So ya wanna make some affiliate sales? Here’s the key: Do a “Super Promotion.”
I recently completed a promotion for Marlon Sander’s Dashboard Product. It took me three days to put it all together and, to date, has sold well over $5,000 in several products, earning me over $4,000 profit.
[This article is the second in a series on putting together a super promotion for affiliate products-you can read the series by going to: http://All-In-One-Business.com/sap]
In my last article I gave you a quick overview of how to put together a super promotion.
In this article I start with the “nuts and bolts” details.
Setting Goals for Your Promotion
Before you undertake a promotion, you need to be assured the potential profits are going to be enough to cover the value of your time and any costs associated with the promotion.
Otherwise: If you put in 30 hours of work on a promotion, and make $100, you have only made $3.33 an hour. That’s not good.
Here’s how you go about determining how much you might make:
1. Figure out how much you need to earn per hour.
You have to know what your time is worth.
In real terms, most of us are never going to have more than 30 productive hours per week.
If your “next step” goal is to be earning $50,000 per year from your online business, then you need to get $1,000 per week for those 30 hours.
That works out to be $33.33 per hour.
Here’s blanks for figuring out your own “per hour” rate:
How much I want to earn per year: ____________________
Divide that by 50 to get your “per week” rate: __________
Divide that by 30 to get your “per hour” rate: __________
Once you have your per hour rate you’re ready to move on to the next step.
2. Figure out how much you can expect to make per sale.
This is usually pretty simple: Calculate the commission.
If you are going to advertise a $100 product, and the commission is 50%, then you will make $50 per sale.
But, sometimes it can be a little more complicated.
If the product you are going to advertise is sold through Click Bank, for instance, even if the commission rate is 50%, it is NOT 50% of retail-it is 50% of what is left over AFTER Click Bank fees.
So, for a Click Bank product, you have to take the retail price, deduct 7.5%, deduct another $1, then calculate the percentage of what is left over. I know that sounds complicated, so let me give you an example:
If the product sold through Click Bank retails for $50 and offers a 50% commission, this is how you would figure your commission per sale.
Take the $50 retail price, subtract 7.5% for Click Bank fees, leaving $46.25.
Then subtract another $1 for Click Bank’s per sale fee, leaving $45.25.
Then, take that amount ($45.25) and multiply it by the commission rate (50% in this case) to get your commission per sale: $22.63
3. Estimate How Many Sales Your Own List Will Produce.
[If you don’t yet have your own mailing list, skip this step.]
Most mailing lists are built on myths.
Recently one of my students told me she had a list of 4,000 people, and couldn’t understand why she wasn’t making any sales. So I asked her for some response statistics.
After listening to her tell me about the responses she has gotten from various promotions, I told her she had about 200 people actually reading her newsletter.
When she ended up switching list hosts and had to double opt-in her actual list, she found out she, indeed, had only about 200 subscribers.
I am not concerned about how many people are subscribed to a list. Subscriber counts just don’t mean much. What matters is how many people actually READ the newsletter.
If you have a mailing list of your own, here are some ways you can know how many READERS you have.
You can use an “open” counter
If you send in HTML or use a service which provides this for you, you can determine the number of people who actually open your emails. If an email doesn’t get opened, it never gets a response to ANY promotion.
To find out how to track open rate with your own list, go to:
http://www.All-In-One-Business.com/openrate
Basically, every person who “opens” your newsletter is a reader.
You can look at the response to previous promotions
About 60-70% of the readers of a well-cultivated newsletter will click on a link in an email for a targeted offer.
So, if your last promotion generated 300 visits, you likely have 500 to 600 actual readers for your newsletter.
Why are the numbers so different?
There can be many reasons why your open rate is much lower than your number of subscribers. Here are some possibilities:
The list is old. The longer a subscriber is on your list, the more likely they are to have stopped reading your newsletter.
The list is from a poor source. If your leads have been purchased, they are not as likely to produce good results as if they are have been cultivated personally from visitors to your website.
The list gets too many offers. Every time you send an offer to your list, some people unsubscribe and some people filter you out. We estimate on our own lists that for every person who unsubscribes, we get another person filtering us out but staying subscribed.
Those people who are subscribed but filtered out on their end artificially inflate the subscriber count.
I have regularly seen lists of 20-50K who have actual reader counts of less than 1,000.
So, how many sales will your own list produce?
Here are the numbers you need to calculate response:
(1) 65% of your readers will visit the link in your email.
(2) 1% to 3% of those visitors will buy the product, depending on targeting, sales copy and follow-up.
So, let’s “pretend” your list has 1,000 readers and the offer you are looking at has a solid sales letter, well suited to your list, and pays a $50 commission per sale:
* 1,000 people open the email * 650 visit the link in the email (1000 x 65%) * 13 purchase the product (2%) * $650 in sales commission (13 x $50)
So, your list of 1,000 should produce about $650 from a well-placed offer.
4. Consider Any “In-Direct” Costs
When you are planning your promotions, consider some related costs:
Based on your past experience, how many subscribers are you likely to lose as a result of doing this promotion?
Since your own subscribers have a finite amount of money to spend online, how will this promotion affect your own sales?
I know from my own experience, I will see about 1% of my readers unsubscribe from my newsletter as a result of sending out a promotion. I also know that for every $1 spent in response to a promotion, I will lose about 20 cents in my revenue from my own products for the month.
Looking at these four factors, I thought a “winning” promotion would need to bring in about $2,500 in commissions, and a “home run” would do around $10,000.
In the next article, I will look at how to plan your promotion to be a winner.
If you would like to make sure you receive each of these articles, go to:
http://www.All-In-One-Business.com/sap
Kevin Bidwell is owner of
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