Traffic is the life blood of any online business. Without it, your business will never get off the ground. And if you don’t constantly work to increase traffic, your business will never grow.
It doesn't matter if you have the greatest product in the world...if no one
"sees" your offer, then you'll be going nowhere FAST!
If you learn how to quickly generate floods of traffic from the start, then there's simply no limit to how quickly you can reach your goals. But generating traffic is the one thing that holds most people back…
The way I see it, there are three ways to generate traffic:
1. You can buy it. That means bidding on keywords, placing ads on
people’s websites, buying solo ads, etc.
2. You can build it. That means using things like article directories and social media sites to generate free traffic.
3. You can use leverage. That means recruiting affiliates to send you traffic and setting up joint ventures.
Buying traffic can be risky if you don’t know what you’re doing and
building a content network can take forever. And there’s only so much time in the day. What you need to do is set up an automated profit machine and leverage the efforts of other people to grow your business exponentially.
The FASTEST way to get FREE traffic is to create a product, set up an affiliate program and get other people to promote for you!
And you need to have this system in place before you start promoting so you can maximize your profits from the traffic that you and your affiliates drive to your site.
Your affiliate program will leverage the traffic you generate and build more traffic without any extra work. In other words, when a prospect becomes a buyer, that buyer can also become an affiliate who will promote your product creating a snowball effect.
For example, let’s say your front-end product is converting five percent of your visitors into buyers and that one out of five buyers becomes an active affiliate. If you get 100 visitors a day, that’s one new affiliate per day who will promote your product and bring you more traffic, customers, and affiliates.
Let’s say you get 10 affiliates to promote to their lists and their combined efforts send you 1,000 visitors. That’s an immediate influx of 50 new customers and 10 new affiliates who will promote for you. Now if those 10 affiliates send you 1,000 visitors over time, that’s another 50 customers and 10 affiliates who can do the same.
See where this is going? If you leave the affiliate portion out, there is no leverage and perpetual growth of your business. But if you have an affiliate program, you just recruit affiliates and your business grows automatically!
There’s a saying that goes, “I’d rather have one percent of a hundred men’s effort than a hundred percent of my own.” That’s the kind of leverage that you can get from your affiliate program.
How Affiliates Multiply Your Efforts
It might sound technical to talk about having an affiliate program, or it might just sound like showing off. It’s neither one. It’s really about a simple concept—leverage.
Let’s look at some different ways that you can generate traffic:
• Forum Marketing
• Press Releases
• Viral Reports
• Viral Software
• Banner Advertising
• Social Marketing
• Podcasting
• Blogging & SEO
• Offline Marketing
• Bookmarking Sites
• Article Marketing
• Solo Ads
• Google Adwords
• Ad Swaps
• Webinars
• Teleseminars
Long list, right? Now, are you an expert at each of those things? I’m
certainly not.
But I can create promotion tools for each of those traffic strategies, give them to my affiliates, and let them go out and drive the traffic for me.
That’s how affiliates multiply you…
The more promotion tools you give your affiliates, the more
passive traffic you’ll get over time.
Here’s a screen shot of the traffic that came in from a recent launch I did. Notice how the daily traffic came in slowly at first from my list. Then the visitor count jumped to 1,190, and then 2,642, and then 5,115. And I had no big JV partners with massive lists promoting this. It all came from my existing affiliates and new customers.
To get the amount of traffic I get from my affiliate sales force, I’d have to learn about and implement those traffic strategies on a regular basis. I don’t know about you, but I just don’t have that much time on my hands.
I’m only one person with only so many skills. But I have thousands of active affiliates who are promoting me and many are experts at one or more strategies that drive traffic to my sites.
If you search on Google, you’ll find that my affiliate team has:
• Posted my articles and banners on their blogs
• Posted links on Facebook and Twitter
• Created Squidoo lenses to promote my products
• Bookmarked my pages with links to my site
• Posted my free reports on their blogs
• Set up AdWords campaigns at Google
• Posted in forums with affiliate links in their signature
• Uploaded videos to YouTube
• Sent my solo ads and free reports to their lists
If you take the time to recruit and train affiliates, you’ll get more done—
and make more money—each day than you would by yourself in a month
And the good news is…you only have to do the work once. Once you’ve set up the tracking software and created the tools and training materials for your affiliates, you could have 100 or 10,000 people using the same tools to promote you!
The real beauty of this system is the fact that you actually make money while building a list and recruiting an army of affiliates who send you traffic for free. It doesn’t get any better than that!
Affiliates, Super Affiliates, and JV Partners
Before I get into the heart of this report, I want to explain the difference between affiliates, “Super Affiliates” and JV partners.
First, an affiliate is anyone who promotes your product in exchange for compensation. So, by that definition, a JV partner is an affiliate.
Second, a “true” joint venture is a contractual agreement joining together two or more parties for the purpose of executing a particular business undertaking. So the term “JV Partner” is not entirely accurate in this
situation.
But for the sake of being consistent with accepted marketing lingo, I’ll refer to JV partners as affiliates whom you want to exchange value with and form a profitable relationship.
Let me explain…
In a typical product launch, the seller or a JV manager will contact potential partners and invite them to participate in the launch. There is a JV signup page, a JV contest, and JV partners often get a free evaluation copy of the product.
Regular affiliates don’t get the preferential treatment. Once an affiliate generates a significant number of sales or gets on the contest leader board, they’ll be recognized as a “Super Affiliate” and will most likely be contacted by the seller or other marketers to participate in future product launches.
In most cases, the only contribution a “JV Partner” makes to a product launch is sending a series of emails to his list. That’s not really much of a “joint venture” in the true sense of the word. So I’d refer to these promotion partners as “Super Affiliates” because they already have built a list prospects and can send you traffic with a click of their mouse.
But let’s say your JV partners all contributed a product to your launch and you agreed to do reciprocal mailing for your partners. Now that’s leaning toward a true joint venture.
It’s important to understand that some affiliates make money passively by submitting articles, writing reviews, posting to blogs, and getting ranked in Google. These affiliates, also known as “Bum Marketers” are more likely to promote your product without asking for anything in return.
Other affiliates are more aggressive. They sell their own products (or resell rights). They build lists of buyers and make money on back-end affiliate products (like yours). Affiliates of this caliber are referred to as “Super Affiliates” and it usually takes a little more effort to get them to promote.
Now that you know more than you wanted to about classifying affiliates, let’s talk about your affiliate program…
Your Affiliate Program
ow that you understand why you need an affiliate program, it’s time to get started. The first step is to decide what you’re going to call your affiliate program, where you are going to set it up and what you’re going to offer.
What Will You Name Your Program?
I call mine, “Derrick Van Dyke’s V.I.P Affiliate Program” because it sounds exclusive. But you can call it whatever you want.
I recommend that you develop a catchy, memorable name that has something to do with making money or an exclusive club.
Your affiliates will log into an affiliate center to get their links and check statistics. But the sign up page will be hosted on your site.
So you have two choices:
1. You can buy a new domain and host it there
2. You can set it up on your existing domain
If you register a domain name, it should match the name of your affiliate program. However, if you want to skip that for now and get going ASAP, then you can go with option two and get a domain later.
If you go with option two, you’d simply create an affiliate signup page on your domain (e.g. DerrickVanDyke.com/affiliates). You could always redirect that page to a new domain later.
This isn’t a critical decision. And if you think it’ll take too much time to set
up a new domain, then go with option two for now.
Lastly, if you can afford a nice graphics package for your affiliate center, you should order it now because it can take a week or more to get it back from the designers.
Where Will You Set It Up?
Warrior Plus easy to set up and supports instant payments via PayPal where every other payment goes to the affiliate or adaptive payments that splits each payment between you and the affiliate and also takes their fee at the time of sale. You can accept one-time or recurring payments and it’s easy to add upsells to your funnel. Warrior Plus integrates seamlessly with Aweber. But you can use any autoresponder you want by adding a
customer registration page.
You also have the potential to be named as the “WSO of the Day” and get a promotion from Mike Lantz. And if your WSO title contains popular keywords, you can get affiliates to promote through WSO Alerts.
The only problem with Warrior Plus is that you can only sell products in the Warrior Special Offer forum and you can only sell your own unique products – no resell rights.
Fees: one-time $19 charge per product + $40 for the WSO + PayPal fees
JV Zoo is easy to use and free to sign up. You can pay affiliates up to 100% instant commissions via PayPal’s adaptive payment system. They also have a dime sale feature, integrates with Aweber, and you can get named
Product of the Day for even more exposure.
Fees: 5% transaction + PayPal fees
DigiResults is free to sign up and easy to use. You can pay affiliates up to
100% instant commissions and also uses PayPal’s Adaptive Payment System. They also have a dime sale feature and you can get listed in the marketplace.
DigiResults does not support recurring commissions, there’s no
autoresponder integration, the affiliate signup process is complicated.
Fees: .50 + 5% (.25 +7.5% on sales of $10 or less) + PayPal fees
ClickBank is easy to use and they have the largest affiliate database on the Internet. You can give your affiliates up to 75% commission and ClickBank pays your affiliates via check or direct deposit. ClickBank supports one- time and recurring payments. But there’s no autoresponder integration. So you’d need to set up a registration page.
Fees: 7.5% plus $1 per transaction
How Much Will You Pay?
We’ll talk about the major benefits of your program in a minute when we discuss creating your affiliate sales letter. What you need to do right now is decide how much and when you will pay your affiliates.
The commission you should pay depends on the value of the product you’re
selling and ultimately, the conversion rate. But to keep it simple,
• If you’re selling a low-cost product ($7 – 17), your commission offer should be 75% to 100%.
• If you’re selling a product at $27 - $47, your commission offer should be 50% to 75%.
Most affiliates really only care about the visitor value or EPC (Earnings Per Click). So if you pay 75% and your offer converts at 2%, the visitor value is less than it would be if you paid 50% and your offer converted at 5%, right?
Let’s work the numbers…
$47 * .02 * .75 = 71 cents per visitor
$47 * .05 * .50 = $1.18 per visitor
Now if you’re just getting started, you won’t have any conversion stats, so affiliates will be attracted to higher commissions. So the more you can offer your affiliates, the better.
Affiliates love instant commissions. So I highly recommend this
method, especially if you’re just starting your program.
Here’s how the traditional split-pay system works:
• If you pay 100% commission, every sale will go directly to the
affiliate’s PayPal account
• If you pay 75% commission, the first sale will go to you and the next three sales will go to the affiliate
• If you pay 67% commission, the first sale goes to you and the two sales will go to the affiliate
• If you pay 50% commission, the first sale will go to you and the next
sale will go to the affiliate, the third sale will go to you and so on…
The only downside to the Instant Pay option is when your customers request a refund and you have to track down the affiliate who got the sale.
At the time of this writing, Warrior Plus uses the split-pay system. But DigiResults and Simple One Click use the Direct Pay system, which also allows you to refund the entire payment.
You can use ClickBank to process payments and pay commissions to your affiliates. The biggest downside is the fees. PayPal charges 2-3% and ClickBank charges 7.5% plus $1 per transaction.
PayPal allows you to pay 100% commission to your affiliates. The maximum commission you can pay at ClickBank is 75% and the “instant pay” option isn’t available.
Which Promotion Tools Will You Provide?
If you want your affiliate to take action and promote your products, you need to give them the tools they need to get started. Your affiliates can take care of all your traffic generation if you provide them with the copy-and- paste tools they need.
If you don’t have banners for your product, you should order them right
away since it takes at least a few days to get them done.
1) http://MyMiniSiteGraphic.com
2) http://WowMiniSites.com
3) http://CoversCorp.com
Here’s a list of promotion tools you can create for your affiliates:
• Articles
• Brandable reports
• eCourses
• Blog posts
• Expert interviews
• Fast-action bonuses
• Follow-Up sequences
• Audio and videos
• Classified ads
• Solo ads
• Product reviews
• PPC keywords
• Banners and buttons
• Thank you page ads
• Error page ads
Do you need all of those? Probably not. But here’s a simple rule of thumb:
The more tools you give affiliates, the more options they have to promote
for you…which often means you’ll get more promotion effort out of them.
Remember, your tools make their lives easier. The easier you make it for them, the more likely they are to help you.
Start with the Basic Tools
Here’s a list of the minimum tools you should have for each of your products:
Three swipe emails
One special report
Four social media ads
Banners and buttons
That might sound daunting, but it’s really not. In fact, you probably have a head start on the work and don’t even realize it. You don’t have to write your ads and emails from scratch.
You’re probably on at least 50 different lists sending you ads for various products. So you’ll have plenty of sample promos to use in your marketing. I’m not saying you should “steal” other people’s work. Just re-write the emails to fit your product and create your own.
You can also grab portions from your own product’s salesletter
or the actual product and use them in your promos.
Once your banners are done, add them to your affiliate tools page for affiliates to download and use however they want. Make sure to send an email to your affiliates every time you add new tools.
Now, about the report…that’s the one that tends to scare people, but it shouldn’t. Here’s why:
It can be brief. A report of 5-10 pages could be plenty. It doesn’t
have to be a long book.
You can reuse material. You can borrow stuff from your product (remember, you own it) or you can buy some PLR articles to reuse. You don’t necessarily have to start from scratch.
Don’t forget the purpose. Your primary goal with this report is to set up a promotion for your product. That means the bulk of the report can be about your product. Specifically, it can be about the problem your product solves, why it’s great, etc. It doesn’t have to be anything revolutionary or difficult to write.
So don’t be afraid of the report. It’s a great tool for affiliates, and it’s not a
big deal to create.
Action Steps
To summarize, there are four steps you need to take to create your affiliate program:
Step 1: Decide your program name. Something memorable that has something to do with making money should work well.
Step 2: Decide where you’ll offer your program. That could be a new or existing domain...and that second option is probably the fastest way to get started.
Step 3: Decide where you’ll set it up. You can use Warrior Plus if you have your own unique product. Otherwise, Simple One Click
or DigiResults are the best for PayPal payments and you can also use
ClickBank to process payments and pay your affiliates.
Step 4: Decide your commission offer. All affiliates care about is the numbers, meaning dollars per visitor. So make your offer attractive. When you’re just starting and don’t have conversion proof, it’s smart to offer higher commissions.
Step 5: Create your tools. Remember, don’t start from scratch unless you have to. Use existing material creatively, and borrow ideas where you can.
Once you’ve decided what you’re going to call your affiliate program, where you’re going to set it up and what you’re going to offer, it’s time to write your affiliate salesletter.
Note: It may take a couple days to create your tools, but you only have to do it once and the benefits are forever.
Your Affiliate Signup System
Here’s a list of components required for a successful affiliate program:
1) An offer that “sells” your program
2) A registration page that adds affiliates to a separate list
3) A landing page or affiliate center that displays all your products
4) Copy-and-paste promotion tools for each product
Your Affiliate Offer
One of the keys to recruiting affiliates is giving them convincing reasons to join your program. So, in a sense, you’re “selling” your affiliate program to prospective affiliates. You can do that with a compelling offer that stresses the benefits of your program and gets people excited. Why is your program better than others?
Here are a few benefits that will help convince new affiliates to join your affiliate program:
1. Monthly contests. You can run a new contest each month to motivate your affiliates to promote your products. Keep it fresh by offering different types of prizes (cash, iPods, laptops, etc.).
2. Performance bonuses. You can offer cash awards to any affiliate you reaches a certain number of sales. This is a great incentive for affiliates who don’t have massive lists and can’t compete with stronger marketers for top positions.
3. Lifetime profits. Some affiliate tracking systems offer lifetime tracking. So your affiliate will get commission on all the products you sell. That’s a huge incentive because they can refer one customer and get paid on multiple products.
4. Promotion tools. List all the tools available in the affiliate center— solo ads, banners, classifieds, brandable reports, bonus offers, etc. and update your page as you add more.
5. An action plan. When affiliates sign up for my affiliate program,
they get my free report called, “Super Affiliate Marketing.” I even had an eCover graphic designed to increase its perceived value. This
is a great way to get people in and get them motivated by giving them a plan of action.
6. Ongoing training. Let affiliates know that they’ll receive weekly updates and tips on generating traffic and increasing conversions. Then load your autoresponder with articles and reports on affiliate marketing. You could even hold a weekly teleseminar or webinar.
What affiliate program do you personally know of that offers these kinds of incentives on a regular basis? It’s a tremendous way to not only attract new affiliates, but to also train your existing affiliates to be more active in your program.
The Registration Page
Once you’ve listed all the benefits of your offer, you need to create a
compelling mini sales page to promote it…
1. Headline: Grab their attention with your best benefits. This could be 100% commission, instant payments, residual income, contests, performance bonuses, etc.
2. Proof: If you have statistics like conversion rates or visitor value (EPC), add it to the top of the page – preferably with screen shots. Testimonials and case studies are awesome too.
3. The offer: Explain each benefit of your program in a short paragraph or bullet point.
4. Call to action: Tell them to register below and explain what will happen next. Remind them that they’ll have instant access to all the tools and resources.
Next, add an optin form to the bottom of the page. This will add the affiliate’s name and email to a specific mailing list so you can follow up with tips, updates, and other information about your affiliate program.
The Landing Page
Once they submit that information, they should be immediately redirected to a landing page or an affiliate center where they can log in and get their affiliate link and tools.
Make it super easy for affiliates to get their link and tell them what to do next. For example, if you offer a brandable report, you will need to provide instructions on how to use the branding tool and how they can distribute the report.
Be specific when you tell affiliates how to use your tools. You can’t anticipate every possible use, but you can give affiliates a basic plan of action to follow. For example:
1. “Send these emails to your list”
2. “Post these graphics on your blog”
3. “Place this graphic on your thank you page”
Don’t assume affiliates will know what to do. If you take the time to train people, you will have loyal affiliates promoting your products for years to come.
Once you have your affiliate landing page set up, it’s time to add promotion
tools to your affiliate center.
Action Steps
To summarize, there are four steps you need to take to create your affiliate program salesletter:
Step 1: Write your affiliate “salesletter”…decide what you’re
going to offer use my 4-step system to create a mini sales page.
Step 2: Create a new affiliate list at Aweber. This list will let you stay in touch with your affiliates, which is likely to boost your referral sales.
Step 3: Add an opt-in form to your affiliate salesletter. This will their names and email to your affiliate mailing list.
Step 4: Redirect to your affiliate landing page. This is where affiliates can log in to get their affiliate link and promotion tools.
Step 6: Add usage instructions for your tools. This will give affiliates ideas and direction. That increases your chances of having more active affiliates.
Once you have your signup system in place, the next step is to recruit some affiliates…
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