Surviving the Economy with Affiliate Marketing – Part II

Better than extras and free gifts, is additional help to use the product that is being sold. You can offer a telephone training seminar at no cost for those who buy the product.

Try and persuade the product-owner to speak on the teleseminar, or maybe interview him over the phone for your customers. People really like teleseminars because they feel more involved with the product, you and the product producer.

What usually happens when an affiliate marketer goes to Clickbank or Commission Junction and signs up as an affiliate marketer for a particular product? The first thing she does is usually place a link for the product on his website and send out a marketing email to her list with the same hoplink in it, talking about the value and benefits of the product, asking the potential customer to please ‘click here’ and go and take a look for themselves.

She will then, probably sit back, cross her fingers, and hope to make a few sales.

If this average affiliate marketer happens to get lucky and be included in the launch of a new product, she will do pretty much the same thing. She notifies her list of the upcoming launch (the average affiliate marketer usually only sends one preparatory email) and then he sends out the marketing email at the actual product launch.

She will no doubt make a few sales…very few. Of course, she won’t be working very hard either and maybe she is happy being an average affiliate marketer. There is a problem, however, with being average. Average is a very crowded place, and average won’t make you much money.

Why would anybody want to settle for average? Average means ‘common or ordinary…nothing special’? If you are not happy with being an average affiliate marketer, then you need to do what is required to become an EXTRAORDINARY affiliate marketer.

Being an extraordinary affiliate marketer means being unique.

Being unique is a quality that sets one apart from all of others. If you want to be better than just average, and you SHOULD want to be better, you will need to develop some uniqueness in your marketing techniques AND your personal image, that will set you above the average affiliate.

Average affiliate marketers don’t understand the idea that in order to sell a lot of each product, their offer needs to be more valuable than the offers that their competitors are making. Most affiliate marketers won’t offer any incentives to their lists for buying a specific product from then rather than buying the same product from someone else.

Some affiliate marketers will offer some bonuses as incentives, but they will be quite ordinary things that aren’t of much value, or are actually unrelated to the product that is being promoted.

The extraordinary affiliate marketer will offer bonus incentives that are BETTER than anything that is being offered by any other marketer and ones that are directly related to the product that is being promoted. The bonuses can actually sometimes be as good as (or even better than) the product being promoted, perhaps an older product that still has value in the current market.

The whole idea of offering better incentives to customers is just common sense. If you can get 3 products for the price of one, why not get the free bonuses?

Let’s say that there is an E-Book about Email Marketing that you want to promote It’s a great book (you know this because you bought it AND read it!) that has been written by an Email Marketing expert. It is selling for $97 and your commission is going to be $50 per sale. There is a very elaborate launch for the product. Your competitors are offering an additional E-Book or two as bonus incentives.

How can you get an edge in this situation? The only way that you can possibly get an edge is to offer something that your competitors aren’t offering. You could have set up a teleseminar that will take place a few days after the launch for those who buy from you. Or perhaps you could offer a free 30 minute downloadable audio tape that further explains certain points in the E-Book.

The people who buy from you will be getting a better deal than they could get from your competitors. The product will always be the same…but the bonuses that are offered is where you get the edge.

NEVER underestimate the power of FREE! Everybody loves getting something for nothing. They especially enjoy getting something that everybody else is not getting.

And that brings me to another, finer point of offering bonus incentives. If you can offer something such as a free teleseminar that is related to a product launch, you need to limit the number of people who will receive the bonus. That makes it more exclusive and thus more desirable. The more difficult something is to obtain, the more people will value it.

Luke.