Affiliate Marketing
Dropshipping For Beginners
You don’t need major skills to be a drop shipper these days. You don’t need to stock inventory, ship anything, or even guess what might sell.
Heck, you don’t even have to use your own money to pay for the goods.
You can work a couple of hours a day or week, depending on how serious you are.
And frankly this dropshipping for beginners method I’m about to show you is so straightforward, a teenager can do it.
Instead, when a store sells a product, it purchases the item from a third party and has it shipped directly to the customer. As a result, the merchant never sees or handles the product.
The biggest difference between dropshipping and the standard retail model is that the selling merchant doesn’t stock or own inventory.
Instead, the merchant purchases inventory as needed from a third party – usually a wholesaler or manufacturer – to fulfill orders.
Hint: Get your kids started with this when they’re in 8 or 9th grade, and by the time they graduate high school they’ll have a very nice nest egg for college, along with more real-world business skills than most college graduates.
Now Then… How Do You Find Products?
Amazon can give you a wealth of information on what’s selling and what’s hot at the moment.
Think about it, Amazon is probably the world’s biggest marketplace so doesn’t it just make sense that if you want to find hot products, people will be selling these on there and all you really have to do is go and find them ?
Go to Google (yes Google, not Amazon) and run some searches such as…
- Most popular kitchen gadgets on Amazon
- Most popular fitness items on Amazon
- Most popular electronic gadgets on Amazon
- Most popular pet products on Amazon
- Etc.
The first few results will be from the Amazon website itself, but don’t stop at those.
You’ll also find articles pointing out what’s new, what’s selling and what’s especially popular.
Be sure you’re only looking at results from the last 12-18 months – anything else might be out of date, especially if you’re looking at anything electronic in nature.
Make a list of possible products you’d like to sell. Once you’ve got some research done, you should have an idea of what niche you’d like to focus on.
Once you’ve chosen your niche, dig deeper into that niche to find products. You might even choose a sub-niche to make targeting your prospects easier.
For example, instead of choosing ‘dogs’ as your niche, you might choose a single breed such as ‘Great Danes.’
When you have your chosen niche and your products, go to Shopify https://www.shopify.com/ and open your own store with their 14 day free trial.
Next, go to Oberlo https://www.oberlo.com/ and sign up to get their free plugin. This is going to make it super simple to add products to your store.
Now add the Oberlo plugin to your Shopify store.
Set up your payment processor. This is probably going to be Paypal or Stripe, or whatever service you are currently using.
Last, go to AliExpress www.aliexpress.com and open a new account.
Once you’ve done that, import your products to your store by using the Oberlo plugin.
Did this sound like a lot of work?
Driving Traffic
Once you’ve done everything above, you are ready to start driving traffic and making money.
If you already have a list in this niche, then that’s your first go-to place to get traffic.
Same way if you already have social media accounts and followers in this niche, you’ll want to promote your store in those accounts.
When you’ve done those things, it’s time to invest a little money and start advertising.
Let’s use $100 as an example. And if you don’t have the $100 to spare, you can always sell something on a site like Craigslist or Gumtree to get it, or just borrow it someplace.
Your goal will be to set up a Facebook page for your store and test ads until you find your winner. Figure on initially spending $10 a day for 10 days to find the ad that gets the sales.
Don’t overthink this or get stressed. If you’ve chosen hot selling products, this really isn’t going to be that difficult.
As an alternative, or in addition to using Facebook, you can also find large Instagram pages in your niche that have at least 50,000 followers and decent engagement.
To figure out the engagement rate, add up the number of likes for their last 10 posts, and then divide that number by 10 to find the average likes. Once you have that number, divide it by the total number of followers to find the average engagement rate.
You’re looking for a bare minimum of 1% engagement. Once you find these pages, send them a direct message asking if they’re willing to promote your product.
Rates for promotion are typically $15 for 50,000, $20-25 for 100,000, and $30-$50 for 200,000. But these rates aren’t written in stone. The higher the engagement, the more you might want to consider paying. And a lower engagement means you shouldn’t be paying as much. Negotiation is key.
Look for the pages that most closely match what you’re selling. For example, if you’re selling something for rose enthusiasts, you ideally want to find a page that focuses on roses, not on gardening in general.
By investing $50 to $100 in Instagram, you should get 2-6 promotions and several sales or more.
Add products, rinse and repeat.
See how easy that is? Yet I know that 98% of people who read this won’t do it. Which is good news for you… much less competition that way.
So, are you going to be one of the 2% who does take action and makes a killing with dropshipping? I know what my answer would be!
Affiliate Marketing Myths (The Top 5 Affiliate Marketing Myths)
Affiliate Marketing Myths (The Top 5 Affiliate Marketing Myths)
Bad information keeps many people from making money online.
People give a half-hearted effort to one form of marketing, get disappointed that it didn’t work, and then cry out to the world that it no longer works…
“Email Marketing Is Dead!”
“SEO No Longer Works Thanks to Google…”
“Content Marketing Has Lost Its Luster…”
Or the big one:
“Affiliate Marketing Is for Scammers!”
When something is proclaimed dead or not working any longer, it’s probably because someone was gaming the system and the system owners plugged the hole.
Ethical marketing always works in the long run.
That’s why Affiliate Marketing has worked for decades and will continue to work for the non-scammers of the world.
But the headlines persist, and the myths and misconceptions flourish. Let’s take a look at affiliate marketing myths (the top 5 affiliate marketing myths) and reveal the truth about them!
Shall we begin…?
1) Affiliate Marketing Is Easy…
There’s a misconception out there that the newbie online marketer can grab an affiliate link, put it on their Facebook page, and the money will start rolling in.
Not so fast…
Affiliate marketing like any other business model IS a business.
And it should be treated like a business.
While affiliate marketing may be the exact business model you need as a new entrepreneur, it’s important to understand and accept that it is NOT a get-rich-quick scheme.
Is this beginning to sound like work yet? It should.
Affiliate marketing can be VERY rewarding, but it is not easy, especially if you have no business experience. But affiliate marketing can be best way to learn how to build a business with very low-risk.
Your investment as an affiliate marketer is low because you don’t have any product or delivery costs. Your focus must be on building a market, knowing that market inside out, and learning how to sell.
These are essential skills for any business owner to master.
Driving traffic and measuring conversions to build your marketing list is the primary tool of every affiliate marketer.
2) Affiliate Marketing Doesn’t Work Any More…
The days of throwing a link up on the social marketing sites and making a million dollars over night are gone…if they ever existed.
Social media has heightened the importance of building relationships with your target market, and that can be a slow process.
Your followers and email subscribers must feel a connection with you. If they don’t, they find someone else where that connection is real.
Affiliate marketing not only works with an audience that knows, likes and trusts you, but they will ask for your affiliate link for new products. Sometimes, they feel such a close relationship that they’ll pass around your affiliate link for you.
Affiliate marketing without real relationships (even if they’re automated) is hard but can be done with a lot of effort.
But affiliate marketing with real connections with an audience that has been nurtured and embraced works like a charm because you’re genuinely looking out for their interests.
3) The Competition Is Too Steep In Affiliate Marketing…
First, let’s agree competition is good.
That means there’s a market for the product. If not, no one else would be trying to sell that product.
Competitors can also become your best traffic source. Using the right tools like iSpionage.com, you can target your competitors, and step in front of their traffic with better offers, Facebook ads, or other techniques.
Sound a little cutthroat?
Nope, it’s just business. Once you become the Big Dog, everyone will target you too.
Your job is to offer better bonuses, better services, better support, and better experience to that market. And by doing that, you’re building a better relationship.
Find out how your competitors are building their audience (keyword research) and jump in there to grab that audience yourself.
Business is about competition, so if that bothers you, you probably need to get a job.
4) The More I Promote My Affiliate Links The More Money I’ll Make…
Listen, this one is tricky.
In theory, this is true. But there are other considerations like…
Does your message match the right audience? This is where you’ve got to get good at know your market including their hopes, dreams and issues.
In the consulting world, they call these the FUDs – Fears, Uncertainties and Doubts.
What is your audience trying to do? And how can the solution you put in front of them solve that issue?
Promote to the right audience and you don’t have to “sell them” often because you become part of their go-to-problem-solver while you’re building a relationship.
5) Affiliate Marketing Is High Risk And Low ROI…
Ok. There is risk in any business endeavor. In affiliate marketing, you could make a lot of sales for a product only to have the product owner go out of business.
That’s always a risk.
And the return on investment could be very low, but only because you’re not making sales.
That usually means you don’t have the right message for the right target market. Conversions are much easier and ROI much higher when you convert prospects to customers.
Opponents of affiliate marketing will jump in here and declare you’d be better off building your own products, selling them online and keeping ALL the money.
Here’s the truth about that:
Affiliate marketing is awesome because the risk is extremely low. You don’t have to create a massive infrastructure to support your products. You’re letting someone else take that risk on.
And the low ROI? Wrong.
The potential in affiliate marketing for those people who learn how to build an audience and convert that audience to paying customers is HUGE because it’s a pay-for-performance model!
The more you convert, the more you make and the higher your return.
Of course, like everything else, affiliate marketing only works if you know how to do it correctly.
To keep you on track, it is a great idea to use checklists and if that sounds like a good idea to you then please look at these checklists here: warr.us/NAMSAffChecklists
Affiliate Recruitment Strategies (19 Proven Tips For Recruiting The Best Affiliates)
Affiliate Recruitment Strategies (19 Proven Tips For Recruiting The Best Affiliates)
Did you know that all affiliate marketers are not created equal? I’m sure if you are a product seller that you are only too aware of this fact!
So how do you recruit great affiliates?
While there is no one answer, there are many ways to find and recruit those key affiliates who will take your business to the next level.
OK, without further ado, let’s talk about recruiting affiliates
1. Social media
Yes, you can find great affiliates on social media. Target people who are interested in affiliate marketing and blogging in your niche.
On Twitter, search for your keywords to find who is talking about your niche, and then follow them and start interacting.
LinkedIn is a great place to meet affiliates and just network in general. You can post and participate in discussions and connect with people in a professional atmosphere.
2. Affiliate networks
One of the quickest ways to attract affiliates is to launch your product on an affiliate network. There are many to choose from, including Clickbank, Commissions Junction, JVZoo, Linkshare and Sharesale.
3. Affiliate forums
Build and maintain a presence on affiliate forums. These are great places to meet and recruit affiliates.
Here’s a few to get you started:
4. Recruit your customers
This is a great way to get new affiliates who truly use and believe in your product. These people are fans of your stuff and would probably have no problem recommending it to others, especially for a bit of cash too!
Reach out to your buyers and see who would like to be your affiliate, and take it from there.
5. Your own website
Place a link on your website! This is perhaps the most simple, yet most overlooked technique of all. Place a link at the bottom of your website, and anywhere else you choose, pointing people to your affiliate page.
6. “Wanna Promote?”
Contacting websites, blogs and other web publishers. Send them a well-written email to ask them in a very polite way if they would like to become your affiliate.
You’ll likely have to contact a lot of people to get results, but it can be totally worth the effort.
7. Use a Service
Use a service such as Affiliate Leads https://affiliateleads.net/ to locate potential affiliates by category, keyword or advertiser.
8. Bloggers
Group High http://www.grouphigh.com/ is a site that will help you find the best bloggers and influencers, as well as manage your relationships.
9. Outsource
If you have the funds, you can hire a service such as Experience Advertising https://experienceadvertising.com/ to do your outreach and recruiting for you.
10. Use PPC Search Ads
Did you know that affiliates are actively looking for great programs to promote? You can find them by running PPC ads in Google Adwords and Bing Ads.
Don’t forget to track to see which ads are bringing in the most effective affiliates.
11. SEO’d Affiliate Pages
Create a page just for affiliates. Then optimize that page for SEO results, so when people are searching for affiliate programs in your niche, they can find you in the organic search results.
12. Press Releases
Write press releases for online distribution. Press releases can be another way to gain traction in the organic rankings.
13. In Person
Trade shows, summits and conferences are great places to meet new affiliates. You might even consider getting a booth at some of these events, so affiliates are coming to you instead of you hunting them down.
14. Customer Referral Program
Tools such as Referral Candy https://www.referralcandy.com/ and Friend Buy https://www.friendbuy.com/ make it super easy to set up and run a customer referral program.
Plus it automates the process, so you can put your focus elsewhere.
15. You Promote Mine, I’ll Promote Yours
Approach other product sellers and offer to do a deal in which you promote each other’s product. A few notes about this one: Obviously you want to find product owners in your same niche. You want to love their product enough to promote it – don’t promote junk just to make some sales of your own.
I can tell you right now that your customers are not buying just one product on generating traffic – they’re buying several. You can be the affiliate who introduces them to a traffic course you truly believe in, and in return get your own product promoted as well.
16. It’s Super Affiliate!
Look for super affiliates – the top affiliate performers who can generate significant revenue for the merchants they choose to promote.
They’re going to be looking for high conversion rates and a decent percentage of the profits.
Be sure you’ve got everything running smoothly and converting well before asking them to promote. If they make a lot of sales, they may continue to promote you into the future.
But if there are technical glitches or low conversions, you will never hear from them again.
17. Spy
Watch to see who is promoting similar offers. If you’re about to launch that traffic program, so some research to find out who the top affiliates were for previous traffic programs.
Perhaps the easiest way to do the research is proactively. Sign up as an affiliate yourself so you can see who the top promoters are, and contact them well in advance of your own launch.
18. Contests
Run an incentive contest, promote it everywhere. Running a contest with cash prizes for top performers will entice new affiliates to join your affiliate program.
19. Affiliates Recruiting Affiliates
Offer an incentive to current affiliates to bring in new affiliates. Affiliates know other affiliates. And offering a percentage of profits on their affiliate recruits is a great way to incentivize them to do your affiliate recruiting for you.
Above all else take care of your best affiliates and keep them happy. Affiliates can make or break your business. If just one affiliate has a bad experience with you, they can potentially tell dozens of others to steer clear. Once this happens, you’ll find it very difficult to recruit new affiliates.
A half dozen of these affiliates promoting you on a regular basis can move you into the 6 figure range. All for just recruiting and taking care of your best people.
OK, there you have it; 19 top tips to add to your affiliate recruitment strategies to help you attract and recruit the best affiliates.
Amazon Affiliate Marketing Guide (7 Tips To Make The Most From Amazon)
Amazon Affiliate Marketing Guide
(7 Tips To Make The Most From Amazon)
Do you want to earn money online with affiliate marketing the right way? It’s not just finding a good product and pasting the affiliate link everywhere. In this post book we’re going to talk about some powerful techniques you could use to make money online with Amazon Affiliate.
Look, I know how difficult affiliate marketing can be if not done right; I’ve been there! But this post will highlight 7 quick and easy tips to maximise your Amazon affiliate marketing efforts.
OK without further ado, lets’ talk about affiliate marketing through Amazon.
Create Value Content
One of the most important pillars for a website is to produce quality content that provides great value and interest to visitors and especially to help them solve a problem. If your content is good and helps people, this can help you keep users interested and get them back to your website.
This quality content will help your website to rank higher in search engines and will also help you convince people to buy.
You can also share that content through social networks to reach more people.
Careful Selection of Products
It is important to take enough time to choose the products you are going to promote. Investigate which products your visitors need or are interested in within your niche. You can test to discover which products that most visitors want, and which convert more. You can change products that don’t give you good results and try others.
Using Email Marketing
The best way to get good sales results is to build a relationship of trust with readers, and the most effective way to do this is through Email Marketing. With Email Marketing you can achieve incredible results, its success lies in the fact that when you use it you can get a person to buy your products more than once.
Landing Page
You can create a high converting landing Page to collect data from your visitors. This landing page should be super-focused, without a navigation bar, with a catchy title, an explanatory subtitle and a super clear call to action that clearly reflects your goal.
Reward
In the landing page you can offer a free reward (like a free Ebook or a free video) with valuable content in exchange for the visitor’s data (mainly name and email) through a subscription form to create a subscribers list.
Subscribers List
The data entered by visitors in exchange for the free reward through the landing page will be stored in a subscribers list handled from email marketing software. This list is really important because all the people there are potential buyers, so it is also important to make it grow.
Email Marketing Software
Using software such as AWeber, GetResponse and Mailchimp you can manage the list of subscribers and send them automated and periodic emails with valuable content and offers.
With these platforms you can divide the lists into smaller lists according to the interests of the subscribers and that way you can send them more targeted offers that can lead to a purchase.
Purchase-Oriented Content
When people go shopping online, they do more specific searches because they are looking to buy something, not only information about the product, that’s why you should use purchase-oriented keywords. For example, if you sell costumes you can use the phrase “cheap costumes” instead of “costumes” and thus attract quality traffic i.e. people looking to buy and not just people who are looking for general information on costumes.
International Commissions
Amazon allows you to receive commissions only if the buying public is located in the country where you created the affiliate account, for this reason, if you only have an Amazon US account you are losing sales commissions from people in other countries such as the United Kingdom and Canada.
But today there is software that help us solve this problem, such as EasyAzon 4 and Genius Link. These platforms include automatic link location, which means that your affiliate link changes depending on the country where the visitor is located.
In this way, if you have a visitor from Spain make a purchase, you earn that commission.
To achieve this, you must create an account for the Amazon Affiliate program in each country, or at least the countries where the most traffic is provided.
The Amazon Affiliate Program exists in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, Spain, Mexico, Brazil, India, Japan, China, France and Italy.
But the software we mentioned above helps you to redirect traffic from other countries to one of the countries where the Amazon Affiliate Program exists.
Make sure you don’t lose any commission.
Best Seller Lists
It is a good idea to include Amazon Best Seller Lists in your website posts. These lists focus on the best-selling products within the category of products you are promoting, so people may be interested in more than one product to buy and in this way you can increase your profits.
Using Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a powerful tool that will help you track visits to your website and the behavior of your visitors.
It allows you to see where your visitors are coming from, what are the most visited pages, how long users remain on each page, what are the hours of the heaviest traffic, used devices, used traffic channels, user retention, age and gender of the users and much more detailed information that will help you analyze your website to know what is working and what is not, to help you make decisions on what should be changed to improve.
Remember to create a plan that includes your goals and the steps to follow to reach them. After doing all the steps in your plan, analyze the results obtained to decide what to change for better results.
Amazon Affiliate Success Part 3: Creating High Converting Content
Amazon Affiliate Success Part 3: Creating High Converting Content
Are you aware of the saying that content is king? While there is no denying that content can make or break a website, you need to ensure that you are creating quality, future proof content for your website as this is just as important to your rank as using the right type of target keywords.
In fact, if you really think about it, quality content on an Amazon affiliate website is only possible once you find the correct keywords so that you can base your content around these targeted keywords so finding the best keywords is a critical step in content creation. Now, quality content on an Amazon affiliate website is not the same as quality content on, say, a bird watching website. What do I mean by that? well read on 🙂
You already know that the first rule about creating quality content is to base it around your most profitable, most traffic generating keywords, but there are other elements that, put together, will make it much more likely that your niche website will rank on the first page.
The first one is length. One thing that you will notice about most sites on the third and fourth pages of results when you start doing your keyword research as explained before is that they do not offer lengthy content around their keywords. They conform with throwing and repeating their keywords around on 250 word articles in hopes that keyword stuffing will get them ranked higher than they deserve. This was the old version of SEO but this doesn’t really work any more.
The thing is that short form content doesn’t work very well for quality written content. So the second rule to follow when creating quality content for an Amazon affiliate website is to make it long, and by long we mean 2,000 words long and over. Yes this is long but is well worth the effort and if you are writing a review this should be easy to do. If you want a feference as to how long a 2000 word post is; this post you are reading is exactly 1104 words long.
Actual online marketing researchers have found that the average length of articles on Affiliate websites ranking on the first page of Google results is 2,000 words and longer. The effect that this has is three fold.
In the first place, it allows you to target your niche keywords several times without stuffing, which is just pretty bad for rankings. This appeals to the Google algorithm because it will find your target keywords repeatedly throughout content that is not a string of repeated keywords.
The second factor in play here is that it will allow you to create content that is truly relevant to prospective buyers because a piece of content that is 2,000 words long has to include a lot of information about the product being promoted.
In that sense, these product centered articles are then perceived both by your visitors and Google as buyer’s guides, which complies both with Google’s own requirements for quality content to be relevant and with your visitors’ desire to find help with their purchasing decisions.
That takes us to the third factor in play here, which is reducing the amount of time that it takes a buyer to jump to the checkout once they see a product link or image for the second or third time. Now, to achieve this you will need to highlight the pros and the cons of the product in the article promoting it.
And you have to highlight them at the beginning. This creates the effect of informing your leads on the things that they want to learn about the product right before they get to read the entire article, making them very likely to skip the article, click through an image or link, make the purchase, and then coming back to keep reading in anticipation.
This is possible because they will unconsciously realize that the article is long and that they can simply keep reading about the product that they just decided to buy right after they check out, to build up on the excitement in anticipation of receiving the actual product.
Also, longer content allows you to make it future proof because it helps you to build up authority. Speaking of which, we highly recommend you to print the following statement and to paste it on the wall behind your computer so you can see it every day:
Building Permanent Traffic Sources
Now, this is where most marketers will recommend you to focus on getting on the paid advertising bandwagon, but like I said before, Amazon affiliate marketing is different, and generating traffic sources takes a different approach.
The best way to create a permanent source of traffic is by creating a series of lists with evergreen content, by which we mean content that stays relevant over time.
These are lists that you have to be updating on a regular basis to always attract traffic through a very specific set of purchase based keywords which include the following keywords:
Best sellers
“Best of”
“Best on a budget” (Such as “Best budget wireless headphones)
The good news is that keeping these lists updated is as easy as going to the Amazon marketplace and sorting through the best sellers list on your niche category, by sorting through the products with the highest buyer review scores and also sorting through the lowest priced items in your niche with the highest scores.
Now, the science behind these updated lists is that it is pretty easy to rank on the first page when you use keywords such as “cheap” alongside a product based or niche keyword as they have very high search volumes on a monthly basis.
In order to keep these lists bringing you fresh traffic all the time through search engine queries is by creating a separate category page on your site. Remember that each product that you insert on your “best of” lists needs to have its own long form product based article that you can redirect to from your list.
Follow these strategies and you will be giving yourself the very best chance of running a successful online Amazon affiliate business. So what are you waiting for? Find your niche, source your items, setup your website and create some great content and by leveraging the Amazon marketplace you can tap into a huge market. So, get started today and keep on working on your Amazon niche sites and your business will blossom. Good luck.