When I started out with affiliate marketing, I probably did it the way 90% of the other beginners do it... I created a clickbank account and started to promote clickbank products on traffic exchanges. The results as you can imagine were close to zero. I then started my learning curve and read somewhere that the money was in the list. So I built a list with an opt-in page and as soon as people signed up, I sent them clickbank offers. Again the results were close to zero and the people on my list didn't stay there very long. It took me several years of learning and many mistakes to finally come up with a business that makes me money.
What have I changed in my strategy?
The biggest change that I undertook is to actually have a strategy at all. What I mean by strategy is to have a plan as to how I want people to find me, how I want to interact with them and especially what I want to promote to them.
The most important component of your business strategy - how will you monetize it?
It is very important to define how you want to monetize your business. It is a good idea to think about that before you start your business. The manner you monetize your business defines the demographics of the leads you should be looking for and how you should interact with them. Surprisingly, I find a lot of people who start to build an online business without knowing how they will monetize it.
How to choose your affiliate programs
Affiliate programs are one of many ways how you can monetize your business and it is probably one of the easiest ones. However there are a lot of different type of affiliate programs. First of all you have to eliminate everything that is not serious. Never promote a program that you wouldn't invest yourself in.
For me a very important aspect of an affiliate program is whether it pays you commissions for sales or whether you are paid according to the activity of the users you refer.
Commission based affiliate programs
Let's take the example of the affiliate program of Splinterlands. You probably all know this game which is one of the great motors of the steem blockchain. Splinterlands offers an affiliate program where you earn 5% commission on all the purchases made by your affiliates. With Splinterlands I earn money when my affiliates purchase new packs.
Activity based affiliate programs
Let's look now at the affiliate program of cointiply. Cointiply is a website that pays you for many different tasks like taking surveys, watching videos or simply to claim from the faucet. With cointiply I earn 10 – 25% of the coins that my referrals earn themselves. With Cointiply I earn each time any of my affiliates fulfils a task on the website.
In my experience it is much more difficult to get affiliates and also income for commission based programs. It is much easier to get affiliates for activity based programs and it is also much easier to generate income with it. On the other hand the income potential is much bigger with commission based affiliate programs.
Choose the nature of the affiliate programs that you want to promote and only then build your strategy for your online business.
Do you want to learn more about affiliate marketing and internet business? I've just published an e-book that can be purchased on steem with steem or Leo How to start a Cost-Free Internet Business.
by @achim03
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One strategy I use is to show people my results (screenshots). This generally gets people's attention because they can see proof that something is working. If it can work for a ordinary guy like me it can work for anyone!
this is a cool strategy,i will try this out...
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just like they say "seeing is believing"....
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Hi,
I think that it is indeed a good point. Thanks a lot for your comment!
Come to think of it, one of the things that seems to keep people away from blockchain is their second thoughts. Screenshots might help be a little bit more coercive in grabbing the attention of those that are on the border line.
Great post, my friend... Nice advice and you have it all... And plug for your great e-book... ;)
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Thanks a lot for your kind comment!
Hello dear @happyvoter, good advice.
Congratulations friend, a good way to help others and make a profit in the process.
Thanks a lot for your comment my friend. I've written this e-book and it is for sale now. The first 10 sales will go into @help.venezuela ;-)
Excellent read @happyvoter and @achim03
Thank you for sharing your valuable experience with affiliate marketing.I never opened clickbank account and I'm not sure what is it. Could you please explain little bit?
Very good point. I recently helped @holybread and together with few other guys from project.hope - we'v got them something over 150 users through ref-link program. Unfortunatelly the way it's structured sucks big time. Users spent STEEM and affiliate marketer will receive 5% of it ... but in form of utility token which cannot be traded and has pretty much no use and no value. Holybread pays in bread, which really isn't useful at all.
That's one of examples of terrible and short term affiliate program. One without strategy. One without giving option of earning to those who participate.
ps. what are activity based programs ? Could you give some example?
Upvoted already,
Yours, Piotr
Hi Piotr,
It's always a pleasure to read your nice comments ;-).
Clickbank is a website (https://www.clickbank.com/) that is like the magic place for affiliate marketers. It is a marketplace for affiliate offers and products. You can find about anything to promote and sell. There are however also negative aspects like a couple of years ago, they still paid you with checks by post...
About Holybread I quite agree with you. On the other hand I also understand their policies. The problem is that on the steem blockchain it is quite easy to make fake accounts and to cheat referral commissions if it is not on sales. However I think it would have been nice if the commissions were paid at least in steem rather than in bread.
There are many website that have affiliate programs that pay according to the activity of the users. Typical websites are trading platforms like binance or websites where you can earn coins like cointiply or faucets.
The idea is that the website owner delegates his marketing to its users and when you get new users, you earn a percentage of their earnings. Lets say my referral earns 100 satoshis with cointiply, I will recieve 25 satoshis as referral commission. My commission will be paid by the website owner.
Hope this was clear ;-)
Best regards,
Achim
@tipu curate
Upvoted 👌 (Mana: 15/25 - need recharge?)
Thanks for the tipu upvote ;-)
i love using email marketing to promote affiliate programs...
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That is probably one of the best ways of doing it. Like that you can propose several offers to the same leads. Thanks a lot for your comment!
that is true
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is email marketing still effective for promoting affiliate programs??
Posted via Steemleo
It really depends how you are doing it. If you are just sending clickbank offers to your list, it definitely won't work. Like with everything you can make it work if you can convince the people on your list that they will gain from joining a program or buying a product. The best way to do it is to create in dept interaction with them. So it really comes down how you do it ;-)