This is an important chapter so please read carefully. All affiliate marketers need to understand the concept of a sales funnel. Identifying a good product to sell is one part of the equation. The other part is the sales funnel we have to create to presell and close the deal. Here’s a simple schematic diagram to illustrate this point.
TrafficSales Productie FunnelSales Sales Visitors Page
There are several sales funnel that are highly popular and effective. They are:
1. Direct Selling With BUM Marketing
2. Product Reviews
3. Mini Courses
4. Free Viral Reports
Who are “BUMs”? BUMs are affiliate marketers who make use of content marketing aka BUM Marketing to promote their products. The concept behind BUM marketing is simple, FREE and follows this blueprint.
1. Pick long tail keywords (see Pg 14). Gather about 10 to 20.
2. Write a content rich article around the keywords with 2 – 3 % keyword density. For every 100 words, repeat the keyword 2 or 3 times.
3. Submit the article to top article directories like EzineArticles, GoArticles etc.
4. Repeat steps 1 to 3 and do so for 10 to 20 articles.
5. Wait for sales and affiliate cash to pour in!
Tip: Web 2.0 pages like HubPages and Squidoo are very popular and it is easy to create a keyword optimized page that ranks high in the search engines! This is how my web pages rank in Top 10 at Google for many keywords within 7 Days!
Sign Up For My Secrets Of Affiliate Marketing Newsletter Free!Product reviews are extremely powerful in preselling your visitors. I personally have review sites that convert at higher than 10% on average. This means 1 out of every 10 visitors would buy my product. Many affiliate marketers have reported even higher conversion rates but that really depends on the niche you are in.
Product review sites are usually created as mini-sites consisting of a few pages. You do not need to create a huge site. In fact for each product you review one page is already enough. There are a few tricks to create a product review that gets people interested in buying your product.
1. Create a content rich web page that is optimized for the search engines. Trick is to optimize for the product name, for example, Project Black Mask. That way, your product review would get ranked high and receive a lot of attention.
2. Write useful content that is related to your niche, and embed your affiliate links into the content and explain how your product can solve a problem your readers have. This is a killer technique that is subtle in your preselling.
3. Create review blogs using free blogs like Blogger.com and Wordpress.com. Google loves Blogger blogs. The blogs are simple to create and templates are optimized. See thissample niche blog.
4. Do a comparison of products. Review a few other similar products. Do a benefits and disadvantage analysis. Your potential customers like to know the differences between the products. Buy-in rate is much higher!
5. You may even use an article to do a product review. Write an honest and useful content-filled review and submit it to the article directories. This method is popular and very easy to implement.
Where do you find the content for the review mini-sites?You can visit forums to read other peoples’ comments, search Google and Yahoo, or even pay a visit to the article directories to read the reviews there.
Tip: You can even interview the product owner and put the Q & A on your website. But the most effective way is to buy the product so that you know exactly what is inside!
Sign Up For My Secrets Of Affiliate Marketing Newsletter Free!Mini courses are simply email courses you send to your subscribers. They are short and often contain only 5 – 10 emails. Marketing statistics have found that a prospect needs to be exposed to a product for 5 – 7 times before he/she buys the product. This is the reason why we use mini courses. For this, you would need an autoresponder. Both Aweber and GetResponse are top quality autoresponders that are available to anyone at affordable rates.
If you are spending money to buy traffic, you want to make sure you can follow up with each visitor. Otherwise, the traffic is too expensive. In order to do so, you would need an subscriber sign-up form either on your website or a name squeeze page. What it does is capture the name and email address of your visitor.
There are free squeeze page templates you can download at http://www.instantsqueezepagegenerator.com. Alternatively, you can purchase cheap but professional squeeze pages proven to convert visitors into subscribers atDual Squeeze Pages or Squeeze Page Profit System. Those who are interested in building huge subscriber lists can try thispowerful squeeze page system.
There are a few ways to prepare the email courses.1. Hire a ghostwriter or freelance writer from Scriptlance, RentACoder etc and pay about $5 for each email article.
2. Buy Private Label Rights (PLR) articles such as those from Niche Content
Packages and modify them.
3. Write your own emails with material from the search engines.
4. Break up the chapters of PLR ebooks you have into individual email articles. But please make sure you read the terms of your PLR.
The reason why mini-courses are so popular is because they are fast to set up and allows you to cross-sell other related products. Imagine you are targeting the internet marketing for newbies niche, other than selling Ewen Chia’s Newbie Cash Machine, you can promote just about any other product like “how to drive traffic to a new website”, “how to create a website” kind of ebooks.
Tip: Instant Niche Newsletter Club offers 52 private label newsletters in 3 hot niches per month. Professional squeeze pages included! Sign Up For My Secrets Of Affiliate Marketing Newsletter Free!Viral is the word when it comes to free reports. You basically create mini reports of about 5 to 10 pages on a niche topic to give away and let it spread around 24/7. Examples can be reports on how to drive traffic using traffic exchanges, how to choose what product to sell at eBay and so on. These free reports serve two purposes, one to build your list and the other to sell related products.
Each free report would detail useful information with affiliate links embedded into the content. If readers buy the products, the author gets paid. But be sure to write quality and informative content that would be helpful for your readers. Products recommended should be good and tie closely to your niche as well in order not to shortchange your readers.
But we have not come to the main purpose of free reports yet. The main purpose is to get subscribers to sign up for your newsletter so that you can build your subscriber list. With the list, you can then follow up with your prospects closely using your preset autoresponder email series. Your email course would be a course that is related to the free report you gave out. Occasionally, you can also broadcast interesting news or information and recommendations to ebooks and tools that would help your prospect.
To make your free report a powerful viral tool, offer the giveaway and resale rights of your free mini-report to your readers. This would motivate them to list your report on their websites and to give it away as a bonus or sell it. See how the free mini report can spread around the whole internet creating a truly viral effect?
Too lazy to write your free report? Did you know that there are now ready made rebrandable mini-reports that promote ClickBank products in the hottest niches? Check out Affiliate Income Machines that provides a complete suite of mini reports and professional squeeze pages to launch your lists and promote 21 different ClickBank products in 7 popular markets.
You can also grab your free membership forPLR Wholesaler and download PLR and rebrandable ebooks and reports to start your viral report campaign!Tip: Give away this ebook you are reading now and use it to build your list. Hurry to do so since it is a new release and not many has it yet! Sign Up For My Secrets Of Affiliate Marketing Newsletter Free!