Affiliate programs are attractive alternative you may use to profit from the sales of complementary products other than your own.
The best affiliate products come from established companies offering excellent commissions, consumable products, or products producing residual income.
Although some of the best affiliate programs require that you purchase the product in order to become an affiliate, most affiliate programs require little or no out-of pocket startup costs. But don’t be fooled, 80% to 90% of all affiliate commissions are produced by 10% to 20% of all affiliates. The key to success in affiliate sales is in choosing the right products for YOU to sell in the first place.
As a rule I never promote a product I haven’t purchased myself. If I own it, use it, and like it, it’s much easier to recommend it to others. It’s also easier to identify the top selling points and to answer questions, and overcome objections from prospective buyers.
Choosing Affiliate Products
The following are the basic considerations when choosing affiliate products to sell. Often I actually choose to buy the product, join the affiliate program, and work it for a month or more in order to answer the following questions.
1) Is the product a good match?
2) How much will I earn per sale?
3) How many sales in a month?
4) What is the lead to sale conversion rate?
5) Is the product consumable or residual?
6) Does the product help develop trust?
7) Can I earn from the sales of others?
A product must not only be good, it must be profitable to sell. I devised a test I call “The $300 dollar solution”. It’s simple, all things considered; if a product does not produce $300 dollars profit within a reasonable time frame it’s not worth my time to market. You might use a different dollar amount or time frame, but sales are required.
Many affiliate products are over-priced in order to pay big commissions and attract affiliates. A product must be priced right in order to sell. The right price is one at which the seller is content with the profit and the buyer receives more than expected. The salability test is if you will buy it.
Is the Company Established?
Over the last seven years there are only a half dozen products that sell year after year. They are also my best selling affiliate products. The sales websites are mature and well written. I use these products myself and the sales material and websites are tested in time and high quality.
http://www.smithfam.com/opps.html
Not all of my affiliate products are high profit. I also offer a few additional affiliate products because they help build trust and add value to my website or because they offer a good solution to a common problem. I also recommend products I don’t sell, this helps develop lifetime customers.
Often I develop my own content rich sales websites for products that sell well. I also include links to these products elsewhere in my website content. Developing your own related content may boost affiliate sales on average by 200% to 400%.
Does Demand Match Supply
A product without a market is a product that will NOT sell. Before I seriously consider marketing any affiliate product I do research. I search on several search engines using various keywords. I determine if the number of sites found is proportionate to the demand for the product. If the market is flooded the product must be even better in order to seriously consider marketing.
When to Drop a Product
Any product worth promoting must sell. Sometimes I purchase a great product, I use it and love it but it doesn’t sell. This can be for any number of reasons, some that can be overcome by creative marketing techniques and some that can not. At some point I de-emphasize such a product. In other words I don’t spend more time or money promoting it. I still may recommend it to folks from time to time but I don’t give it my websites best real-estate.
Selling Techniques
The single most powerful sales technique is your sincere endorsement. You can endorse the products within your website content, in your newsletters and emails to your list. Use your endorsement sparingly and only for your best products. The last thing you want to do is endorse a product your ideal customer purchases then returns.
One hundred percent of the costs required to obtain a prospective buyer goes into developing your first contact yet it often requires 5 to 7 contacts to actually close a sale. Programmable auto responders are the most powerful way to deliver follow-up messages required to make the sale. Get your own script or use a dependable service like AWeber to deliver follow-ups to your leads with multiple email messages spread out over several days to weeks depending on the product.
http://www.smithfam.com/follow-up.html
Goggle’s Adwords program and Overture’s Pay-Per-Click programs are great resources as long as there is enough profit in the product to pay for the advertising. These programs can also drain your advertising budget quickly so you absolutely must choose your keywords carefully. The best keywords to buy are the most specific words for your product. I’m cheap, and have more time than money; I generate about $500 in income per $30 cost in pay-per-click keywords.
The Offline Option
On-line marketers often overlook the off-line option. A little know marketing secret is many Internet businesses do the bulk of their marketing and advertising off-line and receive the bulk of their orders on-line. For example, you may purchase small ads in weekly newspapers that reach your target market. These ads often cost less to reach more people than conventional on-line marketing.
When a prospect finds your ad off-line and go online JUST to visit YOUR website in order to learn more about your affiliate product you have developed a higher quality prospect, they are not only more inclined to buy, they are also more inclined to request more information or to contact you directly.
The Super Affiliate
Super affiliates come in two flavors. One sells tons of products and earns big affiliate commission checks every month from his or her own efforts. The second earns big checks from the efforts of others by recruiting super affiliates of the first type to their second level.
I find it more profitable to focus on the actually selling products rather than on recruiting affiliates, I find that most affiliates don’t really sell much and it requires a lot of second level affiliates to make much difference to my monthly affiliate commission check. However, it only requires a few super affiliates to make a big difference.
Good affiliate recruiters often find success recruiting affiliates even more qualified to sell a specific affiliate product. The key is to find super affiliates who are already in touch with the ideal market yet may not be aware that the affiliate products exist.
Wrapping up
Look for products you use yourself to re-sell. Try for a high percentage of your profit on the first commission level. If possible, choose products that are consumable so you can sell it again and again over time if possible.
Understand the commission structure and learn exactly what you must do to reach your first income goal. Last but not least market on-line and off-line and earn the biggest commissions on your own retail sales. If you recruit others recruit super affiliates and don’t expect others to do all the work for you.
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Robert Smith owns a full info site about investment clubs. Check Out his site at http://www.ez-investment-clubs.com
