But we’re talking about how important it is to get these affiliates on board. What are some other ways that you’ve maybe created affiliate lists, or did you want to get into, because you mentioned you’ve got 1,500 affiliates right now on your list. Is there anything else, any tips or tricks or things you want to talk about, how you do that, or anything else within that subject?
Liz: Yeah, sure. The main way I build affiliates is like I said, as soon as I make a sale to them, I try and recruit them. You always want to make your customers your affiliates, because they’re you’re best sales people. Someone that already has your product in their hand is going to be your best sales person.
What I’ve done over the last couple of years is I have Train Your Affiliates. There I have all of my products listed, and on the front page is basically my sales page. “Here’s what you get for being an affiliate of www.TomeyMarketing.com! We have all these products, and here’s what they pay you!”
And down on the left-hand side, when you click on the product, it gives you an entire page about that product with the ad copy and everything to go. Now, what I also do is I train my affiliates with Train Your Affiliates. You know, I send them out e-mails about how to do this, and how to do that, all affiliate marketing related. But when I teach them how to do this or do that, I say, “Okay, you’ll promote resale rights for movies.”
Say I’m going to be teaching them about article marketing. Well, when I’m teaching them about article marketing to drive traffic, I’m showing them with my site, how they can do it with my site. So that’s a big thing, and that draws a lot of people in, because they want that information. They may or may not promote my product, but I’ve got them as an affiliate, and as I keep coming out with products, I’m going to put something in front of their faces they’re going to want to promote. That’s the biggest key there.
Jeff: I guess, I want to try to uncover some other, not the secret things, but things that you do to get your affiliates motivated or to find new affiliates. We talked about going to seminars now is something that is very valuable, but what are some other things that either you do or that you’ve heard about that can bring more affiliates into the pipeline?
Liz: Oh, man. I’m just stuck on my stuff. That’s a good one. Some things you can do to bring affiliates in. If you know someone who has a lot of affiliates, offer a two-tier affiliate program and go to them, and say, “Hey! If you promote this to your affiliates, you get 10% of everything!”
You can do that with JV brokers, too. There are only a couple left in the industry. I know a couple of them who have retired lately. I don’t know what that’s all about.
[Laughter]Somehow, all the JV brokers are retiring. You can also do that.
Constantly find ways to leverage. Another thing, like I said, is building your own affiliate headquarters, and going out and promoting it. You need to actively be promoting it. If you see someone who has a product like yours, introduce them to your affiliate program. Tell them, “Hey, I have this, this, and this. This is what we do. We’d love to be able to fit you in with our stuff.”
Always be looking for your next affiliate. You’re always looking for your next customer, and you’re always looking for your next affiliate. So that’s basically the ways I do it. There’s no real secret to it.
Jeff: Here’s a tip that I’ve not done, but I’ve seen people do it. When they’re emailing someone or they’re talking to them, and the person’s agreed to help out with the affiliate program, that’s the perfect time you’d say, “Who else would you know that could help me with this?” Then, say, for example, that I would tell that person, “Well, I know this girl Liz. Do you know Liz? Her list would love this.”
Well, then, that person would send an e-mail to Liz and say, “Hey, I was just talking with Jeff Dedrick, and he mentioned that you’d possibly want to take a look at my product.” Well, right there, it’s not like a normal, “Hey, you don’t know me, check out my product.” They’ve kind of almost like gone through me, and because I’ve already agreed to it, or agreed to push it, they can say, “Yeah, Jeff Dedrick’s going to be helping me out, and he gave me your name, Liz. Here’s my product, would you like to check it out?”
That’s a very powerful thing to ask. “Who else do you feel could help me with this, or would be interested in this?” because if every person gives you two names, you could double the size of your affiliate list just from that alone. Just from asking that question.
Liz: Oh, yeah, definitely. That’s the viral aspect of it, refer me to another person, refer me to another person.Jeff: Well, and perfect example, did Jon and Pat ask you to get me on board for their AdSense product?
Liz: Yeah, definitely. And I actually emailed my affiliates, because I know a lot of my affiliates, my general list, about their products, because I really believed in their product. They had a really good thing, AdSense for the Hot Seller. I know a lot of my affiliates promote AdSense stuff, so I went straight to them, too, and said, “Hey, Pat and Jon are having an awesome thing and big commissions. Let’s go for it!”
They got a lot of affiliates from me, too.Jeff: Were you number one in that affiliate contest?
Liz: Yes.
Jeff: Okay, I don’t remember, what was I? Was I three?
Liz: You were three.
Jeff: Three. So that’s a perfect example. By them asking Liz, or putting the little bug in her ear, she brought me on board. Well, they just gained their third-place affiliate just because of that little viral thing that they did with Liz to get her to get me on board. I probably would not have pushed it, because I didn’t even know about it. So by Liz telling me about it, and then also, with her being the expert and me not being the expert with AdSense, I used her expertise.
I said “Liz, give me your total honest opinion. Tell me what’s good and bad about this product.”She told me she loved it; it was great. She told me all of the features, everything it does. Even though I looked at the product and I sensed that it was good, I used her expertise to really let me know if it was good or not. Just by doing that, wham, they got a bunch more sales.
Liz: Yep.Jeff: Well, I don’t know if there’s anything else that we want to talk about for the affiliate JV thing. I do know it’s a very important thing that a lot of times people overlook. They worry so much about their product.
But I did have somebody kind of mention this, and I never really thought of it this way. She’s a JV broker, and when she looks at someone’s product, she’s looking at the product launch not being just one product launch; she wants to see two product launches, meaning one’s for the product and another launch for the affiliate. She feels it’s as important to put as much time into what you’re doing for the whole affiliate launch than it is for the product itself.
Liz: Exactly.Jeff: So that you actually have a game plan. It’s just not “Hey, my product’s done, now I’ve got to go out and get affiliates, send out some e-mails, the end.”
Yeah, you need to come up with a complete game plan. You need to get the postcards sent out to them. Possibly get e-mail addresses, addresses; you need to have special reports, branded pages, branded reports. You need to get a JV blog, possibly a contest. You need to have all of these things in place.
Otherwise, you can’t look at it as an afterthought. It’s that important. You can have the best product in the world, and if you’re just starting off, you’re not going to sell anything hardly. It might eventually virally take off; but if you really want to make a splash, you need to get JV partners on board.
Liz: I totally agree. And don’t just go for the splash. Once you’ve got your product out there, don’t have a, what I call them, one-hit wonders. What I just did is, going more in depth on that, is I have two sites. I have My Original E-Products and Resale Rights for Newbies.
They both kind of were tied into each other. One sells master resale rights products; one teaches you to use master resale rights products. So I actually built My Original E-Products, got it going, and used it to launch Resale Rights for Newbies. So it’s kind of like a double launch. It was a launch to launch, and that was my whole game plan. I wanted to get more bang for my buck, so you always need to look at that, too.
I know that’s not related to list building; it’s more of a launch process. That’s something you guys really need to take note of and write down.
Jeff: Liz, I wanted to go onto free products. I know that there are ways to build a list that you’ve used to build your list. I want to hear about that, these free giveaway sites or things that you do with free products to build a list. Can you give me some details on that?
Liz: Yeah, sure. No problem. I just mentioned My Original EProducts, and Jeff will give everybody a resource link for that because like I said, he’s one of my affiliates, so make sure you go through Jeff.
But what I do is I’ll take and make master resale rights products. Everybody goes, “Oh, gosh, I can’t make those products.” Yes, you can. Just use private label content. That’s what I do when I’m giving away products, is I just use private label content, put new graphics on it.
If it’s an e-book what I’ll do is I’ll print it out, and I’ll go through it. I’ll read the whole thing and I’ll find where I can make some changes or add some affiliate links. When you’re doing a free product, you always want to add affiliate links to it so you can make some money that way, too.
So I’ll get my product totally done. I’ll have Hostler create my squeeze page, because I don’t do my copy any longer. I hire someone to do my copy. That’s very, very important. Dedrick has taught me a lot about outsourcing. Since I’ve outsourced, I’ve more than doubled my income. That’s another thing you guys have to write down: outsource, outsource, outsource!
Jeff: Yes.Liz: But I’ll get all of it totally set up, and of course, I’ll e-mail my list. But if I don’t have a list, of course, posting in forums, I’m a big forum person. But, on the flip side of that, don’t let forums be a time vampire. You know what I mean by a time vampire. Don’t let them suck all of the time out of you, because they can be very time-consuming.
Article marketing, I am a huge article marketer. I probably have at least 500 to 1,000 articles written a month for me because I use them as content, too. Then I have a membership site I put them in. But a lot of them I use for article marketing, because if you can get good backlinks, and I was just on a call with Jacob Stein about backlinks.
If you can get good backlinks for certain keywords, like if you’re trying to build a squeeze page on master resale rights, well, you’ll want to go and search for master resale rights, do your keyword research. I would use Keyword Country, and that’s at www.KeywordCountry.com. It’s an awesome, awesome site that gives you good keyword research statistics.
But I would go, and I’ll find really easy-to-write-for keyword phrases. In my resource box on my articles, I’ll hyperlink that keyword phrase. So the more backlinks you get for that keyword phrase, you’re going to rank in the search engines when someone searches for that keyword phrase.
So article marketing, forum marketing, my own list, if I can put an OTO on it, you know, free front offer, and a lot of people aren’t going for this anymore, but a free offer, then an OTO. If you’re giving 100% commissions like Jeff said, his idea about 100% commissions on the OTO, and then a downsell so you can recoup some of your costs, you know, Jeff left, like, 15 grand laying on the table.
Jeff: Thanks.[Laughter]
Liz: Oops.
[Laughter] Jeff: Thanks for pointing that out again.
Liz: Yeah, no problem. I’ll do that a couple times, I’m sure.
But if you can have the downsell to recoup your costs, that’s cool. It’s a great way to build a great big list. But the thing is, you’ve got to have a product. The free product on the front end has to be very general. It can’t just be for list building, or AdSense.
You can do it that way, but if you’re going to go all out, I really, really suggest doing it as a general product. Something I’ll be coming out with here in the future is a site called MyFreeMemberships.com. What the site is going to offer is free memberships to five different membership sites, and it’s five different niches of Internet Marketing.
The reason why I’m doing that is because I want something there for everyone, and what I’m trying to do is build my marketing funnel absolutely perfect. I’m sure everybody knows what a funnel looks like; it’s big at the top and goes down there at the bottom. Everybody should build a marketing funnel, and I really, really, really recommend you go online and search for “marketing funnel.”
Go to www.E-zineArticles.com and search for “marketing funnel” and educate yourself about that and get your own marketing funnel in place.
At the top of every marketing funnel should be a free offer. Mine’s going to be very general. Then as I put people in my funnel, I can hit them with all of my different offers all the way from something cheap to a high-end product. So if you’re going to start building a list, do a general, so as you add products to your funnel and you funnel people through that, you have people from all different backgrounds so you can create different products for all of them.
So the free way is an awesome way to go, but there’s a lot you have to do, especially if you’re just beginning. If you have no list, the free way isn’t always the best way. The best way, if you don’t have a list, is kind of the buyer’s list, I call it.
Gary Ambrose is the first person that I saw really do it with his Nickel Mania stuff. You get buyers. I do not suggest the whole dime-sell approach. I hate dime-sells, I really do. I think they devalue products, unless it’s your own products. If you’re creating your own product, that’s great, but if you’re trying to use somebody’s master resale rights products, I really don’t recommend it.
But if you have your own product, and say you’re selling it for $10, and on the front end, you’re giving all of your affiliates the entire $10 and there’s an OTO, well, if you can give them 100% on that, that’s even cooler, and then you have your upsell to where you totally get all of the money.
But people like that model a lot better than they like the free model. So if you want to do all your advertising yourself, go with the free model. If you want your affiliates as JV partners to do all the advertising for you, go with the cheap front end, a higher priced OTO, and a downsell after the OTO. Does that make sense, Jeff?
Jeff: Yes. Have you done that type of model yet? Have you experimented around with that, the $7-type model that you’re talking about, that Ambrose $10-type model?
Liz: No, I haven’t. I haven’t played with that yet. I know several people who have, who have built great big lists from it. So it’s a good sound model. I do have something coming up that’s like that. But from everyone I’ve talked to, it’s an awesome model and it really built a good list of buyers.
Jeff: Yeah, I have not done that either, myself. I will tell from the opposite point of view, somebody was doing kind of the free model where they were getting in, letting people download a Web 2.0 audio, and then there was a one-time offer for $10, I believe it was $10, where the customer could get a second audio. Then they gave their affiliate 95% of the profit. So they kept back a little bit to cover costs.
So they were giving, because they were actually collecting the money instead of it going to the person’s PayPal account directly. So they did have some Visa-type collection costs.
Well, then they did an upsell off of that for a teleseminar series, like six-week teleseminar series, all of these experts coming in. It was, what was it, $297? So they split, then, that amount, 50% themselves, 50% to the affiliate.
I don’t know how many total sales they did, and I know, Liz, you don’t really like talking about numbers, but a lot of times I throw it out there just so, not to brag or anything like that, but just to give people an idea of how well these can do.
I know that my 95% commissions, and that was probably 75% of it, and then my $150 of 50% commissions on the $297 was maybe 25% of the total. Again, I’ve never figured it out. But I’ve made over $12,000 commissions alone off of that promotion, promoting someone else.
What I did is, to make it go viral, I was only at $3,000, I sent it out to my list once or twice, and that was about it. $3,000, great, you know $3,500. I was very happy with that, but I was actually surprised that it was so much.
So I created a free e-book on the Web 2.0 stuff that I could give out, and then on my thank-you download page, as one of the bonuses, I gave out that person’s offer. So they were going to that guy’s site and getting the free audio. That was the gift. Well, then, of course, I was making the 95% on the one-time offer.
So that e-book kicked in when I was at about $3,500, $3,600. Well, that continued to fuel, and because my offer was free, more and more people downloaded my e-book, and they saw the onetime offer and they saw the thank-you page one-time offer. That’s what shot it, really, up past $12,000. I would have probably stalled out around $3,500, $3,600, but because I saw how big that was, I decided actually, to create a product that almost pushed somebody else’s product.
I don’t know how much time I spent creating the book. The graphics cost me, whatever it was, $100, $200, but obviously, it was well worth it. I shot up from $3,500 to $12,500, whatever I’m at now. But picture what the owner of that Web site, even though he was giving out 95% and only making 50% of the big upsell, picture the list that that guy made. I sent him a boatload of traffic, and if he had 30, 40, 50 other affiliates doing that, I’ll bet you he came out with a monster list. Again, niched, all interested in Web 2.0 traffic.
As an affiliate, I wish I would have come up with that product, so I would have been making that big list, but I bet you he’s very happy with all of the people he’s created from that.
We kind of were talking about the free products. What about free giveaways, Liz? I know that there was Doug, and who was Doug’s partner on the free PLR giveaway? Was it Terri, his wife? What was that?
Liz: Xavier.Jeff: Yeah, Xavier.
Liz: Xavier Nelson.
Jeff: Yep. They did the free giveaway. That was the most recent one that we were probably in. Have you done many free giveaways in your life, and what were your results from those free giveaway sites? Or maybe explain to people what we’re talking about when we say “free giveaway sites.”
Liz: Okay, what we’re talking about with the free giveaway sites is basically, a great big joint venture. The person heading the giveaway, like let’s use Doug, he has the free PLR stuff. He went to all of the joint venture partners and said “Hey, if you have a free PLR product, let’s put it on this site. We’ll all promote the site together, and people will send their lists to the site, and if the person wants your stuff, they’ll sign up to your list.”
Well, the very first one I ever did was Mike Steup. And I call him Mike Step and I call him Jason Step, and you’ll hear me call him several names.
Jeff: I call him a bunch of names that I can’t say.[Laughter]
Liz: Yeah, Dedrick, Steup, and I have an ongoing e-mail battle. We talk trash constantly. But his was the first on that I was in, and it probably added about 600 people to my list.
Then I went to the next one. That one added about 1,000 people to my list, and I’ve probably done four or five of them. Between the four or five, I’ve probably gotten 10,000 subscribers. So the whole giveaway thing is awesome, absolutely awesome. The king of giveaways is Chris Lockwood.
He’s got products out all about them. He’s getting ready to come out with a report that’s showing how he built his entire list and a membership site using nothing but giveaways. I don’t know what it’s going to be, I don’t know the name of it or anything. I just read it last night, a copy that he put together.
But the giveaways are absolutely awesome, especially if you’re just getting started. Chris actually has a list that you can join. I don’t know it off the top of my head, but if you e-mail Chris, I think he has an AskChrisLockwood.com site. I’m not real sure. Just search for Chris Lockwood Internet Marketing, and you’ll find him, www.LockwoodLetter.com; I think that’s it.
But if you go to him, he could put you on a list where you’ll be notified about these giveaways that are happening. If you can get in on these giveaways, you can start building a list really, really quick.
What I do is when I do these giveaways, I’ll put the product in, and I’ll send it out to my list, “Hey, this guy’s doing this great big thing, go get a bunch of free stuff!”
So they’ll go and they’ll grab their free stuff, they subscribe to my newsletter or whatever I have, they get my product, but I also always have an OTO on it. What I mean by an OTO is a one-time offer. They subscribe, then they get hit. Everybody on this call knows what an OTO is, a one-time offer. You guys see them constantly. You get the free thing, and then you get a “Wait! Stop! You’re never going to see this again!” type of thing.
That’s why I don’t do my one-time offers in the “Wait! Stop! You’re going to die if you don’t get this!” or whatever. “Hey, isn’t this cool?” type of thing.
So, I not only build my list, but it allows me to make money at the same time. So that’s why I absolutely love the giveaways.Jeff: Yeah, I’ve had success with giveaway sites, also. I was trying to remember the amounts. I know that I’ve had giveaways where I’ve brought in 1,500. I did have one that brought in 3,000. I did another one that is about 1,400 right now. That’s been ongoing, because I’m still getting some people, plus people drop off over time, but I’m still at 1,400 people that are still active in the list.
But I bet you I’m close to that 10,000 also. It’s been very successful.Now, Liz has the strange ability to be able to create a product in, like, seconds, it seems like, you know, hours. For everyone else, it’s super slow, like me. I would recommend you already have, because if you’re new and just beginning, you’re not going to hear about these giveaway sites ahead of time. A lot of times we do hear about them. We know about them.
That’s the only reason I’ll ever create anything, because it forces me to. If they give me enough time, a month, I can get something created. I would recommend that you think ahead, and have one already made, or two. Get some private label rights, articles, get graphics made, like Liz explained, reword them, add your own content, add your own links, create the name squeeze page where people are going to be opting in. Create some type of download, one-time offer page, possibly, but the key is to have it all ready to go.
You want to have it done, all ready to go, so when you hear about one of these, you can either sometimes by joining, they let you upload it right there on the spot, or in the case of somebody else, you may have to e-mail them real quick and say, “Hey, I noticed that you’ve got this giveaway! Here’s my site. Can I be a part of it?”
And obviously, if you’ve got a list already, you can explain, “Hey, I’ve only got 500 people, but they’re brand new, or they’re very receptive toward offers. I’ll send out for your things four times instead of the required two times.” Whatever you can do, try to get into it as quick as possible, because oftentimes, that’s when the most traffic comes, too for these giveaways.
You get hit within the first two or three days, all of the participants send out for it, and maybe the traffic kind of slows down depending on how they’ve got it structured. Most traffic could come in within the first few days, so if you don’t react quick, you’re getting in on that tail end and you won’t get as many subscribers as you could have done right at the beginning.
Another thing is all of these people that are doing these giveaway sites, they, more than likely, might be doing another one. So keep the URL, keep their name, e-mail them and say, “Hey, I noticed last month that you had this giveaway. Are you planning any new ones because I’d love to be a part of it?” Show them “Here’s what I could offer you,” blah blah blah.
So you want to make these connections because even though these are free people, a lot of times they’re beginners; they’re the newbies. They’re just getting in. They’re excited; they want to learn. I know that Gary Ambrose was the number one affiliate for Mike Filsaime’s Butterfly Launch back in January of 2006. The most sales, he told me, the most sales came from his Nickel Mania group.
So, granted, they were buyers, but they were buyers that were buying at ten cents, 20, 30, $1, $2. So they weren’t spending that much, but here they were, then, buying a product for $1,000.
So Liz had talked about the importance of having buyers, and in this case, it was low-end buyers, and it was huge. I mean, that was where most of the sales came from, where the largest percent came from.
So again, these free giveaways, or these low-end Nickel Mania, dime, or $7, $10 type things, these lists can be very, very valuable, big time.
Jeff: Hey Liz, going back to when we were talking about the giveaways, being involved and getting 1,000, 2,000, 3,000 free names. We never really talked about the person that actually holds the giveaways.
So for example, Mike Steup or Doug or someone that brings together all these people, we didn’t really explain what’s in it for them because when you first enter their site or the giveaway, they are capturing everybody’s name.
So, in our case, if we are one of ten, 20, 50, 100 free giveaways, our 1,000 only represents just those few people that might have seen our ad or thought our product was interesting so they decided to opt in, but the owner itself captures everybody because all of these JV partners are sending traffic to this site.
They are capturing everybody at the very first opt-in squeeze page. What are some of the - and again, maybe we don’t know numbers - but what are some of the bigger sites that you have heard of, Liz, or maybe what are some of the first ones that you heard of?
Liz: The first one that I ever heard of was, of course, Mark Hendricks’ “Twelve Days of Christmas.” This July is going to be my third year in Internet Marketing so I’ve only seen a couple of the “Twelve Days of Christmas” promotions and this year I got a few thousand off of it.
But Hendricks is probably like the godfather of it. Of course, you know Mike has been doing his “fill in the blank Ten Days of” whatever season it is for awhile. “The Ten Days of Summer,” “Ten Days of Winter,” spring, fall.
Jeff: He even makes up seasons. “Ten Days of Estevez.”