Glend Article

the affiliate diary

Author: glend

One way to make piles and piles of cash is with an opt-in list. I remember a
talk I had with a friend who was pretty short term about the returns he wanted
from affiliate marketing – “I don’t care about having an asset, I am just
interested in the immediate returns for minimal effort”.

Hmmm…

And so it is for 90% of people out there. But, at the same time, a lot of the
money is really in the list. And a lot of short-term money is in the promotions
that you can cue up from day one. The idea is simple; someone signs up to one
of your mailing lists, and gets 10 e-mails recommending a few different
products within the first month. At some point in the chain, they make a
purchase (by day 30 they have been hit by so many different sales letter
techniques, and so many pre-sells, that they have to admit defeat and
purchase at some point!).

Most affiliates have issues with setting up an auto responder, and queuing up
twenty emails – and building trust, and all this other long-term stuff.

And that’s understandable - I didn’t want to take the long-term route when I
started either, and that’s why the affiliate diary technique is as efficient and
effortless as possible. You aren’t going to waste your time writing dozens of
articles, and the returns should come in nicely from day one. I will explain
how the method works, and what kind of returns you can expect. Once more
this method clashes with traditional Internet marketing paradigms in some
subtle but all important ways.

The method

1) Find a niche with desperate beginners with lots of products to choose
from

2) Set-up your squeeze page using the methods outlined below / or use
the drop down box on the pre-sell page you use

3) Write your “welcome” email

4) Choose 3 products to promote and queue up 10 pre-sells (created the
easy way, I will return to this)

5) Promote your site using one of the methods outlined below

Why this method works

When it comes to list building and email marketing, most marketers fall into
one of four camps. The first are guys who truly believe in the value of a list, but
either don’t have the inclination or knowledge to build one. Many of this
group could be persuaded to list build if someone showed them the right way.
The second group can’t be bothered – these guys are a dead loss.

The third group is comprised of marketers who understand the list, are in the
process of building one, and yet heavily under utilize their list (i.e. they spend
too much time building trust and not enough time making money, and this is
something that the guru’s can be partly held guilty for). I learnt the hard way
that it is better to over-sell than under-sell – I am trying to make money not
friends, remember. And I like to level with everyone about that.

There is a fourth category of email marketers – who understand the value of a
good, responsive list, but also know that the aim of list building is to make
money and not friends. These guys introduce themselves, build some trust
and then get right into the promotional material.

You will notice that many of the big names in the Internet marketing industry
spend their time selling their own and other people’s products rather than
providing masses of free content to their list. The same guys will recommend
that you spend months building trust with your list and then – almost as if you
should feel guilty about it – send out a soft-sell and hope they buy.

We are going to take their lead and do as they do and not as they say; we are
going to focus on the short-term moneymaking side of things, without
compromising the trust our list has in us. Let me show you how…

Find a niche with lots of desperate buyers

For this method to work, we need to find a niche with lots of beginners who
are desperate for information on a certain area – two good examples are
gambling and any sub-niche of Internet marketing. That is a general point
that will aid you in your quest to find profitable niches.

But how exactly do you find your niches?

Well, I find the majority of my niches using the product selection methods
outlined later in this guide such as the “thief in the night” method and the
“copy the best” method – you should follow my lead and build your product
portfolio as detailed later in the guide (this is an ongoing process rather than a
destination).

I will return to these points later, but as you will see, product selection is an
ongoing process that leverages off other people’s work.

Time for another paradigm shift - hot products are not discovered by the
“neat” and “in a box” keyword research tools in most cases (at least not in
2006). The process is, to a certain extent, about keeping your ear to the
ground and hustling through many possible candidates while you constantly
refine your short-list – using the methods that super affiliates use, the same
ones I uncover in my later methods.

I suggest you move onto the next step and wait for me to explain my product
selection methods later. Then, choose your niches off the back of the “hot”
products you discover.

To be continued…

Set-up your squeeze page

Now that we have located our niche, we need to set-up our squeeze page and
try to solicit names to our list. A squeeze page, remember, is basically a one
page website with the sole purpose of collecting names to our list.

A good squeeze page can attract signup rates as high as 70% (some say higher,
although I haven’t seen it), meaning many subscribers entering your
marketing “funnel” to be sold over and over again by repeated e-mail
promotions. Which sounds great, doesn’t it?

Our squeeze page has the following features:

1. An eye-grabbing headline that attacks the majority of products in the
industry

2. An introduction – who are you? – Build authority and empathy (you
were like them three months ago, you learned what worked and what
didn’t, were successful and now you can tell them how to do it too)

3. Bullet-points: what you are offering to anyone who signs up

4. Call to action

5. Privacy statement

6. Signup box

All of that information should fit on a single web page without the user having
to scroll down (the information is said to be “above the fold” of the page when
the user does not need to scroll down). This, coupled with the above
techniques, will ensure a high subscription rate, which leads us onto the next
stage.

Now for the important bit that most list builders miss…

Re-directing signups - to recoup all of your advertising costs fast
AND still have a name to market to in the future

When a user signs up to your web page, you will want to send them to a page
that makes you short term money – this is a very important point, and I am
about to explain to you how we can have the best of both worlds.

Now, there are essentially two options here: the first option is to simply send
all signups through to an affiliate link for a product you are going to be
recommending. A second, more advanced, option is to send the subscriber
through to a pre-sell page for one of the products you want to promote, with a
twist (I discuss the twist in a moment).

Whenever a person complies with one request (in this case, signing up to your
newsletter), they are far more likely to comply with further requests from that
person (in this case, purchasing a product). This is due to a psychological
principle called “commitment and consistency”. That’s our amateur
psychology moment over and done with.

Tip: if you decide to redirect subscribers to your pre-sell page, try and get
them to make an impulse purchase to ensure maximum sales and recoup your
ad spend fast: recouping your ad spend fast means you can start marketing to
the list knowing that you are in profit from the start.

With that in mind, what we are going to do is offer them a bonus that is only
available from that page – you already know about creating bonuses (see the
leech method above). But we are not done. One thing that will guarantee
maximum conversions is to redirect your subscribers to a pre-sell page that
offers a time-sensitive bonus.

In other words you are going to state that this bonus is only available via the
“thank you for joining us / pre-sell” web page, and that they will only have one
chance to order the product and get hold of the package with the bonus – and
once they have clicked off that page they will not be able to get that bonus ever
again.

Using time sensitive offers is something that the most successful product
vendors know about and use regularly (Mike Filsaime talks about the use of
the “one time offer” a great deal in his “Butterfly Marketing” product and
manuscript - http://www.butterflymarketingmanuscript.com/). However,
very few affiliates put it to good use and it’s a shame because it is a very
powerful technique.

One theme that I should have pushed on you by now is that the most
successful affiliates add value to their promotions and break away from the
competition (I wouldn’t want to compete with an affiliate using all of these
techniques, but I sure would want to buy from them).

They really make it so that the buyer does want to buy through their link – no
trickery, no push technique – they really do want to purchase from you. If you
use the time-sensitive bonus off the back of a squeeze page, then you should
recoup your ad spend costs extremely quickly – in many cases you will return
all of the costs of your ad spend right away, leaving the potential earnings
from your list as pure profit.

One final point about your re-direct page: you should use your star product,
the one you believe will do the best for you and push that hard via your presell.
If you set-up the squeeze page and yet your returns aren’t as high as you
expected, you should consider promoting another product – using a recycled
version of the pre-sell and bonus you already have. In fact, you can test
different products over and over again, and track the returns.

Now, it’s time to set-up our auto-responder series.

Write your welcome e-mail

Now that you have created your squeeze page, your re-direct page and set up
your auto responder, we need to create the first e-mail that will go out to our
list – this is the welcome e-mail.

In my welcome e-mail I like to do three things and I suggest you do them too:

- Introduce yourself: explain who you are, and why they should listen to
you – remember you must build both trust and authority if they are
going to buy off your recommendations, so do not sell yourself short

- Explain what is about to come: pre-sell your recommendations so that
when they come, real anticipation is already there Important

- Give them some tips – spend some time on this, it’s the only pure
content section that you will be giving out after this. I suggest you
spend some time jamming a lot of good info into this one article.

For example:

Hey [name],

Thank you for subscribing to the Cut-throat affiliate newsletter. You have
made a very wise decision.

Affiliate marketing can be immensely profitable, but it can also be truly
unforgiving for those who don’t know what works and what doesn’t.

This newsletter is about getting you on the right side of the curve, using the
techniques that I learnt the *hard way*

My name is Jim Bob, and I have been an affiliate for a little over six months
– my first four months were unsuccessful, and it was only when I hit on
certain underground methods that I finally cracked the code. No-one told me
these techniques, and I had to discover them the hard way. Over the next few
days, I will pull you into my inner circle and let you in on what I learnt.

As of June of this year, I became fully self-employed and told my boss where
he could stick his job. I am going to show you how to achieve the same
success as me in much less time. I am currently making a little over $300 per
day promoting other people’s products, and I set this site up to show people
like you how to do the exact same.

Specifically, over the next few days, I will show you:

- How I set-up a $340/week income stream in a little under an hour

- The best kept secret in affiliate marketing (they don’t want you to know this
one!)

- The underground “five sigma” method for finding and copying super
affiliates

- …and much, much more…

In fact, I am going to explain to you exactly how to go from where you are
now to professional affiliate – using the exact same methods, products and
techniques I used.

Today, I want to give you quick snapshot of what is to come.

The three techniques I want to talk to you about today are…etc etc….

Notice how their appetite has been whet for what is to come. As I say, try and
cram your content into that first e-mail – good content.

This email serves all of our purposes, and has established you as a trustable
authority, while building interest in our future emails.

Super advanced technique: one method that a friend of mine has been
using recently (for a non-IM list) is to write an opening paragraph welcoming
his members to the list, and then refer them straight to a Camtasia video,
introducing himself, giving a few tips away and then he spends the rest of the
video building authority and trust.

If you hear someone’s voice, you feel like you have really connected to the
person – meaning trust and a real relationship – and far, far higher
conversions when you do decide to recommend something (which you may
also want to do in video form, see my earlier commentary on this).

Another super advanced technique: one product which was launched a
few weeks after Project X is Dominating ClickBank. What caught my eye
about this particular product was a section on selling reseller products via
ClickBank and making use of the affiliate network… with a product / sales
letter you don’t even own.

This in itself is a very powerful idea, and one that gives affiliates an easy way
to enter the profitable world of the ClickBank vendor. That being said, a
second powerful idea came out of the product: you can potentially combine
the one time offer angle with a reseller product you have bought the rights to.

The reason that this is such a powerful angle is as follows: you find a niche
that you would like to build a list in, and you decide you want to quickly test
an Adwords campaign (emphasis on quickly). You can take your standard
“opt-in” page template and edit it to fit the niche, then buy resell rights for a
product in that niche, edit the sales letter down (the products normally come
with sales letters) and put it as your one time offer at a low price.

The whole process can be done in a few hours – and you have a product
already created, ready to subsidize the cost of running those Adwords clicks,
while you build your list.

You should just Google [niche + resale] or [niche + reseller], for example
[adsense resale] to find relevant products.

When Dominating ClickBank was released, I actually put together a video
bonus series on this very subject with an e-book summary of the product and
the bonus; this was an exclusive for my members, but in case you want to
explore this theme in more depth, you already have the link for my leech v2
pre-sell: http://www.leavethedayjob.com/clickbank

Choose four products to promote

In truth, you will probably want to find the products you are going to promote
right at the start of this process – and fit the method onto the products rather
than the other way around (everything follows on from having great, well
converting products). As I say, I spend real time covering my underground
product selection methods later, but let’s start off with the “basic” method I
started off using to choose niches.

This is useful when you think a niche is hot, and prefer to buck my advice and
“fit the products to the niche” (ill advised but it can be done if the niche is hot
enough), then you should do the following…

We need to choose a niche that we know something about – you don’t have to
know too much about the niche, but you should know about something (it will
make everything else far easier). (If that brings you to a dead-end, then just
wait for my product selection techniques coming up later…)

When you have a niche in mind, you can research and find products any
number of ways, all of them extremely simple:

1) Post a request on a forum in the niche, simply asking “what products
are best in the niche” – very often the dialogue will turn into a big
argument as purists vex their own opinions, but it’s a very efficient way
of letting those in the know do your research for you Important

2) Search related terms on Adwords and make a note of any information
product that you come across that has an affiliate program

3) Use some of my other product selection methods (see later in the
manual for these) Very important

4) Search through the ClickBank marketplace, but try to involve one of the
product selection methods I cover later and don’t just “freestyle” your
way and choose any product

Once you have a shortlist of possible products, you will need to check the
affiliate page of the merchant, and see if he has a “standard” pre-sell, in other
words, a pre-sell which he provides which you can automatically send out to
your list (or in our case, queue it up).

In many cases, the merchant will have one sitting there for you to use.
Tip: don’t just copy and paste his pre-sell. The standard pre-sell will have lots
of good content, but we should edit it, taking parts we don’t like and cutting
them, and adding our own spin on things. Also, preface your pre-sells with a
paragraph or two of content – and then launch into your pre-sell.

If there is no standard pre-sell given, then you will need to e-mail the
Webmaster and ask him for one, and if he doesn’t have one, then you will have
to create your own, which brings us onto the next step.

Writing the pre-sell

So, now we have chosen three products to promote, created our squeeze page
and our one-time offer redirect page, and written our welcome email (possibly
with a welcome video to build additional trust). Very often either the product
owner will have a standard pre-sell for you to edit and tweak to your liking,
but if not, you will need to write your own.

An e-mail pre-sell/recommendation is pretty much the same as the one you
would do for the leech – so see the above guidelines if in doubt.
Given that the pre-sell is going to be in e-mail format, though, there are a
number of additional pointers.

Firstly, since you have their e-mail address, you will want to write a follow-up
too. The best follow-ups are interactive, and create a sense of “everyone who is
on this list has bought this product, and we are all ecstatic. I assume you were
one of the smart ones, but if you haven’t got it then get it right away!”

Secondly, remember that – unlike the earlier pre-sell – the people we are
sending the e-mail out do not know about the product. They did not search for
it, and they are not pre-sold, so we will need to sell the product to them.

Finally, for this method, you will need to sign up to the newsletters I
mentioned earlier and pay very close attention to how products are
recommended by the gurus: watch how they lead into the promotion, how
they call the subscriber to action… just read as many of them as possible and
absorb the writing style.

Other than that, refer to the earlier pre-sell information.

You are also going to need a “follow-up” to your pre-sell; a follow-up is, as the
name suggests, a second e-mail that follows up on the earlier e-mail. We presell
the product a second time, repeating the benefits of the product and
recommending the product a second time.

Once more, this follows on from the pre-sell guidelines outlined earlier.

Once you have done that and you have written your pre-sells, queue up your emails
as follows:

Day 0 – welcome email
Day 1 – content email
Day 2 – content email (and mention tomorrow’s promotion)
Day 3 – product 1 email
Day 5 – product follow-up
Day 9 – product 2 email
Day 11 – product 2 follow-up
Day 14 – product 3 follow-up
Day 16 – product 3 follow-up

Promote your site

Now that we have our site set-up and our messages queued up, all we need is
traffic. When promoting your site, you have several options – firstly, you can
get traffic using the article method outlined next.

The problem with this method is that it is slow and takes time to see returns.
You may also only be able to target so many keywords for each product /
niche; this is fine if you have ten products to promote, but your squeeze page
ties you to this one niche.

I suggest you do use the article method, especially if your budget is tight, and
you have more time than money – but make it part of a wider promotional
strategy.

Secondly, you can use Adwords to promote your site. I suggest you start off
with as large a keyword list as possible to promote your site (see the keyword
research methods in the workhorse method below), and use Google’s
conversion tracking to see where the signups are coming from: this should
become very clear within 50-200 clicks.

You can then cut / lower the bids on the poor-performing keywords and up
the bids on your better converting keywords. Adwords will provide you with a
solid return on investment, especially if you use the one-time bonus pre-sell
page as detailed above.

Thirdly, you may want to consider using the “underrated promotional
methods” outlined in Section 3 of this manual. These techniques will generate
good returns time and time again.

Tip: setting up your squeeze page and queuing up your auto responder
messages takes time. You may want to only write your squeeze page and queue
up a small number of messages before you start promoting the page. Then, if
you start to see signups (along with a few sales), you can go ahead and finish
what you started.
Full disclosure: I have a friend who will put up a squeeze page with no content
in it. The subscriber is added to a list that in effect doesn’t exist, and is
redirected to a page telling them that their name has not been added, not to
try again, and that there is a fatal error with the signup process.

He lets it run for a few days, tracking conversions, until he is sure there is a
potential niche there. This method is extremely effective but may make some
of you feel bad for deceiving people. If you are going to steal his method, I
suggest you let the buyer in on what is going on and send them some kind of
bonus as an apology: also let them know that you have deleted their e-mail.
Don’t try and use their e-mail later on. Just delete their names from your
database, send them their bonus, and forget about it.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008 at 9:48 pm and is filed under Affiliate Tips, Work At Home. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.