TABLE OF CONTENTS
Affiliate Marketing - How
Really Competitive It Is 5
Offer Your Prospects Bonus
Incentives 9
Don't Cut Yourself Short
With Offering Rebates! 12
How To Win The Affiliate War 15
Affiliate Marketing – How Really
Competitive It Is
When you watch a football game on TV, you
can easily see how games are won or lost in the battle that takes place on the
line of scrimmage. Offensive plays are designed to protect the quarterback
and/or to open up holes in the defense so that yardage can be gained.
Defensive plays are designed to sack the
quarterback or close holes that would allow yardage to be gained. Quarterbacks
and coaches get the credit for wins and blame for losses but the battle is won
or lost in the trenches.
Affiliate marketing is a lot like a
football game just without the bruises and sore muscles. An affiliate
marketer must design offensive plays and defensive plays that will put him in a
position to win the affiliate wars.
When you are one of many marketers who are
trying to sell the very same product to the very same consumers, you had better
have a plan to get at least your fair share of the market or more.
Every niche market on the Internet is
highly competitive. If it isn’t competitive then there can’t possibly be much
of a customer base to sell to. That is just the nature of all Internet
marketing and in every niche.
Maybe you do have a long and impressive
list of paid customers. That’s great! It means you have already won several of
the affiliate marketing contests and come out on top. The problem is there are
always those up and coming marketers who want your customers on their lists.
Your list and your competitor’s lists may
well contain many of the same names and email addresses. Just having a list
will not be enough to assure you of a victory when selling an affiliate
product. You have to design some offensive plays that will assure that your
customers buy from you and not from your competitors.
So, you ask, what is it that I can do that
will assure that my customers will buy from me? The answer is just one word... unique!
You have to be unique. You have to offer something
that sets you completely apart from your competitors. You have to make your
offer for a product or service for which you are an affiliate more attractive
to buy from you than it is to buy from you competitors.
If you simply send out a marketing email
advertising a product or service that you are an affiliate marketer for, you
need to remember that there are dozens or maybe even hundreds of other
marketers who are sending out marketing email advertising the exact same
product or service and many of them are sending them to the same people that
you are. You have to do something to make sure that your customers buy from
you...you have to be unique.
There are several ways to achieve
uniqueness. One way is to have established yourself as an expert in the field
for which the product or service is being sold. You have to have become not
only visible but credible, as well. This visibility and credibility is not
easily achieved. It takes a lot of hard work, time and effort.
Visibility and credibility are established by taking such measures as writing and marketing
articles and E-Books, posting to blogs and forums, appearing as an expert on
teleseminars and webinars, etc. The fact is that when people know you and trust
you, they buy from you. They will buy from you even is your competitors are
offering a better deal or more incentives.
People do not like to buy from strangers. The Internet is a big impersonal and even frightening place to
many consumers. They want to feel like they know and trust the people that they
buy products and services from. The time, effort and energy that you put into
becoming visible and credible is the best time, effort and energy investment
that you will ever make. Reputation is everything in the world of Internet
marketing. Credibility makes you unique.
Another very important thing that you can
do to insure that your customers buy a product or service for which you are an
affiliate marketer from you and not from one of your competitors is to give
them a very good and compelling reason to make the purchase from you. Offer
something extra or a lot of different extras that will enhance the value of the
product that you are marketing.
No matter what the niche or what the
product is that is being marketed, there are free gifts that you can find that
will make the product a better value if it is purchased from you.
For example:
if you are marketing an E-Book about Internet marketing, you could add several
additional free E-Books concerning different aspects of the broad subject of
Internet marketing.
E-Books can be downloaded from PLR sites or
even from E-Book banks and repositories. Another free gift that people can’t
ever seem to get enough of is free utilities. There are many on the Internet
and you can bet that there are some that will fit right in with whatever
product or service that you are promoting.