If you’ve read a few books on affiliate marketing, you already know…
They tell you to go to ClickBank and pick a popular product to promote…
Then go create a Squidoo Lens or a Hubpage, submit articles to directories and post them on your blog, bookmark your pages, post on Twitter, etc. until you’re blue in the face.
It looks good on paper… I mean it’s easy to start, it’s free, and there’s no risk (except your time).
But there is a fatal flaw with this strategy…namely…
YOU CAN MAKE MORE MAKING BURGERS AT WENDY’S
Think about it….
Let us say you spend 2 hours a day promoting a Clickbank product, that pays out 60% commission on a $77 product. After a 5 day work week, you put in 10 hours, and you make 2 sales. After taxes, that is less than $50 you made. That is less than $5 per hour.
What makes me sick to the belly are the big name marketers who sell this method…and it is full of SH)*&% (doo doo). Here is why….
When a merchant wants you to promote as an affiliate, and they teach you to drive traffic to an affiliate offer, with your affiliate id of course, something happens:
- The merchant, not you, if they do not buy, will capture the lead in their autoresponder and will promote other products to sell to them, and you will not make a dime.
- The merchant, not you, if they do buy, will capture a buying customer and will put them on their customer subscriber list.
- The merchant, not you, will usually have exit popups, with offers to other products on different affiliate software systems, and you will not make a dime. (yes, some of them really are this sneaky).
So, what do you do?
The biggest mistake you can make as an affiliate marketer is to drive traffic
straight to a merchant’s website instead of building a list first.
Think about this…
If you spend time and/or money to drive traffic to a merchant’s website, fewer
than 5% will buy. So what happens to the 95% who don’t buy?
If you aren’t capturing your visitor’s email addresses, you’re throwing money right down the drain.
Whose list do you want to build, the merchant’s or your own? Stupid question, eh….
Here is a recent example:
A popular product on sale right now is on Traffic, and the merchant has disclosed that over 100k people have subscribed to download his pre-launch giveaways.
The product costs $2,000…for a info product. Incredible!
If you send 1000 visitors to the merchants site, and 50% subscribe to the free giveaways, how many will actually purchase?
Not many. Maybe 1%, depending on the traffic quality. Remember, it costs $2,000. That is a lot of money.
So, what happens to the 99% who do not buy? They end up on the merchants list, and the merchant will sell them other stuff, lower priced stuff, and you will NOT make a dime.
But what if you can set up a page, drive traffic to it, and get the subscriber on YOUR list (and not the merchant), and also YOU get all the sales?
You are probably thinking, “Yes Mark, but what the heck do I do?”
Well, there are some ways to stop this merchant monopoly scam. Here are a few ideas.
1. When you see a merchant with a squeeze page that offers a free report or video, and then it sends them to the product page, in your Firefox browser, go to File/Save As, and save their squeeze page (select complete). This saves the page, images, scripts….everything..to your hard drive.
Then, using a html editor, change their optin form to YOUR optin form. Next, host this page on your server, and send traffic to your website, with the squeeze page you have grabbed from the vendor that now has your optin form.
Thus, if you are selling “xyxproduct” you simply send traffic to the squeeze page you set up at “www.yourdomain.com/recommends/xyzproduct”
After they optin to your list, you can either send them directly to the merchants sales page, or you can send them to the merchants download page for their free offer. You have to optin yourself to the merchants list to find out where these links are.
2. If the merchant has a exit script on their salespage that offers them a free bonus if they subscribe to their list, this is what you can do….
- “Save As” their entire salespage and put it on your server. Keep the order link in tact.
- Next, “Save As” their exit page that offers the free offer for a subscribe.
- Change the autoresponder form on the exit page to that it is YOUR form code to your autoresponder. Make sure the confirmation links go to where you want it to so the person gets the freebie, either directly after subscribing, or via email from your autoresponder. Once again, optin to the merchants list on the exit page so you know where everything is.
- Upload the exit page to YOUR server.
- Using a html editor, find the “exit page script” in the source code, and change the exit page URL so that it goes to the URL exit page that is now on YOUR server.
3. If the merchant has a POPUP optin form on their website, then you can simply “SAVE AS” their entire salepage, keep the order links intact, upload it to YOUR server, and delete their popup code using your html editor. Ya, sounds brutal…
(If you have JV partners and you are doing adswaps, then you obviously don’t mind giving away leads, but if you are just starting out, and you have a small list and therefore no leverage, then you certainly want to do everything you can to get the subscriber on your list, rather than the merchants)
IMPORTANT: How To Ensure Your Affiliate ID Is Embedded When The Page Is On Your Server?
No problem. Two methods:
- You can either use a Affiliate Link Bomber (which I use); or,
- Add the following code to your landing page and visitors will be tagged with an affiliate cookie the moment they hit the page:
<img src=”http://nickname.vendor.hop.clickbank.net”border=0> …where nickname is your ClickBank ID and vendor is the merchant?s ID.
You can use the image tag method with any affiliate program.
So, what are the risks with this method?
Top merchants make hundreds of thousands, and some, millions, on #1 selling products. Affiliates use their sales materials every day. Let us remember, you are promoting this persons product and making money for them.
If a merchant gets sour because you are using their sales materials, then ask them to set you up with a unique URL with no autoresponder form or exit popups. If the vender says that their email campaign increases conversion for you, then simply say that you can swipe their email marketing campaign and do it through your email autoresponder.
The merchant will not be bothered…
Please, please…start building your list today. Aweber or Getresponse are the best. I have both of them.
This a new list building plugin, and I just got it today myself
That link is my blatant affiliate link, and I make some money when you order through me, which goes to support all my bad habits 
.
PLEASE, MAKE A COMMENT.
Are you sick and tired, and really really tired, of building the merchant’s list, and not your own? Tell me your thoughts….
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