Explaining how affiliate marketing works is pretty easy and you will find a plethora of visual images and videos explaining what it is (all over the internet), but often what they tend to tell you is – all theory.
No real world examples or explanations of how it actually plays out in reality.
This is understandable, because another reality in the affiliate marketing world is competition, which is something most affiliate marketers want to avoid like the plague for obvious reasons.
So, in this article I take you through an example of a “fictional campaign” (but based around one of my actual live campaigns) in an endeavor to illustrate one method of how affiliate marketing works in the real world.
If you don’t know what affiliate marketing is then you can get a detailed understanding of it here. Also if you want to learn how I make money online with these ugly ass blogs then just copy what I do here.
Anyway, for this article I am going to concentrate on how affiliate marketing works.
Contents
Here’s How It Works
Lets say you love playing the Bass guitar (I chose the Bass because I’m a Bass guitarist) and lets say that you know quite a lot about playing the Bass, so much so that you have a small following of people who love what you have to say on the matter.
One day someone asks (let’s just call him Billy), “what is the best way to learn how to slap the Bass”.
You happen to remember watching a video series that helped you do exactly that a couple of months ago. Furthermore you thought the video series was great and that it would really help Billy in his Bass slapping endeavors. 🙂
You also noticed when you purchased the series for yourself, that they had an affiliate program that allowed you to earn a commission on any sales you referred.
So being the smart person you are, you signup for the affiliate program and then you send your affiliate link of the video series to Billy.
You are confident that Billy is gonna like the video series, because now all your peeps call you “thunder thumbs” and it was because of what you learnt in the video, but whether Billy buys the video is up to him, so after you send him the link you forget about it.
Billy clicks on your link and watches the presentation on the website, and thinks to himself … this is a really good video series … you know what … this is exactly what I’m looking for.
Yay – He Buys It
So Billy decides to purchase the videos series, and after going through the first couple of videos he absolutely loves it.
And because he purchased it using your affiliate link you get credited for the sale.
This is an ideal situation, because everyone wins.
The vendor of the video wins because he didn’t have to make the sale himself.
The purchaser wins because he gets exactly what he wants, AND is slapping the Bass like Louis Johnson.
And you win, because you got a commission for connecting the two parties together.
Pretty cool eh?
And that’s pretty much it.
Then You Scale It!
But this is where things get really cool…
You see, you realize that Billy is not the only one who wants to learn how to slap the Bass, he was just the first to ask, so you decide to create a webpage that presells the video series to people like Billy, so if anyone else is interested then you could earn another commission.
At first your presales webpage sucks and as a result you don’t make much money at all.
Sales are a little sporadic, but you are just so grateful that you are making something.
But it would be cool to make more sales on a consistent basis.
Then you come across a website that tells you how to increase your conversions, and after you read the information you see that your webpage needs a few changes.
So you make the change and whadday know more sales.
Then You Tweak It
You do a few more tweaks … you watch the sales drop off a little … so you change it back and the sales resume to their previous pattern.
You use crazyegg.com to monitor where people are clicking and what actions they are performing on your webpage.
You figure out that they are clicking on underlined text (which they think is a hyperlink), which you change to a hyperlink and then all of a sudden your sales go from one every 5th day to one every other day.
Go figure.
You think … this is a really cool way of making money and you’d be right.
So you find another product and duplicate the process and over time you slowly build up these little money making machines that together make up a tidy income for you.
And if you do it right, these little money machines will continue producing for you over and over again without further effort.
Now one question you might be asking is, “what if I don’t already have a small following of people – what then?”. Simple, you create a small following of people.
Want to learn how to master this process, then come join me here.
Frank
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