When it comes to making money online, I think most of us started earning online via Google AdSense or at least came to know about this industry via Google AdSense. Of course, people were also freelancing, but I am talking about the majority of internet marketing folks who focus on earning via “commissions” instead of service delivery. Affiliate marketing is, without any doubt, one of the major online money making methods. Even if you don’t have access to big players like CommissionJunction or ShareASale, there are lots of small players like Amazon, MaxBounty, etc. that are helping people to make good money online. However, everyone is not fortunate enough to get results when it comes to affiliate marketing. The competition is tough & niches get saturated within a year or two. So you not only have to be dedicated but also need to be smart when chalking out your strategy for being a successful affiliate marketer.
Having worked with lots of affiliate networks including CJ & by analyzing & talking with lots of major players in affiliate marketing, I have reckoned that there are three major factors that can change the game for any affiliate marketer. These factors can move you from an average Joe into the league of big players who are making five figures income per month with affiliate marketing. Although it may sound like a piece of common knowledge, you will be amazed to see how people simply ignore these vital factors without even realizing how many opportunities they are missing. The following are these three major factors for pro affiliate marketing.
- 1 – Scaling
- 2 – Automation
- 3 – Email Marketing
Scaling
I remember when I started with affiliate marketing, we were working on one site only. The first step I took after seeing a couple of sales on some products was to create another website in the same niche with the same products. From one website, we moved to 50+ sites promoting the same products in the same niche. Now to some people, it seems stupid and waste of resources, however, when you realize that recent Google Updates are specifically targeting affiliates website, you can witness the effectiveness of scaling. It doesn’t matter if your one website got hit by Panda or Penguin, you will always have its replacement ready to be ranked. Moreover, once a website stopped ranking in Top 10 on Google, it usually ended up in the top 10 rankings on Bing. Although Bing traffic is not still anywhere near Google, however, these websites will keep giving you a couple of sales per week which will be enough to cover your hosting, content and domain expenses.
Although some people will argue that you should focus on brand, well, let me tell you that sooner or later your website is going to be hit by an update and you will see a sharp decline in your revenues. Unless you have some backup websites, it will be extremely difficult to survive. I have seen affiliate websites with traffic in thousands per month got hit by Google and eventually disappeared. These websites were marketing on Facebook, using 2000+ worded articles but in the end, none of this helped them from a Google Penalty as they were promoting affiliate products.
Affiliate marketing is still the Largest Income Stream of pro-bloggers.
All major players in affiliate marketing focus on scaling as much as they can. Once they find the golden nugget, they simply create lots of websites including EMDs for that product or niche and start collecting emails as well as increasing sales.
Automation
Automation is the key to internet marketing and affiliate marketing is no exception. Imagine a system where you created a lead-capture page or a product review page that you shared on social media and then a couple of users kept re-tweeting it or sharing it on daily basis using the latest trending hashtags.
Another example is using rank tracking services like serpbook.com that can email you the daily report of your current keywords ranking. You can customize the process to directly forward the report of keywords ranking within Google’s 2nd & 3rd page to your SEO team, so that they know which keywords to work for and what the result of their work is. Small tasks like these take a lot of your valuable time and automating them can make a lot of difference.
However, automation needs expertise too since it costs you money plus it requires proper planning. You need to list your day-to-day tasks and check which can be automated to save you sufficient time; you can then hire a developer to create a bot for you. Investing in a system will always help you in the long term.
A great example of an automated system is creating a twitter account with the huge following of the target market. How can you do that? Using tools like Crowdfire.com. For example, if you want to target people interested in gaming, go to Twitter and select some top gaming accounts like IGN. Use tools like CrowdFire or create a bot to extract all their followers and then follow them and lots of people will start following you back.
Once you have good enough followers, you can use bulk DM or create a bot to send a tweet using @username of your followers. You can either promote your own blog or you can promote a gaming CPA. Now, these will be the highly targeted audiences that are interested in anything related to gaming.
You can create small systems like these and then scale the successful modes to earn on autopilot.
Email Marketing
If you ask any pro affiliate marketer about what his most stable earning method is, the answer in the majority of the cases will be Email Marketing. It works – period! People are earning huge using their email list of people who opt-in to get information about their issue.
For example, we created a lead-capture page where users provide their email against a quick report on “How to Lose Weight in 21 Days”. We created a series of 15 emails for the said campaign using MailChimp. The campaign sends 3 emails per week to the subscribers. One email among these 3 pitches a product, an offer or a free trial to users. For the traffic part, we used paid traffic campaigns using different services that keep sharing our landing page on relevant sites. After 3 months, we had 5000 subscribers.
Our total cost was $100 for 3 months and we started earning 500+ per month from the third month. It sure sounds nice, but you should be very careful in crafting your subjects and email content to make it work. There are hundreds of guides on how to write clickable email subjects, etc. Read them and experiment to find out which ones work for you.
Affiliate marketing scope is huge and it has lots of potential and the good thing about it you have several ways to earn via it. You can use product feed or simply use banners to send traffic to an offer and start earning without worrying about product delivery or service quality.
