Sample Content Preview

DIFFERENT PATHS TO MAKE MONEY WITH AFFILIATE MARKETING

When people talk about making money with affiliate marketing, they think about signing up as a publisher and trying to get people to pay them for advertising on their sites. That's definitely one way to make money with affiliate marketing, but it's not the only way! You can make money with affiliate marketing as a publisher, an advertiser, or as an owner of an affiliate marketing network. You don't even have to limit the paths you take. You can try all three!

MAKING MONEY AS A PUBLISHER

This path is the most downtrodden, but very few people explore all the potential to make money, even here. That's because most people are creatures of habit. They find one way to do something, and they never venture from that path, even when they find that the income isn't what they had hoped it would be. The fact is that if you limit yourself to just one advertiser, like Google, you won't be able to really explore the potential for affiliate marketing models that might work better with your niche audience.

So, while we are going to tell you that you can make money using Google Adsense, it's not the only advertising network out there. You can spend a lot of time trying to publish content that gets search engines to serve up high-prized ads on your site, and researching keywords to make campaigns that target high-paying ones. Or you can explore a few other places like Adbrite.com or independent affiliates at different affiliate banks who might give you a bigger return on your investment of time.

The key is not to join the biggest network out there, it's to understand your niche and your audience. To make money as a publisher of other people's affiliate offerings, your job is to match up your audiences wants and needs to the offerings that best meet them. So, you don't necessarily have to know a thing about keywords to get started being a publisher of affiliate offerings, but you do have to know what your audience will buy.

So, let's assume you have a website about winter sports. You can sign up for different affiliate programs that offer everything from winter sports equipment to exciting vacations at mountain resorts. All you have to do is locate those offers and publish them on your site and collect a commission. For that, you'll have to
probably join an affiliate bank so that you can find offers within your category and get started fairly quickly. We'll go over those a little later in this report.

MAKING MONEY AS AN ADVERTISER

Okay, now why would advertisers pay you to publish, if there wasn't money in it for themselves? Obviously, the returns can be a whole lot higher for the advertiser than the publisher, but most people don't figure that out when they think about making money with affiliate advertising. They think that affiliate advertising means they are the publishing affiliate partner, not the advertising partner.

Well, it can pay very well to be an affiliate advertiser who has created an affiliate program for their products and services. For one, you aren't paying a team of sales people to market your products without getting some results, whether it is more online exposure, a lead, or a sale. The best ways right now to make money for advertisers is to use a “cost-per-action” affiliate program that only pays publishers if a lead or a sale is completed. That way, you can measure the return on your investment in a quantifiable way.

For that, you will have to have enough credibility to be accepted into a CPA network and also enough upfront cash to pay for any fees associated with the program. While the returns for setting up an affiliate program as an advertiser are more than as a publisher, it also takes more money to start. So, that's why many people don't realize that there is money in advertising, otherwise, people wouldn't be doing it, but it does cost more to get off the ground.

MAKING MONEY AS A NETWORK OWNER

Let's say you are very technically savvy, have quite a bit of money to invest, and want to make some good money? Why not develop your own affiliate network. You will have to get a site up and running, and hire people to maintain it and do customer service, but you will also get to charge advertisers a 20 to 30% transaction fee in some cases. Or, you can use a model that has them pay a setup and transaction fee. As long as you have the pull to bring in both advertisers and publishers, you can set up your own profitable network and just enroll people into your program. Set up tools to track the affiliates and reports to help optimize programs. Hire affiliate managers who can manage the accounts too. As long as your advertisers are making money, you'll make money from their enrollments too.

WHAT YOU NEED TO GETTO MAKE MONEY ON THE THREE PATHS

There are really only three things that are important, whether you are a publisher, an advertiser, or a network owner. The issue is how to successfully market some product or service online and for that you need to get the three following things to happen:

• High Level Of Traffic As a publisher, you will want high levels of traffic coming to your offerings and doing the action necessary to collect a commission. As an advertiser, you want high levels of traffic too, so that you can make leads and sales. As a network owner, the more traffic your members get, the better odds that they will succeed and you can keep charging enrollment fees.

• Hot Niches It doesn't matter how much traffic you get, if what you are selling isn't interesting to a large number of people. You want to exploit the hot niches that interest a wide number of people and are profitable for you. It makes no difference whether you are an advertiser, a publisher, or a network owner. You have to start with a large amount of demand in the market to make it worthwhile to invest the time and effort to advertise products and services in that niche.

• Matching Demographics So, now you know, you can't make money without traffic or a market demand. What if you have great traffic, a hot niche of products and services, and the people aren't buying? It's because the demographics of the traffic have to match the niche. Once you have a match, the formula of traffic plus demand plus interested buyer yields you a nice profit.

Sample Content Preview

If you want to sell anything online, it’s actually not all that hard. I know that this is kind of a surprise to a lot of people. Some affiliate marketers who have been struggling would swear up and down that making sales online is nearly impossible.

Well, with the right traffic and the right sales materials, you are bound to generate sales from time to time. Closing a sale is not the problem. Generating consistent, high-value sales, that's the issue. Don't confuse the two.

Sadly, even if you are able to master the art of online sales, you may still continue to struggle. I understand that this is better than not generating any sales at all, but if you put in a lot of time, effort, and energy into generating online sales only to settle for a low middling mount, you're wasting your time. That’s the bottom line. As the old saying goes, “Either you go big or you go home.”

The name of the game when it comes to online sales success is return on effort. You heard that right. You’ve probably heard of the phrase “return on investment” millions of times before. Return on effort works on the same principle, but there is a slight difference.

With return on investment, you are trying to invest as little money as possible while getting as much return as you can. Pretty straightforward, very simple concept.

Similarly, if you're going to invest your time, attention, and focus in something, shouldn't you expect maximum rewards as well? This is the whole concept behind return on effort.

If you work for yourself, it's very easy to work around the clock for chump change. Believe me, I’ve done it. It's not pretty. Sure, you’re passionate about what you do. Oftentimes, it doesn't even feel like you're working. However, let me tell you, if you're going to invest your time, effort, and precious energy into something, don't you deserve to get the biggest reward out of all that investment?

Thankfully, there is a way out. You don't have to stick to the grind. You don't have to put in all these hours away from your loved ones just so you can put food on the table.

Using the high ticket sales secrets that I’m going to share with you in this book, you will learn how to maximize the return that you get for all your efforts. It is not rocket science. It all boils down to being at the right place, talking about the right things at the right time with the right people.

If you're able to line all those up, then you will get all the best results. At first, it may seem like this is very hard to set up. You only need to look at how high ticket sales people do it. When they started off, they were no better than you. In fact, in many cases, they knew less than you. Now, here they are, generating seven or even eightfigure annual sales. How do they do it? It all boils down to high ticket sales.

Make Sure You're in the Right Niche

Any discussion of high-ticket sales marketing must first begin with niche selection. Get this wrong and you are going to waste your time, effort and money.

This is non-negotiable. If you make a mistake with the niche that you pick to build your business on, you're going to fail. The truth is, not all niches pay the same.

Niches are essentially subject matter categories involving your target audience’s problems, needs, or interests. These are different subjects and they attract different audiences. Some audiences are willing to pay a lot of money. Other audiences are not as willing.

Even within the high paying audiences, there is a question of timing. There are certain products and service categories that compel people to spend a lot of money right away.

Unfortunately, these are relatively few. These are comparatively few when you line them up with all the other niches out there.

Ideally, this is where you should be. You should look for niches that pay really well, and people need to order merchandise or services almost immediately.

The Reality: Most Niches Pay Poorly

There, I said it. Most niches don't pay all that well.

Well, this might rub you the wrong way. You might tell me that when you check Google's Keyword Planner tool, you notice that a lot of niches that you're interested in actually command fairly high PPC (Pay Per Click) figures.

My answer is, "Look closer."

If you pay attention to those figures, it turns out that, in many cases, for people to click on an ad that pays that much, they must be really, really interested already. In other words, they have been prequalified and they are ready to buy.

That's usually not the case. Usually, people are interested in a wide range of topics, but they're not ready to buy.

They're ready to do a lot of research, they don't have a problem with comparing different sources of information, but when it comes to buying, they're not quite there.

This is why I can say, with utmost confidence, that most niches pay poorly when you look at immediacy.

It's not enough that people may pay good money for a particular range of merchandise or a particular type of service. That's not the issue.

The issue is how willing they are to pay.

Don't Build Your House on Sand

To make matters worse, the best niches (high pay, high demand) tend to get saturated very quickly. It's easy to see why.

You need to build your business on a solid foundation.

This means that your target niche must be lucrative enough and must have a high sense of buyer urgency. Otherwise, you are building your house on sand. You can build tons of these and end up making very little money.

Unless you want to play the volume game, where you are cranking out hundreds of websites, and each of these websites make, at best, a couple of dollars a day, you're going to have to be more careful about niche selection.

You have to be systematic and methodical regarding the type of business you build and the platform you choose to convert your traffic. You also have to be systematic about getting the right kind of traffic and qualifying it so it is more likely to convert. All of this boils down to selecting the right niche.

You Must Target the Right Client

In any kind of market, there will always be audience segmentation.

It's easy to think that just because you are targeting insurance as a niche, you can automatically assume you will make a lot of money.

On the surface, this seems very reasonable. After all, when you go to Google Keyword Planner tool and load up all sorts of insurance-related keywords, you get really high figures.

It's not uncommon for an insurance-related term to pay $30 or more per click. What's not to love? But here's the problem. That market has many segments.

Not everybody who looks for insurance online is ready to buy. Not everybody who is interested in buying an insurance policy is willing to pay top dollar.

In fact, in many cases, a lot of people looking for insurance would rather pay the least amount of money or take out the cheapest type of policy possible. Welcome to the world of market segmentation.

Audiences, in what seem like lucrative niches, have different needs. They tend to segment themselves.

There are people who are willing to pay top dollar immediately. There are people who are willing to pay top dollar later on. There are people who are not willing to pay market rates and are always looking for a bargain, but they are willing to buy now. Finally, there are people who are very cheap and are willing to wait.

Which of these audience members would it make sense for you to chase? This is not rocket science. It should be quite obvious.

Always Be Aware of the Differences Between Your Target Customers

Just because people are interested in the high value niche you are targeting, it doesn't mean that all your visitors will convert. If this is your assumption, I would not be surprised if you continue to struggle.

You're setting yourself up for a disappointment. You have to be aware of the differences between your audience members.

Sample Content Preview

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF BACKEND PROFITS

Most businesses spend too much time trying to gain new customers and fail to recognize the immense goldmine that they have in their existing customers. The fact is that the people most likely to buy from you are those people who have already bought from you! That's why backend marketing can help to boost your profits, even when new customers are few and far between. As a strategy to survive and thrive in a recession, it's hard to beat backend marketing.

WHY IT WORKS

Backend marketing works because people are the most suggestible in buying behavior just after they've made a decision to buy. Once they overcome resistance to purchasing from you, they've given you their trust. You no longer have to market to overcome buying resistance; instead, you market to them to have them buy even more from you.

For the business owner, it works because it's easy to implement backend strategies, whether you are an online or a retail business. It just takes a bit of conscious attention to the actual purchasing transaction and understanding when to offer customers an upsell or a more expensive item. Once you get the hang of this, it's a very easy way to increase the bottom line without spending tons of time advertising.

STRATEGIES ARE SIMPLE

Strategies are deceptively simple and work best when implemented with consistency. While it doesn't take much to ask someone if he/she wants a pair of socks to go with a set of shoes he/she just bought, if you don't have that step planned out, you can miss that opportunity. It works best when you use these strategies at specific times and quite consistently.

When planning your sales funnel, you should include deliberate methods to sell backend offers. It shouldn't ever be an afterthought; it should be a carefully planned marketing strategy. It may look like a simple question or an additional ad that is carefully placed on a thank you form, but it's a planned attempt to get your visitors to open their wallets wider. Don't miss an opportunity to increase your bottom line, particularly when the customer is in the mood to buy – which is usually when they've just agreed to buy. By paying attention to your sales funnel and strategies, you can set up a maze of offers that are subtle yet powerful motivators to sell.

THE PLANNED SALES FUNNEL

A sales funnel is the way that you can get an unidentified visitor to self-identify himself/herself and to join your marketing program. The first step is to turn anonymous visitors into real live email addresses that have given you permission to contact them. Without knowing who is visiting your site, you'll never be able to execute a successful sales funnel. That's just the mouth of the sales funnel. After that, you should have some steps set up to place people in particular demographic groups that you then intend to market to in some way.

Whether it is a new or an old customer, they should all be in some area of your sales funnel. Your sales funnel should include backend offers at regular intervals, in emails, in forms, in various types of promotions. It should include various email campaigns. It should track the sales of your offers and how to upgrade people to other lists if they self-identify themselves as big spenders.

THE DOUBLE OPT-IN FORM

When people first visit, your priority is to get them to register via a frontend offer. This can be a free report, ebook, discount coupon, or some other offer that is given to them in appreciation for subscribing to your email list. Once they've entered the mouth of your sales funnel, the double opt-in form, then you have a perfect right to market to them in any way that you choose, frontend or backend.

The double opt-in form also works great as a way to start the process of marketing to new clients because it weeds out spammers and fake email addresses. In order to receive the freebie, the customer has to verify his/her email address by going to his/her inbox and clicking a link to verify. This then verifies the account, and he/she is fully registered and is sent to the download area where he/she can see the freebie.

WITHIN THE FREEBIE, DO A BACKEND OFFER

While your first few emails should remain friendly and casual, whatever it is that you've offered them as bait to sign up, it should include some backend offers. If it's a report, you should include a description on some good tools or services that you're selling or on other products, even affiliate offers. Ask for referrals too for anyone that might like a free copy of whatever it is that you are giving away.

Sample Content Preview

NICHES: HOT SPOTS THAT DRIVE INTERNET MARKETING

Whether you are just getting into Internet marketing or have been doing this for a while, you know that developing a niche is key to the success of your Internet marketing efforts. After all, when you are in business on the Internet, you don't necessarily have to produce a particular product first to market it. You don't even have to provide a service to market that either.

Online marketing makes it easy for anyone to get into business, whether they have experience in any specific business or not. The entire world of products and services are open to market on the Internet, as long as you know how to market using infoproducts and affiliate marketing to sell online. So, where do you start? Isn't it too overwhelming? That's where a market niche becomes an indispensable tool to help you target profitable and interesting markets that can bring attention to your website and help you be successful in your chosen Internet marketing venture.

This report will tell you how to locate hot spots in Internet marketing topics in a methodical way that anyone can follow. This will save you from implementing topics that you may be passionate about, but in reality have very little market value. It will also help you locate the most profitable areas to be in and to time them to get in when they will yield riches without too much extra effort. When you know how to pick out great hot spots for topics you will find that your Internet marketing gets quicker and easier.

WHY PASSION ISN'T ENOUGH

Many experts advise you to follow your passion and the money will follow. While this may seem like good advice, the Internet is such a vast landscape that to maximize the potential that your passion matches what people are actually searching for online you need a better plan. So, while passion is a good indication that you will be interested enough to pursue a topic longterm, it's not necessarily the only ingredient you need to succeed.

You actually need to know what topics are popular and being search actively on the Internet, to start understanding how to locate a hot topic. In addition, as an Internet marketer, you want to pick a topic that is profitable, and there are ways to do that using tools like the Google Keyword Tool, which will be discussed later more indepth. And, finally, you want to know how competitive the niche is, so that you find a pool that hasn't been over-fished by bigger players.

In Internet marketing terms, what you want to find are hot spot topics that have the following characteristics:

• High demand Many people are interested in searching for this topic and they are keying in various phrases to the search engines that can be mined for traffic and profit.

• High Cost-Per-Click (CPC) Google establishes the CPC for keywords and phrases. Based on that, you can tell when one word or phrase is more profitable than another based on what advertisers are willing to pay a publisher per click of that keyword or phrase.

• Low Competition Since most Internet marketers know that they want a high demand or high CPC to get good niches for profit, they are usually highly competitive too. However, there are still some out there that you can find that are not as competitive and we'll show you how to locate them.

• Advertisers Present You want to also find hot spots that are of interest to affiliate or marketing advertisers. At least 20 advertisers for the hot spot shows it is good to try out.

TWO METHODS TO IDENTIFY THE HOT SPOTS

There are two methods to locate the hot spots in Internet marketing topics: brainstorming them or researching them. Brainstorming is not a bad idea, but if you use it, you should also research and analyze your ideas to make sure they are viable.

BRAINSTORMING

Here, you want to start engaging your creativity to find hot spots that you are passionate about that might have some potential to be great niches. One way to start is to just start trying to look at things from the point of view of a consumer. What are the burning issues consumers are trying to solve? These are the things they will be searching online to resolve.