4 METRICS: How to Build a Profitable Email List With Affiliate Marketing
Hi friends, today we will learn all about how you can build an email list that will help you to get more affiliate income, AKA affiliate marketing.
Over the years, I have made over five figures promoting other people’s products, basically (doing) affiliate marketing. Today, I will share with you some of my favorite strategies that have helped me to build an email list that can bring me affiliate income.
So what is affiliate marketing?
Basically, with affiliate marketing, you are promoting other people’s products and services, and then from there, you get a commission from the creator.
You don’t even need to create your own products and services. So this is good for you if you are say, a beginner, and you haven’t had the opportunity to create your own stuff yet. Even if you own your own products and services, you can also make use of affiliate marketing as a supplementary source of income as well!
So affiliate marketing is very, very important.
When it came to building my email list for affiliate marketing, I had no strategy at all. I would just add links whenever it was convenient. It was just a very disorganized mess when it came to my affiliate marketing strategy.
Click here to watch the video:
Today’s online marketing hack for you is to make use of the affiliate marketing equation that I will teach you to ensure that you are able to successfully build an email list that can actually bring you affiliate income.
So this is basically the equation that happens behind-the-scenes when you are trying to promote products & services to your subscribers.
The equation that every affiliate marketer should know is:
The no. of website visitors x conversion rate x the price of whatever that you are recommending x the commission rate that you’re getting = the affiliate commission that you get.
So remember these 4 elements when you’re trying to build an email list for affiliate marketing.
Let’s dive onto each of these elements!
Metric # 1: The no. of visitors that you can drive to the (affiliate) links in your emails
So the 1st part of the equation is to get more people to actually click. here’s how you can increase this metric…
Create a freebie or a lead magnet that is aligned with whatever you are promoting.
For example, if you are promoting a particular tool, you could have a tech tutorial that demonstrates how to use a difficult-to-grasp function of the tool that everyone is dying to learn.
You could have a checklist or whatever it is that is relevant to the affiliate product that you are trying to promote.
I have a previous video where I share 3 lead magnet ideas that you can use in order to create a freebie that TRULY stands out, which you can watch here:
Only focus on a few key products that you want to promote.
When you focus on promoting a few key affiliate products to your email list, you will get a higher conversion rate because you are able to focus your marketing efforts on these few, GOLDEN products that you have identified.
Here’s what happens when you choose to promote MULTIPLE different things to your email list, promoting whatever you please…
If you choose to randomly promote whatever pays you something, you’re just going to burn your list out and they will not pay any attention to what you are recommending overtime.
You want to focus on a few things because consistency breeds curiosity.
Even if someone may NOT be interested at first, if you are promoting something CONSISTENTLY…
After a while, your subscribers will get curious and they will want to check out the link just to see what this product is all about.
Focusing on a few key affiliate products will also allow you to create relevant + high-value freebies that you can give out to get even more people to join your list. These are people who are HOT leads, who are interested in what you are promoting down the line.
The next step, of course, is to pimp your freebie.
Push out your relevant freebie to as many people as possible.
There are many, many different ways that you can do this:
- Search engines like Google
- Facebook groups
- Add it to your email signature
- Collaborations & JVs
- Here are 50 cool ways to market your business.
There’s a lot of different ways that you can use to promote your freebie.
I talk more about growing your email list in List Building Incubator, my signature list building program.
Do also check out the free masterclass where I go through how you can systemize and grow your email list quickly:
And then after that, you want to distribute it to as many eyeballs as possible, & get it in front of as many people as possible.
So once people consume your freebie, your freebie should naturally lead to whatever you’re trying to promote.
These people will be relevant leads that are already interested in what you have to promote, or at least these people will be having a problem that the product (that you’re promoting) is trying to solve.
If you are trying to promote a weight loss course, for example, a great high-value relevant freebie that you could have is a checklist of all the steps that someone should take in order to lose their first 5kg (11lb).
(This is just an example. I’m not a weight loss expert!)
So your freebie should naturally lead to whatever you are trying to promote.
Metric #2: Focus on conversion rates
What’s this conversion rate that I’m trying to talk about?
When I talk about conversion rate in this context, I mean out of the number of people who click on your affiliate links in your email, how many people actually bought?
So if 100 people clicked on your link and only 5 people bought, which is pretty good, actually… That is a 5% conversion rate.
When you increase the conversion rate of whatever you are trying to promote, obviously you will get more affiliate income as well, because remember the equation, right?
How can you increase your conversion rates?
Select only quality products with a proven conversion rate.
The best way I’ve found, one of the best ways, is for you to select whatever you are trying to promote CAREFULLY.
You want to promote a QUALITY product or service. When that happens, of course, you are going to enjoy high conversion rates.
Because if that’s a quality product that ALREADY has a high conversion rate, it is highly likely that it will have a high conversion rate when YOU promote it as well.
So make sure that you look for quality products to promote and not just promote anything under the sun, because otherwise you’ll just be wasting your effort.
For certain affiliate portals, they will provide statistics of how well a particular product is performing when other affiliates promote it, so you want to pay attention to that.
So that is an easy way for you to ensure that whatever you promote has a decently high conversion rate.
Promote the affiliate product in a strategic manner.
The other part of how you are going to increase your conversion rates is how you actually promote your affiliate products.
You want to share your personal experiences with the programs that you are trying to promote.
The more authentic you are, the higher your conversion rates will be.
Why? Because people can sense when you are trying to be genuine, when you are giving them a sincere recommendation.
The amount of trust that you have with your subscribers play a huge role as well.
Which goes back to my earlier point of focusing on a few key products, because you don’t want to betray the trust of your subscribers.
When you choose something to promote, make sure that it is high quality and how you go about promoting it, you must do it in a very genuine, sincere way, from your point of view. You don’t just want to spew information or facts about the product, because that’s not going to work very well.
Your subscribers trust you, they trust your opinion, they trust your experiences. So you want to share that as well. You want to share things like why you like a particular product, or your SPECIFIC experience with it.
People pay attention to that.
Incorporate storytelling into your emails.
Another thing that I want to highlight about the way you promote your products is that you want to incorporate storytelling into your emails when you’re trying to promote something.
You don’t just want to go like sell, sell, sell, sell, sell.
Instead, you want to like incorporate things like the before and after of what happened when you tried using the product.
Offer affiliate bonuses.
The last tip I have about increasing conversion rates is to offer affiliate bonuses.
I have found that this works especially well when you are trying to promote something that’s higher-ticket, that has a lot of competition.
When there’s a lot of affiliates promoting the same thing, you want to offer an affiliate bonus. Make sure you check the terms and conditions of whatever you are trying to promote to make sure that that’s not against their rules.
And you can offer an extra bonus as well just to sweeten the deal so that people will choose to buy from your affiliate link.
This applies especially for high-ticket, highly competitive affiliate products.
Metric # 3: Price point of what you are trying to promote
Generally, the higher the price point, the better.
When something is $100 dollars, and you get a commission of $20 per purchase… Compare that to something that’s $10 and you get a $2 commission….
Just do the math and you realize if you want to earn $1000, how many products you have to sell?
It is a lot easier most of the time for you to promote something that is of a higher cost if you want to earn a substantial amount of affiliate revenue.
This would also depend on the conversion rate of the product or service.
But in general, I recommend that out of the few affiliate products that you have chosen to focus on, make sure that you have at least one affiliate product that’s at least $100 or even more… especially when you’re just starting out.
You wouldn’t be able to drive the insane amount of traffic needed for you to promote something that’s lower ticket and to be able to do it to a reasonable success to sustain yourself.
It is OK to promote lower ticket products – just make sure that it is not the main thing that your business is built around.
Metric # 4: Look for affiliate programs with high commission rates
You want to look for affiliate programs with a higher commission rate, obviously.
The higher affiliate commission rate you can get, then obviously the higher the amount of commission you can get.
For example, for my affiliate program, my commission rate is 30%, which is really, really high as compared to other similar affiliate programs. If something is $300 and the commission rate is 30%, you will get a commission of $100.
If you compare it to like the measly tiny amount of commissions that you can get from like, say, promoting Amazon products. The Amazon Affiliate Program probably gives you like a 2% commission rate.
Obviously, you wouldn’t be running to the bank with Amazon affiliate commissions… unless you have an insane amount of website traffic to drive hordes of visitors to Amazon with.
( I’m not very sure, so don’t quote me on that… But they are always changing (their rates).
You can add links promoting products with a low affiliate commission rate, but that shouldn’t be your focus when it comes to getting affiliate income, simply because the commission rate is too low.
Conclusion
Affiliate marketing is a great way for you to monetize your email list and it can even help you to build your email at the same time.
With that being said, I always encourage online entrepreneurs not to SOLELY focus on affiliate marketing.
Pretty ironic that I’m adding this in this blog post – but I always encourage you to create your OWN products and services because, at the end of the day, it is better to create your OWN products and services.
I highly recommend that you do that, because you can not only give yourself a 100% commission rate… At the same time, you are not reliant on some other person or some other business to feed your family.
Affiliate marketing can be utilized as a supplementary kind of income source, or maybe as an income stream to jumpstart your online business journey.
But eventually, you want to be more focused on creating your own stuff as well.
That’s just my two cents!
Summary
Alright, that’s all folks!
To conclude, you want to take note of the affiliate marketing equation that happens behind-the-scenes when you’re trying to make money from affiliate marketing with your email list.
Once again, that equation is the number of visitors that you can drive to your affiliate link, x the conversion rate of whatever you are trying to promote, x the price of the product that you’re trying to promote, x the commission rate, = the affiliate commission that you get.
So you want to take careful note of these 4 metrics when you are trying to build your email list with affiliate marketing.
That’s all for now!
Take care, guys. Bye! 🙂
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