The benefits of affiliate marketing

            THE BENEFITS OF THIS ARE

1. You can get started right away because you don't have to create a product, craft a sales letter, develop the website, create marketing materials, or get a merchant account and CRM.
2. There's practically no investment of time on your part because they handle the billing, support, maintenance, etc.
3. There's no risk for you, because the product owner has already made sure the product sells. So if you send visitors you will get paid.

Looking at these benefits, it's clear that affiliate marketing is the way to go!

OK, BUT IT'S NOT ALL ROSY...

You work hard to send the traffic to the product owner's website, but once you do that you will never see those visitors again. Less than 10% of the visitors your send will actually buy the product. The 10% or less that make a purchase now belong to the product owner. She can sell them additional products, but you can never sell to them again.

HOW CAN YOU AVOID THIS PITFALL?

Simply put, you need to capture the name and email of your visitors *before* sending them to the product sales page. This way you can follow up with them and keep sending them back to the sales page to increase your chances of making the sale. And if you're a super star affiliate, you'll provide high-quality content before sending them to the product website.

Here's what these affiliate marketing strategies will do for you:

1. Owning a list of potential buyers gives you the ability to market additional products at the push of a button.
2. You're generating good will by giving them high-quality content. This way, they are much more likely to make a purchase when you send them to the sales page.

If you want to create an affiliate marketing system like this, you'll need the following:

1. A squeeze page, and even better a Video squeeze page.
2. Several high-quality content pages
3. At least a 5-Part Email Followup Series

The video squeeze page is where you'll direct your traffic instead of directly to the product sales page. It captures the name and email of your visitors and puts them into your autoresponder, which then begins sending out the 5-part email series. After subscribing them to your email list, it redirects them to your content mini-site.

The content pages provide valuable information for your visitors and make them more receptive to the sales message that you'll link to from inside the content. And even if they don't buy on the first visit, your email series sends them back to the product sales page again and again to increase your sales.

All of this together increases your chances of making the sale by up to 500% so it's well worth the effort of setting it up. And after you get it all set up, it runs on total auto-pilot. You just refer people to your lead capture page, instead of the product sales page.

One option, if you're not up to the challenge of setting this all up yourself, is to let someone like Affiliate Silver Bullet do it for you. With a service like that, you don't have to do anything. They make the video, build the squeeze page, write the email series, develop the content mini-site, etc. And then just give you a finished package. The major benefit of using a service like this is that you can get started right away, and for a whole lot less than it would cost to do it all yourself. One negative is that there will be other people using this same affiliate marketing system. However, the odds of you and them both finding the same visitor are so small, that it doesn't really matter.

Alternatively, you can use a service like Elance to "outsource" each of these compnents. Whichever way you decided to go, it's critical to get an affiliate marketing system like this in place, if you're at all serious about your business.