5. What type of programs do they offer: CPA (cost per action), CPC (cost per click), CPS (cost per sale), CPM (cost per impression)? 6. Do they have real time tracking? It can sometimes make your life a bit complicated if there is a delay in the statistics! Let’s take a look now at some of the other networks and what they offer. Commission Junction Let’s take a look at the highly popular Commission Junction. The web address is certainly easy to remember! It’s simply, http://www.cj.com Commission Junction is probably one of the most popular programs online. It has plenty of big name clients which makes it a very attractive option: eBay, Etronics, Frederick’s of Hollywood , NetZero Platinum, Overture and Yahoo! Personals. CJ also has real-time statistics tracking. This is very, very important. Can you imagine not knowing whether you were making sales from a particular program for a month? You wouldn’t know whether you were throwing your money away or making millions. For this very good reason I advise you to ONLY choose a program with real time tracking. Turn-around time from your application is very quick and Commission Junction really know how to look after their affiliates with prompt feedback and lots of helpful advice for starting up. It’s also really easy to find good affiliate programs: CJ uses statistics to show how well each merchant converts site visitors into sales for a 3-month period. You can also view the average commissions paid to affiliates for every 100 clicks for the previous seven days. Let’s look now at another network. This one’s called Commission Soup. Commission Soup Another important feature to check up on when you’re choosing a network is how often they pay out. Commission Soup issues checks once a month, so you won’t be left waiting too long! But some other networks send out checks on a less-regular basis. One affiliate network I know of doesn’t pay out until 45 days after the end of the month. So you’re effectively waiting for over 2 months to receive the money. Also take a look at the minimum commission requirement you must reach before a check is issued. Commission Soup’s is only $35, but other programs are a bit higher – and you won’t receive a check until this amount is reached. It’s certainly a good incentive for getting your marketing on track! eAdvertising www.eAdvertising.com This program claims to have the highest payouts to their affiliates: 15% to 25% higher than other networks! However, to join, your affiliate site must have a minimum of 2,000 unique visitors per days – although exceptions will be considered for highly targeted traffic. Affiliate Fuel This is great-looking website. They also offer to work with affiliates to create a landing page. Very useful when you are starting out! Affiliate Fuel provides a great service to affiliates by working with them to create a landing page. Fine Clicks http://FineClicks.com FineClicks offer their service to affiliates internationally – so you won’t be restricted if you live outside the US and Canada. Fine Clicks is a small network, but it provides excellent quality and great service. And finally, here’s a list of some other good programs to take a look at. Other Good Programs to Try http://AdRevenueService.com I strongly recommend that you take a look at least five different affiliate networks before you make a choice. Good luck! I’ll see you in the next lesson.
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Mark Ling
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