The Power Of FREE In Affiliate Marketing!

©2009 Doug Champigny, Captain-Affiliate.com. All Rights Reserved.

Affiliate marketing has changed since the onset on the global recession. Not just evolved, but changed suddenly, leaving many affiliates behind and confusing a lot of newbies who are seeing their confidence eroded as the techniques they’ve been taught fail time and again.

Understand this right now: If your affiliate marketing strategies are based on information more than a year old, on tactics people still teach from a few years ago, or on methods you’ve been using for years, your commissions have dropped significantly or been completely wiped out, and your efforts going forward will be increasingly less effective.

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If you’ve been in the biz for more than a couple of years, you don’t need me to tell you your affiliate commissions have dropped – either you’re working 3 times as hard now and accepting a lowered lifestyle or you’re looking for a full or part-time job to supplement or replace what was a full-time income until recently.

If you’re new to affiliate marketing and following advice from one of the gurus or super-affiliates who are still milking their success from a few years back, as most are, then you know you’re not experiencing nearly the results they told you you would, even though you’re following their instructions to the letter, right?

Well, fear not. For all the changes, there are still more affiliates making more money online today than ever before. But the business has both evolved continually over the years and changed suddenly a few times…

When Teri & I started affiliate marketing 12 or so years ago there was very little competition. A simple banner at the top of a page on your website pretty much guaranteed traffic to your affiliate link, and thereby some commissions each month. When we started blogging 5 years ago, a graphic in the sidebar drew traffic and a blog post could simply be the first half of the text from a salespage, followed by your affiliate link to that page – and it got results.

Search engine optimization was easy because the directories told you the truth about how they rank websites, whereas today you only need compare any search results to what they state are their ranking criteria to know you haven’t been told the truth, either intentionally or by lies of omission.

By now, I’m sure you’re wondering about all this… How can what I’m saying be true when it flies in the face of what most of your tutors, guides and mentors are telling you?

There’s a simple test – compare what they’re telling you to what you see actually going on online. Have they released a new product in the last 6 months? Not a Master Resell Rights product, but one they actually wrote? Do their blog posts teach you instead of just selling you? And most importantly for affiliate marketing – are you still seeing their names on the leaderboards of various JVs and affiliate launches?

On the other hand, some have been giving you valuable advice all along, but for the most part it’s been too vague and general for most people to integrate the ideas into their strategies. The most valuable information you’ve been given vis-a-vis the current state of online marketing is:

1) Pay It Forward.

2) First Give, Then Collect.

3) Teach your audience so they know WHY they need the product you’re recommending and HOW to use it once they have it.

But the question was always ‘Just how do I implement that in my daily activities?’

Let’s start by taking a look at some of the biggest launches this summer…

In June, Resell Rights Fortunes launched – and as an affiliate marketing opportunity, I think this was the best launch so far this year. Not only did we make more on this launch than any other, but so far the residual commissions have added another 40% to what we made on the launch!

So how was the launch made so successful? First, Socrates created two powerful videos showing relatively unknown ways to build your opt-in list faster. He put them online 2 weeks apart, allowing his launch partners 2 weeks to send traffic to each video, and cookied each visitor for the affiliate. Then he added in a short e-mail course that gave them more powerful information without pitching anything.

When the time came for the launch, he already had a new 5-figure opt-in list of marketers from those promotions, and he did his best to convert as many of those leads to sales as he could to help out both the affiliates and himself.

To keep the JV partners and affiliates motivated, he ran TWO contests during the pre-launch – one for the most referrals during the whole pre-launch and another for the last few days of the pre-launch. We took home a notebook and a flip cam from those two contests, so obviously we were happy with it – especially since those were on top of 4-figure commissions the first week the site was open.

So let’s take a look at how the POWER OF FREE made this a successful launch:

From the Site Owner’s perspective:

Socrates put more into making this launch successful than any of the other events we’ve promoted. First, he gave away thousands of dollars worth of prizes to his affiliates and JV partners – prizes based on pre-launch opt-ins, not on sales. If the launch had flopped, he’d still be on the hook for all of the prizes.

Secondly, for the new prospects he gave away the content of those two videos – powerful list-building strategies he could easily have turned into a product and sold. Yet by giving them away free, he both built his opt-in list and demonstrated his expert status to the visitors his partners sent to the site.

From the Affiliates’ perspective:

We were able to warm up our lists, blog readers, Twitter followers, etc. to the site by offering them not a product for sale or a membership to join, but instead by sending them to free information on how to build their lists faster. Since everyone in online marketer always needs to be building their opt-in lists as quickly as possible, this was a very powerful free gift we could give them.

Then, two weeks later there was another video showing them yet another way to build their lists. Not only did those who visited the first video return, but an almost-equal number of additional people went to watch the second video, and were able to watch the first video as well – Socrates invited them to view the first video as part of his followup sequence.

Then Resell Rights Fortunes launched – a new PLR and MRR membership site, launched at the height of the recession when most membership sites where losing members in wholesale fashion… The result?

Resell Rights Fortunes launched with over $100,000 in memberships sold the first week! Granted, if it hadn’t been (and still is) the best site for marketers to get their PLR and MRR products, with innovative search technology that makes the site much quicker and more profitable for members to use, the launch wouldn’t have been as hot – and we certainly wouldn’t be making as much in residual commissions because the members wouldn’t be staying as long as they are.

But even with the best membership site and the highest member value online, the site still would have flopped – or been very small – if it hadn’t been for the free resources that Socrates used to attract targeted prospects, and the free gifts he made available to his affiliates and JV partners during the month-long pre-launch. And the affiliates who promoted the launch wouldn’t have had nearly the success we did if we hadn’t had those free videos to send people to in the first place.

THAT is the POWER OF FREE in affiliate marketing. No longer is it enough to just send people to a salespage to make your living, and no longer can site owners expect to have big sales without paying it forward by offering both solid, valuable information for free upfront and using that free information to demonstrate their expertise in the niche and assure people they’re not buying into one more source of overused and rehashed material.

That’s it for today – next post I’ll show you how the POWER OF FREE is being used by Expert WordPress, ClickBank Pirate and the Niche Audio Club to benefit their members and their affiliates on an ongoing basis – tune in then!

To your Profitable Affiliate Marketing…

Doug Champigny,
http://Captain-Affiliate.com

PS – If you’re not already a member of Resell Rights Fortunes, be sure to check it out today – I’ll be showing you how to use it effectively to boost your affiliate commissions in the new affiliate marketing paradigm and how it lets you master the POWER OF FREE strategies with ANY affiliate marketing promotions you get involved in. Watch for those posts coming soon – same profit time, same profit channel! ;-)

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