By Affiliate marketing is without a doubt the best way to get started online. You can make money with very little outgoing (unless you pay for traffic), it is instantly measurable in terms of success and ROI and you have no customer support or product development. Of course you can generate a lot more revenue by having your own products, but this also means more expenses.
As you would expect, there are different models that you can choose from when you get into affiliate marketing and you should spend sometime thinking about these before you get started.
Once you have chosen your model you will find that it is difficult to change your list to be adaptive to a new style. Of course, it is possible but it is a lot of work and needs to be done carefully. It is far better to choose a model you are happy with at the beginning and stick with it.
So the big question is… what are the different models?
I’ve seen hundreds of different models, but the majority revolve around the same three. And, each of these three take two main things into consideration:
- Aggression of marketing
- Importance of content
There is no right or wrong one, they’re just different approaches and they work for different people. I am going to call them:
- High value content marketing
- Buy or bye marketing
- Dream seeker marketing
High value content marketing is where you provide a LOT of FREE content. This is not cheap content created by an outsourcer that you are paying $3 for five hundred words an article. These articles are only good as blog fodder, personally I prefer to stay away from them on my main sites. You either want to write the content yourself if you are an expert on the subject, or you want to pay an expert on the subject to write the content for you.
NOTE: An expert will not charge you $5 or $6 for 1000 words, it will be much more expensive!
Providing this content builds you a fan base. They are not fans of your site or of your products (yet), they are fans of YOU. And the reason they are fans is because you are providing them with information and tools that most people charge for. You actually WANT to help them achieve their goals and have their best interests at heart.
You may email frequently but it will always be relevant and targeted to their specific interests. Let’s take Internet Marketing as an example, some people will be interested in all aspects of it while others are interested specifically in SEO or PPC or product creation or outsourcing etc…
If you have someone on your mailing list who is just interested in product creation then they’ll probably be interested to get the odd email about a blog post to do with SEO, but if you keep trying to sell them an SEO product they’re most likely to get pissed off and unsubscribe.
Buy or bye marketing is best used in situations where initially you can easily generate leads onto your mailing list. This is because you are going to be mailing them a every day, or even a few times a day, with sales emails.
It is a common theory that this will burn your list and eventually will run itself into the ground. That is not true.
You will experience a comparatively high unsubscribe rate compared to people using the first approach. However, after a period of time you will generate a list of people who like to buy. The reason they are still on your list is because they like to receive the marketing emails, they like to look at the latest products and they like to try them out.
Don’t expect to be loved by everyone if you do this, but if you can generate the initial quantity of leads this can be a very profitable and, comparatively, low workload method of generating a good affiliate revenue.
Dream seeker marketing is a technique where value and product comes last, marketing and funnels come first. It’s not for me, that’s just personal, but one of the biggest marketers in the IM niche uses this technique and makes millions from it. Why?
Because you are selling a dream.
The dream is all that matters, which is why the product comes last. If you use this technique then it almost doesn’t matter what your product is because that’s n0t what you are selling. It is the fantasy of what can be achieved with the product that is important.
If you’ve ever seen one-click button IM products that promise you riches then you’ve seen this style of marketing. Using this technique the first thing you put on paper is how you are going to make as many leads as possible purchase as much as possible. This will include upsells, downsells, continuity products, one-time-offers, exit pops and more.
Build this funnel out first and then decide on the product. Almost any product will fit into this because your customers don’t care what they do, all they are interested in is what will happen at the end. This is confirmed by most of the copy for these products being blind copy. Blind copy is where there is no details about what you are actually buying on the sales page, instead there is a lot of hype about what the product can do for you without telling you how it is going to do it.
In fact, this is probably the most powerful marketing technique there is. It attracts the most attention, people love to buy into a dream that is strongly connected to their emotions and they convert like crazy.
You may experience higher refunds than other methods of marketing, but the increase in sales will normally cover that.
My own personal preference for marketing is high content value marketing. That’s because I get satisfaction when I see people achieve their goals.
Spend some time deciding which model suits you the best, not only for time spent but also for job satisfaction. It’s important that you enjoy what you do and you must take that into consideration when you make your choice.
What do you think?