Once you've decided to get started as an affiliate, there are two ways you can choose to build your business:
Which method you choose depends on how much money and time you can spend, and how fast you need to see results.
For anyone wanting to see results FAST, and prepared to spend a bit of money to get the ball rolling faster, here's my most straightforward and simple method.
I see a lot of newcomers get bogged down with creating big websites with lots of content: Not only do you need to create all that content, but you also need to figure out how to put your website together.
So instead of creating all that extra content, you’ll just create a one-page website.
The only thing you’ll have on your website is a page telling people to sign up for your newsletter list. We call this kind of page a “squeeze page”: You basically give them just two options: Subscribe or leave.
In order to encourage people to subscribe to your newsletter list, you offer them an incentive on your squeeze page, like a free book, a podcast, an exclusive video, etc.
The job of your squeeze page is to make people really really want this. So you need to make it irresistible. Tell them all the excellent things they are going to learn. Tell them how it will help them. Build their curiosity with mysterious bullet points like…
Add an enticing picture of your incentive: If it’s a book, turn it into a 3-d book image so that it seems more valuable.
(You can easily find somebody to create an image like this for you on Fiverr: Try searching for "3D book cover")
You can also say that your bonus "normally sells for $47" (or some other dollar figure) to give it more value. Make people feel like they’re getting something really incredible for free.
An autoresponder is an automatic-emailing service. When someone comes to your page and enters their email address to receive your book/bait, the autoresponder is what captures their email address, and automatically sends them the stuff they’ve been promised.
To get it working on your website you need to sign up with a company like AWeber or MailChimp. They will give you a snippet of code to add into your website that will do all the hard work.
Your autoresponder can also drip-feed emails to your subscribers at regular intervals: You pre-load them into your autoresponder, and any time a new subscriber joins, they’ll start at the very beginning of your sequence.
You can use this to automatically send emails promoting affiliate products. When one of your subscribers clicks on a link in your email and buys one of the affiliate products… you’ll get the commission.
The longer your subscriber stays subscribed to your newsletter list, the more chance that they’ll buy something, and the more valuable they can be. So find the right balance between giving them enough information to keep them happy, and making sales.
A word of warning: This system relies on your subscribers growing to trust you and your opinion. These emails should be well-written and not just full of fluff, and they should do a really good job of encouraging people to check out the affiliate products.
(If this sounds hard and slow, keep reading: I’m going to show you how you can get these emails pre-written for you for less than $2.50 each.)
When your newsletters are set up correctly, they will just sit there, automatically emailing your subscribers, and automatically making sales for you. And because you’ve already got your squeeze page and "bait" encouraging people to sign up, all you have to do is get visitors to your page to start getting subscribers and making sales!
Here is where the “you have to spend money to make money” part comes into play.
You need a quick traffic injection so that you can start making money. The easiest way to do this is to approach other websites that already have a big list of subscribers, and pay them to send out an email promoting your website and your book/bait.
This is called a “solo ad”.
There are directories of websites that sell solo ad slots, but the most effective way to do this is to just go out there and look for websites who might be interested in doing this for you.
They might not always advertise that they do this. In fact, some of the best ones might not even know what a “solo ad” is. (These can be good because their subscribers won’t have been exposed to hundreds of other offers already, and they may be more responsive.)
If you’re not going through a solo ad directory, here’s what to look for “in the wild”:
Contact the website and ask if they do sponsored emails. Once you’ve got this set up with your solo ad provider, the next two steps will happen quickly, and automatically:
A solo ad provider sends an email to their list, and some of their subscribers will click through to visit your website and sign up for your book. Boom! You’ve got subscribers.
As these subscribers sign up to your list, they’ll start receiving your drip-fed promotional emails. Boom! You’ll start seeing commissions.
It may take a while to make back the money you spent on the solo ad in the first place, but since subscribers tend to stay subscribed for a long time, you have many opportunities to make money from them.
The best thing is: Once you have a reasonable sized list, you can start earning big money from product launches and promotions. There’s always a lot of buzz around new product launches, a lot of special discounts, and a lot of money to be made by affiliates.
You can email out to your list telling them about a new product that’s launching, or a new promotion that is running, and you’ll earn commissions for anybody who buys. This is how most of the big marketers make their really big commissions. In some niches, it’s not uncommon for an affiliate with a particularly large and responsive list of subscribers to make 6-figures over the course of one weekend.
Can you imagine earning 6-figures in one weekend? This is only possible if you have a good subscriber list.
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