As affiliate marketers, the ways we generate affiliate sales often fall into a handful of categories including:
- Video reviews and demos
- Emails to our lists
- Social media posts
- Blogging
- Podcasting
There are others, but these are foundational affiliate marketing methods that give us a way to quickly reach our audiences. That’s because these are easy. It only takes a smartphone to create a talking-head video and post it on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram or other sites.
Sending an email to your list only requires a keyboard (or talk-to-type from a smartphone) and a list of addresses.
You get the idea.
The problem is those messages can get lost in the shuffle because the strategies are used by practically every affiliate.
Yes, it is my opinion that, you do need to include these in your overall affiliate game plan. But there are other techniques for advanced affiliate marketing that set you apart from the crowd and generate more affiliate commissions than using the basics methods alone.
Here are some of my favorite ways to earn more using these advanced affiliate techniques.
1. Freebies
Freebies? What? Aren’t freebies only going to get you freebie-seekers? No. Not if done the right way.
The idea behind freebies is the same as getting a sample of something from a physical store. For example, when you’ve visited you local grocery store, you have probably seen women standing in the aisles cooking and offering samples of food prepared using ingredients sold in the store along with coupons.
Sometimes, they might be handing out samples of already prepared foods you can eat as-is such as deli meat, rotisserie chicken and the like.
The idea is that – if customers can taste the products – they’ll want more. If you sweeten the experience with a discount it turns into a no-brainer.
We translate that into our digital world with opt-in freebies.
Some affiliate managers will already have freebies available (also called content upgrades or opt-in bonuses). As an affiliate of the company/brand, you are allowed to give those gifts to your list in order to encourage interest. While some are well done, sadly, many are poorly put together and don’t have a clear path to conversion through upsells to paid products or services.
If the affiliate managers you’re working with don’t offer professional, useful freebies, you can always create your own!
It works similarly to when you create a short guide, email series, video or other freebie for one of your own products. The major difference is that you’re providing information related to the affiliate product then you’re upselling to the affiliate product.
It’s important to remember that you should never use information verbatim from an affiliate manager’s course/product without permission. You can include:
- Your experiences with the affiliate product.
- Problems/needs that led you to want the affiliate product.
- Your own results after using the affiliate product.
- Other information related to, but not directly from the affiliate product.
I’ve made tens of thousands of dollars creating freebies to upsell affiliate products. And, if you set them up on an evergreen system, they get promoted over and over to continually produce commissions for you passively.
Want to see examples of my freebie upsell technique? Get the “5 Problems With Print-On-Demand Books” today and see what I’m talking about.
You will also find “How To Make Affiliate Commissions Without Selling” email lessons helpful.
2. Evergreen Funnels
Product launches and all the excitement they bring are great for making sales, but someone else’s launch dates quite often won’t work with your schedule. That doesn’t mean you have to miss out though.
What if instead you could bring the same sense of urgency to an evergreen offer?
Here’s everything you need to get an evergreen launch funnel set up and running:
- A lead magnet
- A short email sequence
- A paid course or product you want to promote, and a non-expiring coupon from the product seller
- An evergreen countdown timer
First, create an attention-grabbing freebie that’s a natural lead-in to the paid product or course. (See #1 above.) Checklists, worksheets, or cheat sheets work well and are quick to write.
Next, build out your funnel. You’ll need a landing page where you can send traffic, and where you’ll offer some details about your opt-in incentive and what the benefits are to your visitors. Alternately, you can write a blog post or two and use your lead magnet as a content upgrade.
You’ll also need a short email sequence promoting the paid product. If the seller has swipe files available you can use them as your starting point. Just make sure you remove any time or date specific language, since this is an evergreen launch, and not one that ends on a specific date.
Finally, add a sense of urgency to your final emails with an evergreen countdown timer. Unlike traditional countdowns that end at the same time for everyone, an evergreen countdown is unique to each visitor. It won’t matter if you’re promoting the offer this month or next month or even next year, the evergreen timer will always be current for your subscriber.
The end result? A free affiliate offer you can promote at any time, and that is always current, with just a dash of urgency thrown in to help seal the deal.
Cindy has great training to take you in-depth through the process of creating evergreen funnels for affiliate offers and/or your own courses. Because you’ve found this blog post, you get 50% off when you use code EVERGREEN50.
3. Campaigns
One typical mistake many beginner and intermediate affiliates make is only emailing their lists about a particular affiliate product once. Here’s why that’s a practice that will leave easy money on the table.
- People are busy. They have hundreds of emails coming into their inboxes every day. They forget or “save” the email and never get back to it again. Additional emails give them a gentle nudge.
- People need time to think. As they consider what they want to do, they often forget about the one email you sent. Your additional emails will bring them back to focus.
- More info to share. By sending two or three or five emails, you give your subscribers the gentle nudge they need and bring them back to focus. You also have the opportunity to offer additional information about whatever you’re promoting which adds to their knowledge about that product and increases the chance they will buy.
- Last-call emails. When you create email campaigns (multiple emails about the same product) the use of last-call emails comes into play. Last-call emails (announcing that the time is expiring and inserting a countdown timer) are vital to scooping up sales.
While there are no formal statistics about the use of campaigns or last-call emails, I can give you some anecdotal data.
I, personally, have had numerous occasions when the last-call emails of a campaign brought in more sales alone than all the other emails combined.
Several of my affiliates have reported that they have made more on last-call emails (including some who only made sales during the last-call emails) than with the other emails in their campaigns.
Bart Hennin (big-time affiliate and product creator) states his affiliates have seen an increase of 17%-37% when they use campaigns vs. using one solo email.
If you’d like more information about the mindset, strategies and creation of affiliate email campaigns, you can get instant access below.
Wondering why you only make a few affiliate sales every month? Discover the strategy top affiliates use to drive more affiliate commissions on demand! Save $20 with code AFFADV20.
4. Quizzes
Have you ever opted to take a quiz on Facebook, online or in a magazine? Whether it's to find out which movie start you're most like, to determine if you married the right spouse or discover the best 3 ways to grow your email list, quizzes have always been (and will always be) an awesome way to engage.
Why? Because they are fun! That's why most other people love to take them, too.
What's more, quizzes draw in highly targeted leads because the person taking the quiz is naturally a prime fit for the topic the quiz is about.
And quizzes have a higher opt-in value because they are interactive and deliver a personalized result. Plus, they give you a way to intuitively segment your followers so each person gets specifically what s/he needs.
Here's what you need to get started with using quizzes to sell affiliate products.
- The Type of Quiz
There are numerous types of quizzes so investigating and choosing the one(s) that will work best for your audience (and for you!) is a vital step. Some are more complicated to set up than others.
- A Connection Between Your Quiz and the Affiliate Upsell
Just asking questions in a quiz can turn out to be pointless unless there is a direct connection between the fun quiz you create and the affiliate product you are upselling to.
For example, if your goal is to bring in people who are interested in getting their college degree online, your quiz might take the approach of asking, "What should your college major be? This quiz shows you!"
Or, if you're upselling to a course that teaches copywriting, your quiz might be something like, "Are you smart enough to write your own copy?" That type of provocative language not only piques curiosity, but also tickles their pride.
- Questions!
That's the basis of the quiz. As you create the questions that your quiz-takers will answer, think of them as stepping stones. You want each question to have a specific purpose and lead the subscriber in a particular direction.
For example, if you're upselling to a single affiliate product, you'll want the answers to the yes-or-no questions to be yes for people who should buy the product. For this type of quiz, every question should have a direct link to either pushing the person toward the affiliate product or showing them that the product is not a good fit for them. (In that case, you might upsell them to a different affiliate product that is a good fit!)
Cindy can show you all the steps it takes to create evergreen quizzes that work 24/7 to drive affiliate sales into your account. Get instant access to her Money-Making Quizzes training today and take 50% off when you use code QUIZ50.
Do these advanced affiliate marketing techniques take more time than the basic ones? Not really. It depends on which strategies you’re comparing. But the question you should actually be asking is, “Are these advanced affiliate methods worth the time they take?” 😉
And the answer to that is a resounding yes!
Have questions about affiliate marketing? Talk to me below!
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Thanks for this valuable information, Karon. This gave me some good insights as to how I can utilize affiliate marketing in a better way. These are strategies that you don’t see very often, so they will make us stand out if we use them.