Archive for the ‘Strategies for Success’ Category

Written by: Beau Blackwell, Community Manager

A common fear among Internet marketers these days is the dreaded “Google slap.” If you’re not familiar with the term, it refers to Google significantly lowering the Quality Score of AdWords ad/advertisers, or banning them from advertising on AdWords outright.

Since Google slaps can be a big concern for ClickBank affiliates and vendors, we’ve made a concerted effort to work with Google to identify what causes them to lower the Quality Score of particular ads or landing pages. Now we’d like to share what we’ve learned with you so you can ensure your advertising and landing pages meet Google’s quality guidelines and maintain a positive Quality Score.

We’ve condensed the information we’ve learned directly from Google into the following videos, which discuss topics like the purpose of Quality Score, what goes into Quality Score calculation, specific techniques and page elements that Google frowns upon, and what to do if you’ve been “slapped.” As we learn more about this issue, we’ll continue to share it with you. Feel free to leave comments with questions or concerns, and we’ll try to get them answered for you.

Written by: Beau Blackwell, Community Manager

We’ve talked a lot recently about the emergence of online video in affiliate marketing, and how powerful it can be for selling or promoting digital products. It seems like everyone’s using it and having great success, but we’re aware that a lot of people still don’t know where to get started with creating, filming, editing, and uploading online video to their Pitch Page or affiliate page.

To help make online video marketing easy and accessible for everyone, we asked long-time ClickBank vendor and web video expert Gideon Shalwick to make a series of videos for ClickBank affiliates and vendors who need help getting started, or want to make their videos more professional and effective.

He created 3 easy-to-follow videos, each under 10 minutes, that cover extremely important topics like what camera, software, and equipment to use, how to plan and write the content for your video, how to make it look professional, and much more! If you’ve wanted to get into the profitable world of online video but don’t know where to start, these videos will show you exactly what you need to know.

Video 1 – Equipment you need for creating high quality online videos quickly

Video 2 – Preparing for the recording and planning out your content

Video 3 – Recording & editing your video, and uploading it to your site or Pitch Page

These videos contain lots of great information and detail, so be sure to check them out! Gideon regularly updates his online video marketing blog with the tips, tricks, and techniques he’s used to succeed in Internet marketing, so it’s a great resource for anyone looking to make a splash with online video. He also encouraged anyone who still has questions to leave comments on the videos and he’ll help answer them. You can also leave comments here with any additional video-related topics you’d like to see in the future.

Thanks Gideon!

Written by: Benjamin Ravaru, Guest Author

Many years ago when I started marketing online with the usual web-page sales letters, I was living in fear that one day everything would move to video. If that happened, would the little guy still be able to compete with big companies and their video budgets?

Fast forward to 2010, and the answer is an emphatic YES.

There’s an explosion of homemade videos online. YouTube has become the 3^rd most-visited website in the world. Video gets higher conversion rates and builds a deeper relationship than print ads. But the really exciting news is that it’s easier than ever to make videos at home.

Cameras are cheap. You can buy a Flip or Kodak Zi8 for under $200 and record great HD videos at home. Keynote and PowerPoint make it easier than ever to create beautiful screen-casts. Tools like Camtasia and Screenflow make it easy to capture your videos and put them online in the cloud using a service like Amazon S3. You can then play them back with tools like Flowplayer or JW Player.

There are more sources of great content than ever before, including royalty-free music, photographs, and videos on sites like iStockPhoto.com.

But even with all of these tools, not all videos are created equal, and not all videos convert. So what are the keys that will guarantee your video is a success? To achieve big video profits, I recommend the following:

1. Great Script: Take time to sit down and write a script for your video. You might be a great narrator, but you need to think of your video as your spoken sales letter or sales presentation. A great script with a killer intro makes a huge difference in whether your video converts into sales.

2. Interesting Hooks: Make interesting promises and deliver on them, or have nice visual effects and/or music. Anything that can hold people’s attention is worth its weight in gold in these times of multitasking and short attention spans.

3.  Keep It Clean: Make sure to remove the noise from your audio recordings and use image enhancing effects for your photos. You want clear sound and sharp contrasts. It doesn’t cost any money to do this, just a bit of time. It will really separate your video from the mass of videos out there and give you that professional edge.

4. Easy to Read Text: Make your text high-contrast, so it stands out against the background of your video. Big, black, bold text is a good rule of thumb, unless black won’t show up against your background.

5. Reasonable File Size: Resize your video to be between 500×300 and 800×600. Any less than that and the video is too small; more and it’s too big. When compressing your video, use the H.264 compression codec with the compression settings set to “best” to ensure a good file size.

6. Promote Other Video Products: As obvious as this may sound, it’s best to use video to promote an offer that uses video on its sales page too. Having a nice video presell as an affiliate and sending people to a non-video offer can kill conversions. The feeling of continuity and flow is important.

7. Always Be Testing: This is true of any selling or promotional techniques, and it holds for video too. Don’t get complacent, and always fine tune your scripts and videos. You can always improve your conversion rate and make more profits.

About the Author

Benjamin Ravaru is a ClickBank vendor who has used video to sell and promote ClickBank products, including his own product Xocoslim. For an example of his video tips in action, click here.

Written by: Chris McNeeney, Guest Author

In my years as a super affiliate, I have seen some of the best and worst that copywriting has to offer and almost everything in between. ClickBank is awash with sales letters and copy for vendor products and it’s not always obvious which ones will convert to sales at first glance.

Even the ugliest site will convert browsers into paying customers if the copy is well written and does its job as it should – and if the copywriter understands how to sell to the niche in question.

In this post, I am going to teach you the copywriting elements that are vital to the success of any sales page (no matter how good or bad the design and graphics). The end result should be that your customers feel they simply have to buy the product you’re offering, without delay.

The Key Element of Converting Browsers into Buyers

One of the most important elements to concentrate on when promoting your own or someone else’s product is your sales copy. The better your copy converts, the more products you will sell and the more you will attract affiliates to sell your product for you. It’s all a virtuous cycle – and arguably your sales copy is the most important factor in the entire mix; perhaps even more important than the product or the affiliates you recruit.

If you can write a great sales letter, one that converts into sales, then you will have other marketers ‘eating out of your hand’ in a bid to promote your ClickBank products. Get it wrong and you won’t get any traction in the ClickBank Marketplace, and your product will stagnate and die.

The starting point of writing killer sales copy is to understand your market. By that, I don’t mean reading a few articles and assuming you know the market. You really have to do a bit of leg-work to understand who you are talking to, establish what they want, and research what’s already out there and what isn’t.

Find a gap in the market and fill it. Visit forums and find out what people are talking about, what their frustrations are, and how likely they are to spend money to get a solution to their problem or need. Read your competitors’ sales letters and sign up to their e-mail newsletters. Listen to the problems they talk about that the average customer has (e.g., “Aren’t you sick of diet pills that don’t work?”), along with which benefits they push hardest (“Lose weight without hunger pangs”). This will highlight important clues as to what is on the mind of your target audience.

So do your research and work out what is going through their heads. In other words, you really need to resonate with your potential buyer. If you can do this you can establish empathy with your potential buyer. If you do this, you are well on your way to a winning formula for your sales copy.

Getting Started

Now, before you exclaim, ‘But I can’t write copy,’ know that it is actually easier than you think. In fact, the transition from never having written a word of copy to being a ‘monster’ copywriter is perfectly achievable in just days – but only if you follow and implement some simple but extremely powerful copywriting rules.

The Short Cut To Copywriting Success

One of the fastest ways to get yourself from 0 to 60 writing great sales copy is to leverage the years of experience of some of the great copywriters who have already tried, tested, and proven the elements of copywriting. In short, we are going to cheat a little by building up a big pile of other marketers’ copy and swiping it (a.k.a. “the cheat sheet”).

Note: before I proceed, I want to be very clear on something. I am not suggesting you break copyright rules by copying other people’s work – you simply cannot do that – it would be copyright infringement. But the good news is, we don’t need to. Instead, we can examine and discover the successful elements, phrases, hooks, and buzzwords that are being used, and spin them to work into our own copywriting. In other words, we are going to extract the most important elements and rework them into our own sales letters. This is not only lawful – but its common practice in successful copywriting circles. The trick is to go to other niches and take elements from the most successful sales letters there for your own inspiration.

For example, let’s say you want to write copy for a bodybuilding product. You might come across a Forex sales letter with a headline that reads:

“Just In: Renegade, Grass Roots Trader Exposes Forex Loophole and Siphons Off $3,000 In 30 Days.”

You have a lot of words you can work with and use here, such as renegade, grass roots, exposes, loophole, siphons, etc. So if your niche was bodybuilding, you could work those words into your own headline:

“ Renegade Bodybuilder exposes muscle-building loophole and packs on 8 lbs of muscle in 3 weeks.”

The idea is to take the words and adapt and fit them to your own copy, whilst keeping the same elements of newness (renegade), something uncovered (loophole, exposed) and, very importantly, how quickly something can be achieved (6 days / 3 weeks). This method should not only be used for your headline, but also for your sub headers and the body copy of your sales letter.

Benefits Are Vital

Why? Because it’s a proven fact that people will buy something based on its benefits. Benefits are simply what the customer gets out of buying a product – in short, they’re the reason that people decide to buy a certain product. For example, if you have a product on making money, people will buy because of the perceived benefits that making money will bring, such as being able to pay off debts, improve their lifestyle, and by doing so appear more attractive to people around them. If it’s a more advanced guide, benefits might be very specific – for example, if it’s a blogging guide, one benefit might be “generating a flood of backlinks to your blog.”

Also, there’s a deeper psychological aspect here. Whilst people think they just want to make more money, in truth the benefits they will gain from doing so are much deeper than it at first appears. So it’s not enough to just sell the ‘idea’ of making money – this is far too general and unfocused. Instead, you should sell the benefits that will have a knock-on effect as a result of making money. So the more you understand the deep reasons behind why people want something, the more likely you are going to be able to tap into a person’s psyche when writing sales copy.

Check Out What’s Working

The best place to start when researching what is and isn’t working in a given niche is to check out the top performing products in that niche. This is easily achieved by heading over to the ClickBank Marketplace and doing a keyword search in a given niche. Alternatively, you can check out affiliate niches or the top ClickBank products on my site, Affiliate X.

For example, let’s look at dating. We know that Internet dating is a huge market that continues to grow repidly, but what about digging deeper into the dating niche?

Doing a search in ClickBank on any aspect of dating will bring up the top performing products, which are easily identified by their high gravity score. Take a look at the headlines of the top performers. The headline is the most important part of the sales copy. If you don’t grab the reader’s attention at this point, you will have lost them forever. A headline should be compelling, intriguing, and raise curiosity so the reader wants to read on. In the same way, the sub header should pull the reader in with a taste of what’s to come.

Generally, a good formula for a headline is: “How [someone like the customer] [got the kind of benefit the customer wants] in [x days].” For example, “How a 27 year old renegade Forex trader made $1,000 with a breakthrough new robot in 10 days,” or “How a 21 year old scrawny kid stacked on 13 lbs of chest muscle in 31 days.”

Remember that empathy is a powerful copywriting tool. If you can identify with the reader and show that you understand their problem or need because you have been “in their shoes” yourself, that helps build trust. Explain your situation and how you worked to discover a solution, and now you want to share it so that others don’t have to go through the same hurdles and problems that you did.

Empathy in any situation is beneficial, but in copywriting it’s essential. For this very reason, your story (i.e., how you arrived at this point) should make up a major part of your copy. It’s important not to underestimate the value of empathy within your copy – get it right and your copy will result in insane conversions.

Don’t Ignore The Competition

When writing your copy, you may be tempted to ignore the competition and hope that potential buyers will see your product for what it is and just buy it. Don’t make this mistake. Instead, explain in your copy why your product is better because it covers an angle that isn’t covered in competing products.

Try to think of a unique selling point that makes your product different from the others out there. Maybe it’s a better value, easier to understand, quicker to implement, or has better proof. Whatever the unique selling point is, elaborate on it and make it stand out. Just put yourself in a reader’s shoes – if you wanted to buy a product on dating women or learning to play the guitar – would you just check out one product? No, of course not; you would check out what’s available from a selection and then choose the best one.

Which brings us nicely to…

The Power of Proof

The number one reason why people don’t buy a product is because they don’t believe its claims. How many times have you thought to yourself, “that sounds too easy” or “that sounds too good to be true?” This is why it’s so important to demonstrate empathy within your copy.

However, the second element that cannot be overlooked is proof that your products does what it says it does. If you can provide screenshots of profits you’ve attained using the product, or a live working example, or even testimonials from existing customers, then you are on to a winner. Once you have the proof, it will be easier for potential customers to identify themselves with the benefits your product will deliver and they will want it for themselves.

To Conclude

It’s important to understand that in order to write great copy that will convert into sales, you DON’T need to be an experienced copywriter. It’s as simple as breaking down the sales copy of highly converting web pages out there, and carefully working out why they are selling. That’s just something that comes with a little digging and a bit of experience.

It doesn’t matter what niche the sales copy is in. You can swipe the buzz words and curiosity elements within the headlines, sub headers and sales letter body and rework those to your suit your own niche. Well thought-out copy and strong proof will almost guarantee your sales pitch will convert into sales. Once you have mastered these essential elements, you’ll be able to create copy that converts in any niche you choose.

About the Author

Chris McNeeney is the owner of Affiliate X – a resource for ClickBank affiliates with affiliate tools, affiliate videos, and training information.

Written by: Beau Blackwell, Community Manager

In the ultra-competitive affiliate marketing landscape, it’s a good idea to always be on the lookout for new and innovative ways to promote products. Somewhat ironically, a great new space for affiliate promotions is actually an advertising medium that’s been around a long time: television.

Up to now, advertising on TV was far too expensive and complicated for the average marketer. However, Google recently introduced Google TV, which allows practically anyone to create TV spots within their AdWords account and run them on national cable TV. One of the most amazing parts is the low cost- as low as $20 for an ad spot!

Considering the huge potential reach of television, this can be a great way to advertise your own product or separate yourself from other affiliates who are promoting the same product. And considering how powerful and relatively inexpensive video creation tools and software packages are today, it’s reasonable for almost anyone to create a simple TV ad they can test out.

If you’re not sure you’re capable of creating an effective TV ad, check out this Copyblogger post on the topic. It’s written from the perspective of promoting a blog, but the same idea applies to ClickBank products or affiliate websites. It has some great advice on making your ad compelling to viewers.

One important thing to remember is that if you’re an affiliate who’s using this service, you shouldn’t try to promote a basic HopLink, since advertising on TV requires that viewers be able to remember the website so they can type it in. HopLink URLs are too complicated for this purpose, so your best bet is to send traffic to an affiliate landing page, such as a review site, blog, or other content-based site, where you then recommend one or more ClickBank products to your visitors. Try to keep the URL of your site as simple and memorable as possible. If you’re a vendor and want to send traffic to your own site, you can just send people directly to your Pitch Page URL.

If you’ve been struggling to make AdWords work for you due to the level of competition or pricing, it’s worth checking out Google TV to see if it could be an effective new way to promote products. Some of the best strategies for affiliate marketing success are testing out new promotional techniques and being an early entrant into new marketing spaces before they get overcrowded and too competitive. Who knows- you could end up being the next advertising mogul!

Do you think TV ads could work for your promotional efforts? Please share your thoughts in the comments!

Written by: Beau Blackwell, Community Manager

When you’re searching for new products to promote as an affiliate, one of the things I always recommend looking for is whether a vendor has an affiliate tools page. These pages can be one of the easiest ways to quickly develop effective promotions for a product, especially if it’s a new niche you’re just starting to explore.

How Affiliate Tools Can Help You

Though affiliate tools pages come in many forms, most of them include a selection of useful information about the vendor’s product that will make your life as an affiliate much easier.

Typically, they include information like:

• Suggested keywords for SEO or PPC advertising
• Image or text ads you can use to link to the vendor’s site
• Ideas for article marketing content
• Strong selling points of the product
• Information about the best target audience for the product
• Embeddable videos with information or sales pitches
• FAQs

All of these items can save you valuable time, energy, and money when crafting your marketing efforts. They can help you quickly develop effective marketing campaigns, rather than having to put in hours of keyword research or spend your own time developing topics for articles.

How to Identify Vendors with Affiliate Tools Pages

The easiest way to find affiliate tools pages for ClickBank vendors is to search in our Marketplace. Look for vendors with a “Vendor Spotlight” link under the Promote button in their listing. It will look like this:

In the Vendor Profile box, if they have an affiliate tools page, it will be shown at the bottom of that box. Not all vendors who have a Vendor Spotlight will have an affiliate tools page, but most do.

You can also easily find vendors in your niche by performing an Advanced Search in the Marketplace. Near the bottom of that page, you can select to only see vendors who have an affiliate tools page.

Some vendors may also choose to list their affiliate tools page in their Marketplace listing, but this is much less common and isn’t as easy to find as the previously listed methods.

Finally, some vendors may have an Affiliates link on their website, typically in the footer. If there’s a particular vendor you want to promote but who doesn’t have any affiliate information, you can always try contacting them to ask for any insight or tips they have for promoting their product.

Taking advantage of affiliate tools can be a great way to make your promotional efforts easier and more successful. If you’ve never explored vendors’ affiliate tools pages, be sure to check some out today!

What affiliate tools do you find most useful? What do you wish more vendors included in their affiliate tools?

Written by: Nathan Hangen, Guest Blogger

If you’re a blogger who’s thought about creating and selling your own product, you’ve probably heard that in order to make sales you need to get a lot of traffic. What I’ve learned, though, is that there’s a difference between getting a lot of traffic and getting valuable traffic. There’s even a difference between getting a lot of valuable traffic and getting a lot of paying customers.

For some reason, people automatically assume that if you build up your traffic, via comments, email, social media, etc., you will automatically start seeing your bills get paid and your bank account grow.

I wish!

The truth is that converting traffic into customers is a lot more difficult than it seems, especially if you don’t have a solid product to offer up to that traffic. The following steps will help you develop and launch your first product, while keeping your readers happy.

Step 1: What are You Selling?

Sure, you need traffic in order to sell stuff, but how are you going to sell anything unless you have a good product?

You’re going to have a hard time converting traffic into sales if all you’re offering is a “me-too” ebook or the same PLR content as everyone else. Make sure you take the time to develop a product that can really solve problems and offer practical advice to your readers.

Step 2: Identify Your Market

Technically, you should do this part first, but as I’ve learned over the past few years, you sometimes won’t know your market until you’ve tried to sell something and failed.

I’ve had a lot of failed products, but instead of just quitting and closing up shop, I’ve learned to re-evaluate and adjust based on what I learned from my mistakes.

My Experience

For instance, when I had the idea to write Beyond Blogging (co-authored with Mike Cliffe-Jones), I didn’t have an audience in mind; I just had a general product concept.

From there, though, I spent time sending surveys and talking with my readers on Twitter and in my blog comments. This isn’t something you can skip—you have to really get in the trenches and hang out with your audience.

In doing that, I learned what my audience wanted, which was a product that was inspirational, wasn’t a typical “how-to” blogging book, and had information and advice they could use right away. I used my research to create my product specifically for this group of people, instead of trying to make my book “everything for everyone.”

Step 3: Respect Your Audience

Some people are successful using “hit and run” sales tactics, but that’s not my style. Quite frankly, that shouldn’t be the style of any blogger that wants to build a long-term relationship with their audience. Blog audiences are fickle, and if they start feeling like your values aren’t in line with theirs, they’ll drop your blog in a heartbeat.

How To Build Relationships While Selling

Building relationships is easy, but it takes time and dedication. It starts in your comment section, by providing your readers with replies and feedback to their questions or concerns.

From there, you should make sure your email newsletter so that it provides maximum value to your readers. Keep in mind that value doesn’t always mean commercial-free content. Sometimes, value means relevant affiliate offers. People don’t mind this as long as you aren’t contacting them only when you have something to sell.

Finding the balance between selling and relationship building is tough, and will likely take some trial and error to get right. Some people will absolutely never want to be sold to, and it’s OK if you lose a few people as long as the vast majority of your audience sticks with you. If you get lots of feedback that people aren’t interested in what you’re selling, you might want to consider whether your product is really addressing the needs of your audience.

How I Sold to My Readers

When I started selling Beyond Blogging on my site, I spent a few weeks telling my subscribers and my blog readers that I was working on a really cool book.

I built up anticipation over time so that they not only knew it was coming, but so that I could pre-qualify them ahead of time.

Once the launch started, I gave my readers a head start to an early link and a discount code. They appreciated that I rewarded them for being a regular reader of my blog, reinforcing our relationship.

Although I sent reminders every few days until the end of the launch, I never acted desperate or forceful. Again, readers responded well to being treated like we had a valuable relationship, rather than just being targets for sales.

Lastly, I didn’t harass them or annoy them if they didn’t buy. When the launch was over, I simply added an email to my autoresponder sequence and went on with my blogging as usual.

If you spend all of your time promoting products, people are going to get tired of hearing from you. If you mix it up with good advice, you’re not only helping them, you’re creating a need and a desire to learn more. It’s like building blocks. You’ve got to build them up one level at a time.

The Results

When all was said and done, we sold 5 figures in the first 24 hours, and doubled that by the end of the launch. Our names were all over the blogosphere, and people were asking their favorite bloggers to do a review, without us having to prod them. That’s some true social proof.

From there, we’ve built a strong customer list that still wants to do business and is ready to learn more. Our next step is to use what we’ve learned to take them to the next level with a more advanced product, resulting in a second product with a built-in audience.

When it comes right down to it, you need traffic, but you also need to make sure you’re making something worth buying. Don’t go with big ideas—go with what people need. Once it’s ready, launch with as much hype as your audience can tolerate, while still maintaining the integrity of your relationships. After all, we’re building businesses here—not selling used cars!

What strategies have you used to turn your readers into customers? What mistakes have you made that you’ve learned from? Please share them in the comments!

About the Author

Nathan Hangen teaches people how to build digital empires, helps them rock through their workday, and works with small businesses to implement digital marketing campaigns.

Written by: Mark Ling, Guest Author

Since I’ve been a successful affiliate marketer for a long time and have coached many affiliates on how to be more successful, I thought it could be helpful write about the key differences that I see between the mindsets of super affiliates and struggling affiliates.

If you have dabbled in affiliate marketing but aren’t making a killing yet, then you might find that some of the differences I mention below are issues you need to resolve first.

1. Super affiliates take action towards their goals, while struggling affiliates often procrastinate, or spend too much time overeducating or preparing themselves and not enough time DOING. Super affiliates are usually prepared to fail fast and often, learning from their mistakes, rather than not making any progress at all.

2. Super affiliates invest their money in software, marketing, and outsourcing, and then spend what is left. Struggling affiliates spend the vast majority of their money on other parts of their lives, and then invest what is left in their online business.

3. Super affiliates invest their time in networking with and learning from other successful people, whereas struggling affiliates often try to work alone, or listen to people who have a negative influence on them. In addition, super affiliates try to learn as much as possible from other successful people through books, audio, or DVDs. This is especially important when you’re not in a position or location where you can network with other successful Internet marketers face to face.

4. On a similar note, super affiliates enjoy the process of learning, even when they’re learning from their failures. Struggling affiliates often don’t enjoy having to constantly learn new techniques and ideas, and don’t appreciate the experience of failing in order to learn and grow.

5. Most super affiliates understand the power of their mind and focus on developing strong self belief and an abundance mindset, whereas struggling affiliates can get derailed by negative self-talk, focusing on what is going wrong in their lives and in their affiliate marketing efforts.

6. Most super affiliate millionaires that I’ve met in person (and I’ve met dozens) only focus on one or two niches. It’s true that most have experimented in many other niches in order to find the ‘golden’ one or two that work for them. Struggling affiliates, though, are often scattered all over the place, and even when they find a niche that makes them money, they keep moving on to the next niche without fully maximizing their potential or getting to know a niche in extreme depth.

7. Most super affiliates build a strong mailing list through email capture and make regular repeat sales to the same people. Struggling affiliates often like to skip the process of building a website to gain leads and focus on direct traffic, missing out on the chance of repeat sales and having more marketing opportunities.

8. Most super affiliate millionaires I know, including myself, make the vast majority of their money from the big competitive niches, and not from the smaller, less competitive niches. Super affiliates are not afraid of competition, whereas many struggling affiliates are. Super affiliates realize that to make big money, you have to go where the big money is. I’ll clarify this by saying that small niches are good to sink your teeth into early on and to make some sales, but in the long run, to make 7 figures or more online, you need to get good at marketing in one of the major niches where billions of dollars are being spent (e.g., diet/fitness, make money online, dating/relationships niches, self-help, security software, etc.).

I hope the above differences between super affiliates and struggling affiliates inspire you to upgrade your mindset and start thinking and acting like a super affiliate! Above all, make sure you follow point #1: super affiliates take action towards their goals.

All the best to your success!

About the Author

Mark Ling is the Founder of Affilorama, an affiliate marketing training portal that offers cutting-edge free video training, education, and affiliate tools to both beginning and advanced affiliate marketers. You can follow Affilorama on Facebook or read Affilorama’s Affiliate Marketing Blog.

Written by: Simon Slade, Guest Blogger

If you read my earlier post on acquiring visitors’ email addresses, you understand how important it is to build an email list, and how a newsletter can be a great way to get value from those subscribers. But how can you promote products in your newsletter series without sending your subscribers running for the “unsubscribe” button? How do you promote newsletter loyalty and, at the same time, monetize it to the max?

Let me share with you my 7 steps to a killer newsletter: How to grab readers’ attention, hook them, and sell to them. We at Affilorama employ this strategy quite regularly with our newsletter lists, and with subscribers topping 100,000… we must be doing something right!

Step 1 – Refer to it as a ’6-day mini course’ instead of a newsletter

• Firstly: It’s more exciting than a newsletter – Essentially it’s the same thing but it sounds a lot more interesting. And, because you usually pay for a course, subscribers will feel like they’re getting something of value for free!
• Secondly: It lowers the commitment barrier – By signing up for a 6-day course, subscribers will not feel like they’re being added to a list they’ll never get away from.
• Thirdly: It builds trust – By creating a 6-part series of high quality emails, you build a good reputation with your subscribers and get them used to opening your emails.

Step 2 – Build an inviting sign-up box

You need to make it really obvious how to subscribe. A good idea is to have your sign-up box display “above the fold” and appear on every page of your site.

Your sign up box really has to pack a punch. Don’t just shove a little form in your sidebar and hope for the best. You need to sell your newsletter – almost as if it was a paid product.

We’re not saying that you have to create a huge sales letter for it; a few bulletpoints covering what people will learn in each lesson is sufficient. But don’t give too much away. Create a bit of mystery, and make it enticing!

Step 3 – Make sure your content is the very best you can offer

It’s an old saying that you don’t get a second chance to make a first impression, and it’s true for your newsletter. If you don’t capture the attention of your readers from the start, there’s every chance they will unsubscribe and you will have lost them forever!

Conversely, if they haven’t unsubscribed within the first 10 to 15 emails, then they will probably stay on your list for good. Fantastic! Another reason to make sure that your first 10 emails are first class.

The quality of your content also sets the tone for how much readers will respect you as a source of trusted advice. If the content has obviously been copied, scraped, or lacks substance, it’s likely your readers won’t view you as an authority and your product recommendations will be far less successful.

Step 4 – Include affiliate promotions, but leave the hard sell at home

While there’s nothing wrong with including relevant affiliate links to ClickBank products in the body or signature of your emails, the focus really needs to be on valuable content. So avoid the hard-sell in your mini-course.

One technique is to just say “if you’re looking for the best guide to XYZ, I really recommend ABC. It gets right to the heart of 123 and will teach you XYZ in no time” and then return to your main content. You need to remind yourself that you are trying to build trust. A constant sales pitch will undermine that.

Step 5 – Day 7 promotional email

After the 6-day course has ended, your subscribers are ready to get a hard-sell promotional email. This could be a product review or talk of a recent product launch. Pull out all the stops and sell, sell, sell. Include limited, time-sensitive offers or create truly unique deals by adding your own bonuses that you’ve put together for this promotion.

Step 6 – Keep emailing them every 3 days

At this point you need to decide which direction your newsletter will take:

Option 1 – If you want to build loyalty and have long-term subscribers, then offer a mix of informative and promotional emails, emailing every 3 days, with every 3^rd email being something promotional like a product review.

Option 2 – If you’re not interested in building up your email list as a long-term asset, you can take the option of ongoing, rapid-fire promotion. Product reviews, launch offers, YouTube reviews and affiliate links should feature heavily in all your emails. True, your subscribers will probably end up growing tired of it but hopefully by then they’ve bought from you at least once!

So, is emailing every 3 days too much? Surprisingly, our tests proved that emailing two or 3 times a week was optimal. There are reasons for this and why email frequency is a vital part of your newsletter strategy but the key is: don’t be afraid to email people frequently. Chances are they won’t be opening all your emails so in reality they aren’t actually getting 3 emails a week after all!

Step 7 – Track your newsletter performance like a bloodhound

Don’t fire and forget. Know which newsletters are helping and which are hurting.

• Check your autoresponder statistics to see which emails are generating the most unsubscribes. Look at what might be offending your subscribers in these emails. Can you fix it and keep them hanging on?
• Use ClickBank’s tracking IDs (TIDs) to see which promotional links are getting the most clicks. Create a new tracking ID for each newsletter. If nobody is clicking the links in a particular email, can you see why that is?
• Don’t forget to use redirects or other link-rewriting services to make those nasty affiliate links look pretty and inoffensive to click on!

Hold up just one minute – Is your niche newsletter-worthy?

Before you even start down the road of building a newsletter and getting sign-ups, you need to determine if a newsletter would be helpful or appropriate for your niche. Not every niche works well with a newsletter series. Dog training, World of Warcraft, and dating niches are good because people have a passion for these topics. On the contrary, I am yet to meet anyone who has an ongoing interest in yeast infections or hemorrhoids. Nobody wants to be reminded of these problems every three days!

Don’t underestimate the value of a good newsletter

Many affiliates find that a large portion of their earnings comes from their newsletter series. Sometimes they earn more from their newsletter than their actual website! Rolling out a killer newsletter strategy is one of the most profitable exercises you can undertake – you just need to make sure you do it right!

Have you used this newsletter strategy? Did you modify it to boost its converting power or did it not work for you?

If you haven’t already, I’d recommend you review the Do’s and Don’ts of Email Marketing before kicking off your next campaign!

About the author

Simon Slade is the CEO of Affilorama, an affiliate marketing training portal that offers free video training, education, and affiliate tools to both beginning and advanced affiliate marketers. You can follow them on Twitter.

Written by: Chris McNeeney, Guest Blogger

When I first got started as a ClickBank vendor several years ago, I faced one of the major challenges that faces all new ClickBank vendors: how to find and attract affiliates to promote my product. Since then, I’ve sold several very successful products through ClickBank, and have learned what it takes to get affiliates to promote your product, which is absolutely key if you want to make a lot of sales. In this post, I’ll share what I’ve learned over years of finding and attracting affiliates.

First Things First

An extremely important step in attracting affiliates that many new vendors don’t know about or ignore is promoting your offer yourself before seeking out affiliates. The reason for this is that you need to make sure your offer converts. Otherwise, all your efforts will be wasted. Many affiliates, especially highly successful ones, will only give a product one chance. If it doesn’t convert into sales for them, they’ll stop promoting it and probably won’t try again, especially if they spend money to promote it.

Pay Per Click traffic is a great way to test how well your product converts. The goal is to get a conversion rate of at least 1% – ideally closer to 3%.

This may sound like unncessary groundwork, but it really is a vital first step: the importance of having a high converting offer can’t be stressed enough.

If your offer converts, recruiting affiliates will be a piece of cake. Any affiliates you bring on board will make money and continue promoting you. Their efforts will quickly pull in many new affiliates, and so on – its a virtuous cycle. Your offer will go viral if your conversions are high, as other affiliates start to see what their competitors are promoting.

However, if your offer does not convert you will have a tough time keeping any new affiliates you do manage to enlist. Your offer will likely stagnate and then disappear for good.

So be sure to run a simple PPC campaign to test your conversion rates before reaching out to affiliates. You can get more info on PPC at my Affiliate Videos page.

Next Steps

Now that you have a proven 1-3% conversion rate, its time to start contacting affiliates. The good news is that some of the work is already done. With ClickBank, you are never working from a dead start.

First, the ClickBank Marketplace will introduce your new site to a potential network of hundreds of thousands of affiliates (you should submit your product to the Marketplace as soon as you are approved). Second, the fact that all payments are handled by ClickBank ensures you have instant trust with affiliates. ClickBank have paid out over $1 billion to vendors and affiliates – so your affiliates know they will be paid on time, which is important since you don’t have any reputation right now. In short, listing your product with ClickBank gives you a firm platform to recruit affiliates from. You may well even attract affiliates passively before you start work.

But a mere presence on ClickBank won’t be enough; we have to actively build on that platform and reach out to affiliates if we want to succeed.

So how do we do that? And what kind of affiliate do we recruit? To a large extent, it depends on your niche. In the fat loss niche, for example, you have many avenues open to you. There are thousands of potential affiliates, some with lists of customers (so they can promote you via e-mail), some spending huge amounts of money on Pay Per Click traffic, and others with well-visited “authority sites” that pull in masses of free (“organic”) traffic from the search engines.

Smaller niches may be more restrictive, with all the sales coming from one traffic source or affiliate type. For example, in your niche, perhaps there are 10 big e-mail affiliates (“list owners”) who account for 70% of all sales. I’ve seen it happen before. Perhaps all the action is happening on a handful of search engine keywords that can be targeted via “organic search” or “pay per click” (this is actually the norm).

I have divided affiliates into 3 types here, but there are many other traffic sources, such as affiliates who purchase ad space on media networks (“media buys”). For simplicity’s sake I have restricted the affiliate types to e-mail, Pay Per Click and organic.

Pay Per Click Affiliates

PPC affiliates are very often the easiest to reach of all, although often the most fickle (they are constantly tracking their return on investment, and so will move to the highest converting offer in a heartbeat – another reason to ensure you are converting before you recruit affiliates).

PPC affiliates basically buy traffic from search engines such as Google, so that when people enter a keyword relating to your niche (e.g., “fat loss guides”), their ad shows up on the right hand side of the search results page.

If you enter a few keywords that relate to your niche, look at the ads that appear down the right hand side. Do any affiliates appear here that are promoting your competitors’ offers? Are there are any vendors promoting their own offers but collecting leads? If so, they may be open to promoting your offer to their lists.

If you find advertisers like these, you should contact them and ask them to promote your offer.

You can brainstorm keywords to find these PPC affiliates by entering the URL of your website or related keywords using the Adwords Tool or my affiliate keyword tool. Search for each related keyword that the tool returns and look for affiliates advertising on that phrase.

Organic / Website Affiliates

Some affiliates buy traffic from the search engines via PPC, but others have established sites that actually get free rankings in the search engines. These “organic” affiliates often have a huge amount of traffic coming to their sites, and so can be superb affiliates.

The first step to finding them is to take the keyword list you generated earlier (when you were looking for PPC affiliates), enter the same keywords, and now look for webiste owners appearing on the left hand side of the results page. Visit every site and head to their contact page, explaining how your offer is relevant to their website. Some website owners may not be familiar with affiliate marketing, so you may need explain to them why it can be lucrative for them and a good fit for their audience.

You can also search for the name of a competitor’s product (e.g., “The Ultimate Fat Loss Guide”) and contact any website that has a review of your competitor’s product. If they are promoting your competitors, they may well promote you also. When contacting these organic affiliates be sure to emphasise why your offer will add value for their visitors.

E-mail Affiliates (“JV Partners”)

These are the hardest affiliates to get on board, but also potentially the most lucrative. E-mail affiliates have a list of customers that they can promote offers to. It stands to reason that many of your top e-mail affiliates will be your competitors, such as other product vendors. These guys have a customer list of their own, and may be interested in promoting your offer to their list.

If you do get them to promote, they can generate huge numbers of sales with a single e-mail. Secondly, e-mail affiliates are the key to going viral: since all the big product vendors and affiliates sign up to each other’s lists, if they do promote you, other affiliates can jump on board quickly. A high-converting offer can go viral off a single e-mail, as more and more affiliates see the e-mail blast and jump on board. That’s the power of reaching thousands of people with a single e-mail.

List owners like this are in theory very easy to find – just do a simple search on the ClickBank Marketplace and contact any vendor in your niche who is collecting names and e-mails on their Pitch Page.

However, while they are easy to find, these affiliates are also the hardest to recruit. Many of your e-mails asking for promotion will probably go ignored, much more so than the other kinds of affiliates. These guys are bombarded with e-mails like yours, and they just don’t have the time to answer every one they receive. It isn’t personal, its just business.

For this reason, I advise you to focus on the PPC and organic affiliates to start with. Then, when you have some grass-roots traction behind your offer, and you know your product converts well, you can approach the big e-mail affiliates from a position of strength.

What to Say When You Contact Affiliates

You usually only get one shot at contacting affiliates, so it’s vital that you do it right the first time. First, make your e-mail personalised to the affiliate in question. Reference their site and start by telling them your offer is relevant and will deliver value to their visitors/customers. Please do not send out a “one size fits all” e-mail. Any potential affiliate receives dozens of e-mails like yours – you need to make it personalized if you want your offer to stand out.

Next, tell them why they will make money by promoting your offer – give them your overall conversion rate, details of any affiliates you already have on board, and how successful they’ve been. Explain what is working especially well for you. Finally, close by giving them a call to action – tell them to either visit your affiliate page or e-mail you back for further information and a review copy of your product.

Closing Thoughts

I’ll repeat my advice from earlier: it’s vital that your Pitch Page converts before you recruit affiliates.

This will make it much easier to retain the affiliates who you do recruit, and also bring on new affiliates once you get your first set of affiliates on board. Once you have a high-converting offer, set up your affiliate page, listing details of your conversion rates at the top of the page. The affiliate page is where you will be sending potential affiliates, and should include your HopLink info and any resources (Adwords ads, e-mail swipe copy, etc) that affiliates can use.

You should also submit your offer to all the affiliate directories that are out there, along with the “announcements” sections of the top affiliate forums. This will take some time, but is vital to establishing your initial grass-roots foundation. Then, once your offer converts, your affiliate page is live, and you are listed in some directories, you can approach the above 3 affiliate types and start generating some real sales for your ClickBank product.

Finally, understand that affiliate recruitment is a numbers game. Look at it as a process rather than an “end game.” You’re looking to build gradual momentum, get your offer out there, and if it converts, the viral power of the Internet will do the rest. A high-converting offer only needs a little push before it gathers traction. So get to work – and build that initial buzz yourself!

About the author

Chris McNeeney is the owner of Affiliate X – a resource site for ClickBank affiliates with affiliate tools, affiliate videos and training information.