In this post I’m going to tell you about my first big mistake (mistakes) in affiliate marketing, and what I learned from it.
I had some vague idea of affiliate marketing, or at least I’d heard about it from a guy on YouTube, talking about how to make money from YouTube. But I didn’t start paying attention to the idea until I saw an ad on Facebook talking about time and place freedom (as well as financial freedom). That got my attention. That sounded good.
The ad was promoting what I’ve now come to know is called a high ticket offer – which means big commissions; that sounded good too. And it made it all sound so easy. All I had to do was direct some traffic to their funnel and they’d take care of the hard part of closing the sale and handling all product delivery and customer service follow-up.
Again, I was aware of sales funnels, but I now know I really didn’t understand them. I certainly didn’t understand the most important parts of them. But hey, the sales pitch worked on me. It seemed like a good product. They promised several different types of products to promote, with more to be added (there wasn’t), and I would be part of an affiliate marketing community (that was true).
All I had to do was direct traffic to their funnel.
Now I had been working on learning online marketing, and trying to figure out Facebook marketing. Affiliate marketing seemed like a good way to do that. Someone else has developed the product. Presumably it’s a proven product, people are buying it. They take care of the sales. They take care of the delivery and customer service.
I had been trying to sell products and services; I was trying to develop some of my own. I was trying to build my own funnels. I was trying to close sales and deliver the products. I had gotten a few sales calls scheduled, but no sales.
Wait I take that back. I did sell one PDF, I can’t even remember what for, for about $10. I wasn’t making much progress.
So I figured I’d start with learning the marketing, get good at that selling other peoples’ products, with their proven funnels. Then I could start developing my own stuff later, once I knew I could consistently generate quality leads that predictably resulted in sales.
And I wasn’t actually wrong. That’s not the mistake I made.
First mistake I made was I didn’t research affiliate programs. I didn’t know a good program from a bad one. I didn’t understand how the system really works. I just signed up for the first thing that came my way.
And as I worked at learning Facebook marketing (long story short), spent a lot of money, directed a lot of traffic to the offer I was promoting, made no money, and then got my Facebook account shut down for some absolute BS, I did learn about what kind of product a should actually be marketing on Facebook.
Here’s what I learned:
- Yes you want to promote a high-ticket item that can generate large commissions, but that can’t be the only thing you promote. Yes you have to generate good commissions to pay for the marketing, but if the only thing you’re selling is really expensive, it will be much harder to get any sales – especially from cold traffic.
You need introductory offers, upsells and cross-sells to cover the costs of the marketing. Then you can scale and get those larger sales that will convert at lower rates.
It doesn’t matter how big a commission you get off a sale is, if it costs you more money in advertising to finally get someone to buy the product, you’re going to go broke. The average cost per sale has to be less than the average commission. That’s really hard to do starting out if all you’re selling is a big-ticket item. It’s certainly not how to learn, or how you test a funnel’s effectiveness.
- Most people won’t buy from you, certainly not the big ticket item, the first time you make an offer. You need to be able to follow up with your leads. You have to be able to nurture those leads from being cold traffic, warming them up to hot leads that buy. BUT you can’t do that if you don’t get some form of contact information from them so that you can follow up.
The program I was using was collecting my lead’s emails for themselves. They were doing the follow-up. Now they can follow up with those leads indefinitely, making them all kinds of new offers for years to come – I won’t get any commissions on those other offers.
If you want to succeed in affiliate marketing, you need to build a relationship with your customers. You may not be producing or delivering the products. But your product is trust, that’s what you’re selling. People are trusting you to point them toward good offers.
But if all I do is pass the leads onto someone else, so they can follow up with them and build trust with them – they’re the ones that are going to get the benefits. Which would be, consistently getting high ticket sales (those take some trust), repeat sales, and sales of new products in the future.
Perhaps the people who developed that program I started with had all the right intentions. But in the end they created a system that got me (and probably most of the other people involved) to spend a lot of money and time to get them leads they didn’t have to pay for. The numbers were working out for them. They didn’t need to develop a high converting funnel with a low cost per sale, because they weren’t really paying the cost.
And they didn’t teach us how to capture those leads we were paying for for ourselves, so we could follow up with them. They weren’t teaching us how we could make other offers to the leads we generated. So whether it was intentional or not, they were taking advantage of us.
To dive a little deeper into the topic of how to spot a bad affiliate program – you could watch this video I made.
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