Affiliate Marketing - How Get 80k Traffic With Facebook How To Get Free Traffic Because we were losing money on the campaign, I decided to scratch the Facebook advertising idea and refocus on other traffic strategies. There’s SEO… content marketing… solo ads… … and my favorite, leveraging other affiliates to promote for me. Now before you start grumbling about affiliates as a traffic strategy… (like I normally do) keep reading because it gets good. The Power of An Affiliate Army Setting up an affiliate program for your product is one of the best ways to attract more customers. Why? Because you have other people doing the work for you! The real money in the digital marketing business is made in finding what are called affiliates. These are other people who sell your stuff for you for a commission of the sale they generate. Affiliates are your straight commission sales reps on the internet. The more affiliates you can attract, the better. I’ve spent a majority of my career being a super-affiliate. Meaning – I’ve made a lot of money online selling other peoples’ products for a commission. Because in the beginning, I was too scared to create my own products. But here’s what I learned: traffic is the hardest part of internet marketing! So… Why put in all the effort and send traffic to somebody else’s business, when you can have thousands of affiliates doing the hard work sending YOU the traffic instead? When this lightbulb went off in my head, it really changed the game for me. Having your own affiliates promoting your product for you is the quickest and most effective way to drive traffic, make a lot of sales, and bring in a ton of targeted leads. The reason this is the case is fairly obvious. You get either get: 1. Someone who already has access to and a relationship with a large audience, who then recommends your product or 2. Someone who is a master at driving traffic with paid traffic or free traffic (but they’re too lazy to create their own products) Having other internet marketers drive the traffic for you makes any other traffic method easy to beat. Tapping into someone else’s traffic through a joint venture or having an army of your own affiliates is the quickest & easiest way to get qualified buyers. I’ve personally done this a number of times and it has almost always drastically increased the traffic flowing to one of my offers. What’s The Incentive? There are two reasons why someone would want to promote your product: 1. Because they don’t have to create a product of their own, since yours is already finished; and 2. Because you pay them a commission every time they make a sale for you. This is better than simply advertising on other websites because as an affiliate, these people have a reason to help you sell your product – the more they promote, the more money both of you make. How Does It Work? In this case study, I used EasyDigitalDownloads.com to sell my product. So, I used AffiliateWP.com to integrate an affiliate program. If you’re using another shopping cart, you’ll have to do some further research into the particular service you’re using, or signup for a thirdparty affiliate program. Most affiliate programs that you use will provide you with a link that you can send out to anyone and everyone you want to help you promote your product. When people click on this link, they setup an account and are given special links that are unique to their accounts, which point back to your website. The affiliate program keeps track of those special links and knows exactly when anyone who purchased your product came from one of your affiliates. It doesn’t matter if someone sells anything or not because you only pay them when they do. However, here’s the thing… The Pain of Recruiting Affiliates Now here’s why most internet marketers avoid utilizing affiliate traffic… 1. Unfortunately building your own affiliate army is a giant pain in the butt. 2. Most marketers don’t want to create their own products or services. This is why a majority of internet marketers ignore recruiting affiliates. Hell! It’s the exact reason why I put it off for so long! But don’t worry because I have the solution for both roadblocks. Recruiting influential joint venture partners to promote your products is a daunting task - especially if you’re brand new to the niche with no existing connections, relationships, and influence. Depending on what niche you’re in… Most influencers are bombarded with emails and joint venture requests. So it takes time to nurture a relationship with the bigger players who can drive thousands of visitors to your website overnight. You can definitely hustle you way to building partnerships, but if you’re anything like me… you don’t like to “bother” people and perhaps you’re even a little bit shy. A New Twist To Getting Traffic Now here’s where it pays to have a business partner that’s much smarter than you… Instead of going through the long process of building relationships and reaching out to potential affiliate partners… Tina suggested that we try using Facebook ads again, but this time… instead of targeting our customers… we would target affiliates who could potentially promote our product for us. Hmm… sounded great in theory, but would it work? So we created another Facebook ad and targeted people who were interested in “Clickbank” and other “weight-loss affiliate groups” on Facebook. This time, instead of directing clicks to our salespage, we were sending the traffic to our affiliate page where visitors could sign up to promote our product. When a ClickBank affiliate saw this ad while browsing Facebook, they would click on it and get directed to our “affiliate program” page instead of our sales page: • http://slendershortcuts.com/affiliate-program/ Here they were invited to join our affiliate program to start promoting “Lose 10 Pounds in 10 Days” for 75% commission. Looking at the numbers: We let this new Facebook campaign run for a couple of days and these were the results we got: • $100 spent on Facebook Ads • 127 Clicks To Affiliate Page • 31 Affiliates Registered • 165 Sales • $2,030.55 Total Revenue Whoa! I had to rub my eyes and refresh the page a couple of times to make sure there wasn’t an error. I spent $100 essentially promoting the same offer, only this time it generated $2,030 in revenue and added 165 subscribers to my customers list! Now, THIS was getting interesting! All of this was done WITHOUT having to contact or even TALK to any affiliates. Without even having to be in front of the computer! All on complete autopilot! We simply attracted affiliates to US rather than the other way around. The Big Break-Through Here’s what was happening. Previously when we were targeting our target audience with Facebook… with every new visitor, we had the opportunity to make either no sales or one sale. Here were the two ways things could play out: 1. If the visitor didn’t like what we had to offer, they left the page. 2. But if they did like what we had to offer, they made a purchase. On the other hand, when we targeted affiliates… with every new visitor, we had the opportunity to either make no sales or MANY sales. Here were the two options: 1. If the visiting affiliate didn’t like what we had to offer, they left the page. 2. But if they DID like what we had to offer, they promoted our product for us to many, many targeted customers for free! (All on autopilot without us having to do anything!) This is invaluable because it’s free viral traffic that you don’t have to generate yourself. By spending pennies on the click for a super-affiliate, you set yourself up for a future of THOUSANDS of FREE traffic coming to your site. Best of all, this traffic is already pre-vetted to convert as soon as they hit your offer. I honestly don’t know any better way to instantly send thousands of hungry pre-qualified buyers to your website overnight. There is no limit to the amount of visitors you can drive to your site using your affiliates. No More Painful Recruitment Process Most people understand the power of having their own affiliate army… However, the biggest pain is having to go out there and make affiliate relationships. Most internet marketers go about trying to get affiliates and joint venture partners the wrong way – by sending them an email asking them to promote their product. The likelihood of that succeeding is close to 0%. But now by using this method, you can easily build an affiliate army of your own by attracting them to your offer rather than you having to go and chase them down. This allows you to send thousands of qualified visitors to your website without you ever having to: • No more reaching out to influencers in your niche • No more taking months to build a relationship • No more wasting time having to build a reputation and credibility in the niche Unless you want to manually reach out to potential partners or do a bunch of forum posting or spend time writing great content on your blog… Use your money to attract value to YOU. Not you having to chase it. You don’t even need a lot of money to begin with. Even if you just invest $100 into advertising your product to affiliates, you could get on the radar of a bunch of potential affiliates and just one could easily recover the $100 (often times, many times over). This isn’t even including the branding benefits, the long term value of those referrals, and the high likelihood of a new positive ROI from the investment. With a good product and a well-written sales copy, you can easily create more traffic just by setting up additional Facebook campaigns.