Affiliate videos

No one would deny the power and popularity of video. People love watching videos and that’s why they’re everywhere. About the only thing that keeps people’s attention anymore is video. So why wouldn’t you use it in your affiliate business?

Here are a few ideas for creating affiliate videos:

• Record your testimonial
• Record a walk-through
• Do an ordering video
• Sneak peak

Testimonials

This is probably the easiest of all. Simply turn on your recorder and talk. It doesn’t have to be professional or polished. Listening to your honest endorsement makes your viewers feel comfortable buying. And the mess-ups or mistakes just make the video more real. So serious, just turn on the camera and talk. If you don’t want to be in front of the camera use one of the other methods.

Do a video walk-through

This technique works slightly more subconsciously. Make this more like a tutorial helping them use the product. And in the process you’re actually selling the product. If it’s useful, then what you’re teaching just makes people want it. So just make sure you’re demoing a good product.

Do an ordering video

This could be the most powerful method of all. Record yourself placing an order. Watching you make a live purchase will inspire your viewer like nothing else. First of all it’s what’s called “social proof”. Once they see you doing it, they feel more secure. It also build your viewers trust. Your advice is easier to trust if they can see you’re doing what you tell them to do. And finally, it creates envy. People want what they see you getting. You can add some extra punch to this by ending with: If you want to see the inside, you’ll have to order it yourself.

Do a preview video

This is a great way to build value. What you do is record a tour of the back end. You show them the entire contents of what they get. And it helps soften the skeptics. Once they’ve seen the back-end, they know it’s real.

It’s easy!

There’s no technical knowledge required. There are simple software programs that make it easy to create videos. The software really does all the work So there’s no need to even think about the technical side. Remain focused on the benefits:

• Make more money Using videos in your affiliate marketing will dramatically increase your sales. Start using videos because people love them.
• Lower refund rates You’ll also have less of your commissions taken back. Your customers will know what they’re getting into ahead of time. So, very few of them will cancel their order.
• Rise above the competition! Adding video is so simple. And almost no one is doing it. So, you’ll be way ahead of the crowd.

Get started right now and take your affiliate marketing to the next level. It’s your profit that’s affected by not taking action.

Now you now why. Here’s how:

Here are the three components of list building:

• The Squeeze Page
• The Bribe
• The Thank You Page

Your Landing Page – Your opt-in page is the page you send visitors to to build your list. This is where they will enter their email address. That’s why it needs to look like a professionally designed page. And have an easy to understand opt-in form. And have a clear call to action.

If you fail to make a strong close, you’re wasting your efforts. This is a definitive message that tells your visitor what to do. You opt-in rates will take a dramatic nose dive without it. Oddly, if you don’t make it clear, people will be confused and end up doing nothing.

If you want to add some extra juice to your opt-in page make it a video squeeze page. You only have a few second to get your visitors attention – video helps! It also allows you to tell them what to do several times. Then at the end of the video you can print “sign up now” on the video.

Now, don’t worry if you have no idea how to make videos. Hiring out-sourced help to do it for you only costs $150 – $250. You can also find ready-made list building tools that have everything pre-built for you.

The Incentive – Next, you’ve got to figure out what your bribe is. People need a good reason to part with their email address. Most people are very protective of their email address. So make your “bribe” a good one!

You have to provide value in your bribe for it to be good. That means you make it something people would actually want to receive. And can benefit from. A few ideas:

• A PDF report
• Some useful software
• A video
• An email series

Basically, you just need some content. And make it both helpful and informative. And nothing sells like “free”. If you make it good enough, they will give you their email in exchange.

If you’re worried about creating this content, don’t be. Here again, you can hire freelancers to create this for you. Simply tell them what the topic is and they can write the content. A 5-part email series is a good freebie. You can have ghost writers create emails for under $25 an email. And whole thing will only cost a hundred and fifty buck.

There are also list building products that include the follow up email series. There are two important things about the email series. First, it must provide value to your subscribers. It also has to generate revenue for you! The easiest way to do this is to market affiliate products in the emails. This is such a simple solution because you don’t have to create the product. And you can earn some commissions immediately from your emails.

The Thank You Page – The “thank you” page is the final piece of the puzzle. This is the page your subscriber sees after they opt in. A great thing to do here is provide some immediate value. That way, they feel glad that they gave you their email address. And it helps you establish the relationship. Then they’re more receptive when you email them.

Again, a simple solution to this is to get an email marketing package that includes everything. You can also put the whole thing together on your own. And write it all yourself. Or have someone ghost write for you.

Summary

Whether you decide to build your email funnel yourself. Or if you hire people to do this for you. Or go with a complete package. It’s just important that you start today building your opt-in list. Once you’ve got it built. You’re free to make money at the push of a button.

If you want to make more money as an affiliate, you must presell.

First, what is preselling? Preselling is both an art and a science. It’s a process of taking your reader and getting them ready to buy. Then sending them to the product sales page to make the purchase. When done correctly, your reader will not even notice.

Basically, you give them some content. And give them a link to the product you’re preselling. In just a minute, I’ll explain exactly how to presell. First, it’s important to understand why we do it. Just a few of the reasons you want to presell.

• Preselling creates trust – Readers who trust you are more likely to click your links. And the more traffic you can send to the sale page, the more commissions you’ll earn.
• It disarms your reader – When you’re not hyping or pitching a product, your reader lets their guard down. Unguarded reading means they’re not filtering what you say. And your intention is conveyed more easily.
• It puts them in a buying mood – Your readers are now receiving your message. Being open means, they are open to everything you give them. Like the info on product sales page you’ve linked to. Sending them to the sales page in this state makes them more receptive to the actual pitch.
• Your commissions go up – Now your reader arrives at the sales page in a buying mood. With a feeling of trust and openness. This dramatically boosts your sales rate!
• Your customers are happier – Your referral now feels like they decided to buy. Instead of feeling pressured or “sold”. And this makes them feel better about the product they purchased.
• Preselling increases your bottom line – Happy customers ask for refunds much less often. And that translates to more commission staying in your affiliate business.

Obviously, it’s important to presell. You increase your profits. And produce happier customers. Everybody wins!

Now, here’s how preselling works:

You’ve learned the importance of preselling. And hopefully you’re convinced you need to start doing it. So, it’s time to break down how it works. As I mentioned earlier, it’s both an art and a science.

Mastering the art

The first step is in getting your readers to trust you and open up. And the only method of doing this is to give exceptional value to your readers. The art of this is to provide enough information to be of value, but not enough to satiate the hunger. The idea is that they want more and the sales page you send them to gives them more. Plus they’re not guarded, so they’re more open and likely to purchase the product.

It’s also a science

There are also several key elements that need to be included.

The first is how you present the information. You’ve got to map out your strategy before you start writing. Your goal is to sell the product you’re promoting. You use the information to do this in one of two ways. One way is to give them enough info to whet the appetite, but not enough to satisfy it. The second way is to provide all the information and let your reader discover how hard it is to actually implement it. Either way, the product sales page solves the problem.

You also have to link to the product you’re promoting discretely. Instead, you use a direct link to the product website. That’s because nobody likes to click on affiliate links. But how will you earn affiliate commissions if you don’t use your affiliate link? This is all part of the science of preselling. You use an image tag to cookie your reader before they leave your site.

You also want to link to the sales page from inside your article’s content. Hyperlinked words are clicked more than anything else. And if the words you hyperlink relate, your reader will naturally click them for more information.

Putting all of this together creates a powerful affiliate marketing formula for success.

Unfortunately…

This process is not easy – at all! Think about everything that goes into crafting an effective preselling article: Awesome content. The entire process depends on your being able to provide useful information to your readers. Which means you need to be both knowledgable on the subject and capable of writing a high-quality article. Writing to presell. Yes, you must providing useful content. You also have to present the info in a way that provides real value. And somehow also make them want to learn more. Or make the information so overwhelming they realize they can’t do it on their own.

Product selection. Next, you’ve got to pick the right product to presell. If you can manage to get the article written well. You’ve wasted all your effort if the product doesn’t sell well.

Technical skills. To be most effective you have to use the “covert cookie” method. This is actually pretty simple – just embed a 1 pixel X 1 pixel image and set your affiliate link as the “source” of the image. (But if you do it wrong, you won’t get paid for the traffic you send.)

Wrapping it up:

Now you know exactly how to presell effectively. Using these techniques will increase your affiliate sales by 500% or more! The important thing is to use these techniques for everything you promote as an affiliate. Take action now. Put in the effort to reap the greater rewards.

Let’s talk about how to generate traffic…

These are the best and fastest ways to get free visitors coming to your site:

• Web 2.0 Sites
• Article Websites
• Video

And here’s how to use each method…

Web 2.0 Methods

A Web 2.0 site gives its users the ability to interact with each other and create the site’s content together. These are great sites to work with because they allow you to participate in this content creation. The other interesting thing about these sites is that all the search engines (including Google) treat them as “authority sites”. Which means the content on them gets “indexed” faster and with more weight. By placing links to your websites in this content you’ve created, you get traffic from the site and search engine ranking for the keywords you choose. This is the hidden benefit of using Web 2.0 sites. How to generate web 2.0 traffic is something we’ve only scratched the surface on. I don’t want to be exhaustive – I want to give you an overview of all the methods…

Articles Sites

The next thing we want to talk about is article marketing. Article sites are in essence web 2.0 websites. In typical web 2.0 fashion, article sites rely on user-generated content (i.e. your articles). And because they are also considered authority sites by the search engines you get all the benefits of other web 2.0 sites just by putting your articles on them. But you also get the extra benefit of other users taking your article and putting it on their site. And along with your article, they have to include your author information and a link back to you – so you get more free traffic and SEO benefits. In order to get the most free traffic make sure you:

• Do your keyword research
• Write specifically to target these keywords
• Use anchor text links in the article and the “resource box”

Video

The last of this group is video marketing. Just like article directories, video sharing sites also rely on user-generated content. And it carries all the same benefits of article marketing. And in addition to this, because Google and the others love video so much, you can get listed for highly competitive keywords much more easily.

OK, so how do you do effective video marketing?

• Set up your YouTube account
• When people view your videos, you want them to visit your site, so turn all the other modules in your profile off
• Put relevant “tags” in your profile
• Make sure to include in your profile a link to your site
• Upload at least 1 video
• In the title, the description and the tags for each video, include your main keywords

Putting it all together.

This is a great overview to get your started generating massive traffic to your site.

Step 1 – Find a Fanatical Market

The first step in developing a profitable membership business is to find a market with fanatics in it. Simply put, a fanatic is someone who’s willing to spend time and more importantly money on a topic they are interested in. Now that we know what we’re looking for, let’s talk about how to find them…

• Here’s something you may not have considered – magazines! We’re so internet-based these days, it’s easy to forget about them. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to run a print magazine. So if you see one on the shelves you know they are making money, which means that there are enough people interested in what they’re saying to make it profitable. That doesn’t mean definitely that it will make a good membership business, but it’s a good starting point.
• Pay attention throughout the day in your regular activities. See what people are talking about on the radio, TV, at parties, in public, etc. If people are talking about it, they are interested in it. Which means you can start a membership business providing information on it.
• Again, looking in the physical world for clues you can tell there are lots of people interested in something if there are clubs and organizations around the topic. Likewise, if there are enough people to hold a convention, there are definitely enough people to fill your membership website.
• What about your interests and hobbies? There’s a good chance that others are interested in these things, as well. The icing on the cake here is that you get to build a business doing something you love.
• Another fantastic way to discover what people are interest in is Google Trends. Google Trends tells you the most popular current search terms. The reason people are searching Google for info on these topics is because they are interested. And the fact that it’s made it into Google Trends tells you LOTS of people are interested. Hot topics that people are excited about make great niches for your membership website.

Second – Analyze the “commerciality”

Once you found a potential niche or topic to center your membership site around, you need to figure out if you can actually make any money in it. One way to figure this out is to see if other are making money in it.

Here’s a punch list for figuring out if anyone’s making money in your niche:

• Find out if there are blogs or forums related to it. Just search Google for “YourNiche blog” & “YourNiche forum” and see what comes up. This tells you there are people who are actively interested in your niche.
• See if other people are creating and selling product in this niche by searching in Google Shopping, ebay and Amazon. If other people are creating and selling products in this niche, it means there is money to be made.
• Monitor Google Adwords to determine if people are running the same ads for weeks in a row. If they are, this means they’re making money on these ads – otherwise, they’d stop running them. Which means there is money to be made in your niche.

Last, but not least… How hard will it be to break into this niche?

Once you’ve found a niche and figured out that there is money to be made in, you need to determine if you can break into this niche. How do you gauge the ease of entry?

• Look at the product types in this niche. You want to find a niche where information products are being sold as the norm. Membership websites based on information are the easiest to start and maintain.
• The last thing you want is a marketing filled with tons of competitors. A few means it’s a profitable niche, but too many means you won’t be able to take a piece of it.
• Unless the market is just so big that it doesn’t matter how many competitors there are, you want to limit the competition. So evaluate the size vs. the competition.
• How quickly do people in this market make buying decisions and are the ready to buy? Depending on the market it can be anywhere from a couple minutes to a many months between when someone starts the investigation process to when they actually make a purchase.

Putting it all together

So far, we’ve talked about exactly what it takes to pick a great niche: One with a hungry crowd of fanatics, who are ready to spend money on information about their topic. And you’ve determined your barrier to entry is small enough to give it a go. If you’ve followed along with these steps you’re success in practically guaranteed. The only thing left to cover is exactly how to run your membership business…

But, first…

Keyword research is really the first step in getting traffic to your website. The reason this is so important is that you are going to be building content and traffic sources for specific keywords. So you need to make sure the keywords you’re targeting are worth targeting.

Here are the important considerations for your research:

• How competitive are the keywords you’re going after? This involves doing some competitive analysis to determine the ease of entry for each keyword
• Will the keywords you’re targeting bring buyers? If you don’t do your research you’ll end up with a lot of traffic that doesn’t buy from you. You want to generate visitors ready to buy.
• What about affiliates? Generating your own customers is great – having other people do it for you is even better. So, it’s important to also target affiliates in the keywords you go after.

This is critical to your business, but it takes a lot of time and effort. And hiring an expert is very expensive. The upside is that these two factors keep most everyone from even doing their keyword research. The smartest marketers use website traffic software to automate this and other aspects of their business. This will not only speed it up. It will give you better results, as well.

OK, now we can talk about traffic…

Once you’ve done your properly keyword research, you’re now ready to start targeting these keywords to draw in visitors.

Here are a couple of clever ways to do this…

• Something you may not have ever considered is Surveys
• “Traffic Traps”
• Video Websites

Surveys

The truth is that people really enjoy taking surveys and finding out what other people think. And if you make it interesting, other people will post your survey on their website. And when they put your survey on their site, they will include a link back to your website. The beauty of this is that it generates website visitors for you with no work on your part. This is a sneaky little idea that most people never even think of. So, get creative and make up a survey that’s wacky to get other people interested in putting it on their sites.

“Answer” Sites

Sites like Yahoo! Answers allow users to ask and answer each others’ questions. Once again, the main reason for this site is not the reason you’re interested. What you want to do is use these sites to generate traffic and leads for your business. One thing you can do is to visit sites like Craigslist and Yahoo! Answers and manually extract contact info to contact other users. But a much smarter method is to use website traffic software to do it for you. These tools put the whole thing on auto-pilot and just deliver the leads to you each day.

Video Sharing Sites

No doubt you’re aware of YouTube and other video websites. In fact, YouTube has over 2 billion videos watched per day! If you’re not taking advantage of this rich source of website traffic, then you are really missing out.

You don’t have to be able to make awesome videos for this to work. One super easy thing to do is take an article or website you’ve written. Then just do a screen capture of yourself going through it. And like anything else, there is software available that will turn articles into videos for you automatically.

In Closing

It’s not that hard to get traffic to your websites. It just takes a little time and some ingenuity. Plus, there’s lots of great software out there to help you.

Don’t waste any more time:

• Keyword research first is key
• Set up some viral surveys
• Build your traffic traps
• Capitalize on video!

The question marks that keep people from getting rolling are many – but this is a very common one.

This is a question that comes from a new system user:

I don’t see how i can get leads from my [xyz] business, i want people to join with me, and become an associate, and to become one its around 320.00. My site is this http://xyz.mycompany.com/about. you think that will attract people to sign up? I don’t get how Jonathon got all these sign ups if he did it from a site like this…I NEED HELP PLEASE!:(

Hear this sort of confusion all the time.

It’s the sort of thing you don’t really “get” until you see it in action – either for someone else or better – yourself.

This is how I answered him:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Hi Mike -

Attracting people to want to work with you involves
building yourself up as a leader first.

You can use this system to build any business you want.

From Jonathan -

“The principles you are going to learn are SKILL SETS that
you will take with you wherever you go. It’s frankly HOW
to become a real marketer, and get into the psychology of
the markets you go into so you can GIVE PEOPLE what they
want and are looking for. That is the essence of true business,
and those who understand how to do it the best WIN. ”

See – you learn to identify what your particular market wants and
then you give it to them.

People aren’t looking for a drill – they want a hole.

Similarly, no one’s out there looking for a ‘[insert company]‘
business – they’re looking for solutions to the problems having
a thriving home business will provide.

Become a source of solutions and people will want to join you.

Hope this helps!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

So how’d I do?

Appreciate you!

Andrea

But this comes from a source worth paying attention to (yes – follow Kary on Twitter and I’m a sucker for a new technology so I grabbed a free position and will probably upgrade (supposed to be under $10) when upon launch.

If it delivers 10k optin leads to plop into my marketing funnel (so they actually optin to

me

) every month for cheap? Can’t hurt to try it right?

However – I am VERY curious to see how Paul Birdsall has managed to come up with a software program that from what I can glean steals optins from other sites and calls them ‘optins leads’ that it’s okay to spread around… also have to wonder how many of those leads will be shared among us (ie. even if they’re optin and legal – will 10,000 other people get them too??).

But I’ve seen enough things developed online over the years not to take an “Okay I’ll play for now” stance when something potentially revolutionary comes along

We shall see.

What do you guys think?

Would love your thoughts below and FOR SURE include your Streamline link if you have one – k? (and then Retweet so you get some free exposure!)

Appreciate you!
Andrea

Recently I met Paul, a Usana Rep on Twitter.

We got to talking about optin pages and why it’s smart to capture names before sending them on to the company. It’s smart for a couple of reasons -

• it gives you an opportunity to brand yourself rather than the company
• you have the opportunity to sell them other things they might want in the years to come
• they get to know and trust you which can often lead to referrals later

Anyone who knows me just a little knows this is something I think is uber critical to building a real business online vs. just being a distributor or affiliate for a company.

ALL of these things are lost when you send your traffic straight to an affiliate or company link directly.

He asked whether blogger blogs could be used to create optin pages and I was pretty sure they could, so went hunting for a solution for him.

Found a great one!

This video shows you how to  combine a blogger.com blogs with Getresponse to make as many optin pages as you want. Pretty handy, eh??

You’ll want to go grab a free trial of Getresponse if you don’t already have an account with them and follow along with the video to create your optin pages.

Here’s the code that he puts into the template editor to make the navigation bar hidden:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

#navbar-iframe {
height: 0px;
visibility: hidden;
display: none;}

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I just watched it again and it’s an excellent tutorial – but thinking there may be a few technical terms and such in there that could hang you up (can’t have that!) … so be sure and ask questions here below in the comments area if you want help with it, k?

Happy to walk you through any part of it – and this thread will help others who come along and need help later. For sure a great way to get started if you’re on a budget

Appreciate you!

Make it a great day,
Andrea

PS. If you’d rather bypass all this coding stuff (see I know how, but often it’s just easier not to be bothered – call me lazy), you might want to use the pre-designed pages that come with the Network Marketing Tools I use.

I think we’ll evolve to a point where they can be – really all depends on your message. I haven’t got mine quite right yet, but then I’m evolving too. It’s a really good opportunity to connect with the people you’re attractive to. And that can only be a good thing, yeah?

What I’ve been doing (and I don’t care if it’s their DM or them responding in person) is going to my DM’s a couple times a day and scanning through them for interesting ones – which I reply in person to – then if I really want to get their attention (’cause I think they’re cool), I @ or RT a recent tweet of theirs.

Nothing beats honest appreciation – “appreciation beats self-promotion every time” – good stuff!

So we had a question on our MLM Mastermind community this morning about how to set up the auto DM’s on Tweetlater. And since I’m suddenly finding it easier to do short videos to do “how to’s” I did this one to walk you through that process.

How to Set-up Auto DM on Tweetlater.com

Hope this clears things up for you!

Make it a great day,

Andrea