I Wish I Knew This One Thing When I Started Affiliate Marketing

Majority of people started their online business adopting affiliate marketing as the core model, just like myself. It is indeed a great strategy to kick start your online business because the only thing you need is to find a converting offer and start driving traffic to it. Simple and straight-forward.

You could start a blog to review products or build a squeeze page to promote the affiliate offers and tap into traffic techniques like content marketing or paid traffic with PPC, PPV, banner, etc…However, the bottom line is you will only get a cut in the commission.

If you are driving paid traffic, you will need to make sure your return of investment (ROI) is positive, i.e. for every N1000 you pay for traffic, you will need to generate at least N1,500 to have an earning of N500.

If you are doing content marketing like video marketing, article marketing, blogging, etc…to promote the products, you will need to make sure the profit you generate from the commission can cover the time you spent generating the content. Ultimately, your time is equal to money, no matter how much you price your hourly rate.

So, always make sure your earning per click (EPC) is more than your cost per click (CPC) when promoting offers.

The real question is how can you make it big when you are doing affiliate marketing? How can you get the most out from promoting other people’s offers?

Majority of the products in Expertnaire will only you 50% of the commission, including some of the upsells, downsells, etc…Other marketplaces like.

Normal people who are able to generate 4–5 figures per month with affiliate marketing will be considered good enough! So how do the super affiliates who can generate 5–6 figures from affiliate marketing alone?

This single question puzzle me for long time.

Income Formula

Let’s review this formula again:

Traffic + Conversion = Income

Based on this formula, as long as we can find an offer that convert well, all we need to do is to scale up the traffic to increase the income. Make sense?

The problem is it takes money to generate traffic and the traffic cost has been increasing. Even if you are into free traffic techniques — content marketing, it takes time/money to build up/outsource the content.

Although traffic is a major formula we can tweak to increase the income, we should not forget “conversion”. Let’s take a step by and think about the rationale behind affiliate marketing.

How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?

Why do you think people let you to promote their products while giving you a large chunk of commission up to 100%? You might be thinking because they would like get more traffic and generate more sales. Absolutely!

A more precise answer is the lucrative portion is from the backend sales via email or phone follow up. Not the frontend, upsell, downsell, etc…When the vendor acquire a customer, he can market his products including high ticket items and other relevant products. The lifetime value of a single customer worth a lot more than the frontend product.

Feel being used? You shouldn’t. You have the choice to develop your own products, sales funnel to be in the vendor games but be prepared to spend lots of money in product creation and testing of the sales funnel in order to attract affiliates to promote.

What Should I Do?

Now you know how affiliate marketing really works, you should use it to your advantage to take affiliate marketing to the next level. Don’t worry, if you only want to earn 4–5 figures per month, you can still make it by promoting the products from the marketplaces like Expertnaire.

If you are looking to take it to the next level, you will need to promote the products with a very strong sales funnel with decent conversion rate, containing multiple products, high ticket items (i.e. N100,000 programs). A call center will be very beneficial to increase the closing rate of the high ticket items.

In this case, your EPC will be a lot higher because the leads you sent to the vendor will go through a strong sales funnel including high ticket items. This is the key to become a super affiliate.

Also bear in mind that there are a lot of private affiliate programs that are outside of marketplaces. Spend some time to research them and do you own due diligence to test the funnel despite what the vendor claims about the EPC. Find out if their tracking system is based on lifetime cookie or IP tracking, etc…

What’s your view on affiliate marketing? Feel free to leave me a comment below to share your thoughts.