Posts Tagged ‘relationships’

At ClickBank, we recognize that partnerships are among the biggest keys to success in the affiliate marketing business. Having great relationships with other people in the industry such as affiliates, copywriters, subject matter experts, virtual assistants, or affiliate managers can be the difference between making a few dollars online and having a thriving Internet-based business.

Until now, managing the administrative side of partnerships, whether it’s figuring out revenue sharing on a given sale or working with affiliate managers to determine the effectiveness of referred affiliates, has been challenging and time-consuming, if not impossible. With that in mind, ClickBank is very proud and excited to announce the availability of our extensive new Joint Venture capabilities.

ClickBank Joint Venture is a powerful new way to automate payouts, refunds, bonuses and more between multiple parties. It even allows for something which many ClickBank clients have wanted for a long time, which is 2^nd tier affiliate commissions!

Joint Venture includes four different types of JV contracts you can create, with each serving a unique and useful function:

• Traditional JV Contract- Allows a product vendor to give a portion of their earnings from a sale to another client, such as a partner, copywriter, designer, customer service manager, or anyone they wish.
• Upsell JV Contract- Allows a product vendor to upsell another vendor’s product and split the proceeds of the sale however they wish.
• Affiliate Referral Contract- Commonly referred to as 2^nd tier affiliate commissions, this type of JV allows a product vendor to share a portion of their earnings with an affiliate manager or JV broker who referred the affiliate that led to a particular sale.
• Affiliate JV Contract- Allows two or more affiliates to share the affiliate commission on a sale. This is a great way for affiliates to partner on an advertising campaign or collaborate on projects.

For more information on how to set up and use all the different kinds of Joint Venture contracts, please see our Joint Venture Help Center article!

Written by: Beau Blackwell, Community Manager

The latest episode of Affiliate Marketing Today, hosted by Dush Ramachandran and yours truly, is now available for download or streaming. It’s called Building Relationships in Affiliate Marketing, and talks about how important it is to establish and grow strong relationships with your customers, partners, and even your competitors.

Be sure to check it out and let us know what you think!

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.

Posted by: Beau Blackwell, Community Manager

Last week, I attended the BlogWorld Expo in Las Vegas. It’s a great event for learning about the latest advances in online marketing, and is filled with people who are serious and passionate about learning the best methods for achieving online success. Although only a small portion of the event and sessions are geared towards affiliate marketing, I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to learn more about writing, selling, expanding their sphere of influence, and who wants to make some great networking connections.

While there were a lot of nuts-and-bolts marketing tactics taught at the learning sessions at BlogWorld, there was a recurring theme that popped up in several presenters’ speeches and panels: the importance and power of cultivating relationships.

Without exception, building strong and mutually beneficial relationships with your customers (or potential customers), clients, partners, industry peers, or anyone you’d like to work with, can be the difference between success and failure.

Why You Need to Work on Relationship Building

For a lot of new affiliate marketers, when they first get started, they jump right in to things like writing articles, creating ads, building landing pages, etc. While this is of course very important and necessary, I believe that spending a significant portion of time trying to build relationships can have a far greater long-term impact on potential success.

I’ve met and spoken with quite a few of ClickBank’s top-performing vendors and affiliates, and nearly all of them have connections with other top people in the industry. Some have collaborated on creating a product, some recommend products to their customers from vendors they know and trust, and some form “mastermind” groups to develop strategies and offer each other assistance. Almost no one gets to the top alone, without having received significant help and advice from other people at some point.

Not only is the advice and help you can receive extremely important, but having strong relationships can create opportunities and open doors you didn’t even know existed. It’s the same as it is for job hunting- it’s often not what you know, but who you know. You could end up getting invited to be an exclusive partner for a project, getting tipped off to a fantastic product to promote, or being introduced to other potential partners in your space.

Relationships are About Giving

At BlogWorld, author and marketer Chris Brogan discussed how the only relationships that really work are ones where both parties benefit. This is an extremely important point, and one where I think many people who are trying to create relationships with important people in their space run into problems.

If you’re new to a space, whether it’s affiliate marketing or any other industry with some established experts, immediately begging for help and going straight to the most influential people with requests for personal assistance is probably a bad idea. Best case, you might have someone take pity on you and give you a stock answer they’ve given to a thousand other people and then forget you completely. Worst case, you become a memorable annoyance to them and they do their best to avoid you altogether. Their first impression of you may end up being negative, and it’s hard to overcome this later.

How to Introduce Yourself Without Being Annoying

Instead of immediately asking for help, first become an information sponge and soak up all the information you can about a topic, whether it’s in books or on forums, blogs, Twitter, podcasts, or wherever. If you dedicate a substantial amount of time to just learning about a topic, without trying to first take action, it’s pretty amazing how quickly you can get up to speed and start really participating in the conversation and even helping other people.

Once you feel like you at least understand the conversation and are starting to form an opinion on the topic, starting contributing before you start making requests of people. If you follow an influential blogger in your space, start leaving thoughtful comments on their posts. Give your opinion on the subject, or offer up something you’ve learned in your research that could help others understand the topic better.

As a blogger, I can tell you that there’s nothing more satisfying than receiving comments on a post that show that someone has really thought about what you’ve written and is engaged with your ideas. If your comment shows me you’re really here to participate, and aren’t just commenting to get a link to your site, I’m far more likely to want to know more about you and listen to what you have to say in the future. I’m also a lot more likely to respond if you do ask me a question or make a request of me in the future.

This holds true all the way up from small bloggers to the most influential people in Internet and affiliate marketing. Before you can expect to get anything out of a relationship with people in your industry, you first have to show them that you’re willing to be authentic (don’t pretend to be interested just to get their help) and to give back to the community they’re a part of.

This is especially the case if you want to engage with someone who’s already achieved some success and is too busy to give significant time to every newbie who comes along. You’re going to really have to stand out as someone who’s worth their limited time. A great way to do that is by helping the same people they’re trying to help, and ideally, actually helping them too.

While I certainly can’t guarantee that you’ll develop a great relationship with the person or people you want to work with even if you do everything “right,” your chances of getting respect and becoming an influential person in your space will be much higher. For example, many bloggers and affiliate marketers who are now successful in their own right started out by commenting frequently on blogs or forums in their space. Even if the person you’ve approached doesn’t end up engaging with you, you may find that other people will seek you out and want to work with you, creating opportunities you never knew existed.