SNM028: Affiliate Marketing for Beginners

speaker 0: 0:00 affiliate marketing for beginners on today's episode. Today's episode is brought to you by ECM Rush started in 2008 with one mission. To make online competition fair and transparent, with equal opportunities for all. To find out how SCM Rush can help you compete with the big boys. Go to serve no master dot com Backslash ECM rush today. Are you tired of dealing with your boss? Do you feel underpaid and underappreciated?

If you want to make it online, fire your boss and start living your retirement dreams now then you've come to the right place. Welcome to serve no master podcast where you learn how to open new revenue streams and make money while you sleep. Presented live from a tropical island in the South Pacific by best selling author Jonathan Green. Now here's your host. I sent out an email to a small group of followers, just a few people who are interested in what I had to say.

It would visit my block, and the next morning I woke up with over $2000 of my PayPal account. I couldn't believe it without anything to sell people, simply recommending something I was already using something. I liked Army more money than I've ever made in a single week before, let alone a single day. It was unbelievable. The power of affiliate marketing. It's all built upon trust when I recommend another product when I recommend something to you that I already use.

If you click my link, they pay me a percentage. It's amazing without doing anything. You can live a magical life, simply recommending excellent products that you already use already believe in. Already trust to the people that trust you. That's the power of your relationship. To begin to understand the concept of affiliate marking, many people start by looking at Google's platform with Google AdWords, Google AdSense. You let the post little links on your website in every time zone. Click some of one of those.

You get a few pennies, and that's fine. But that's not the business I'm interested in. I want the bigger fish. I want to control what I recommend to people, and it starts by understanding the different type of offers that are out there and finding the ones that are best for you and best for your audience. Certain offers pay you a bunch of money the day you make the sale. Other offers you a little bit of money over time.

I'm always interested in the long game, the long term recurring revenue. I have certain offers that I brought it 45 years ago that are still sending me a paycheck every single month. That's the real magic. There are certain staples of business that everyone needs. Everyone needs. Website hosting. Everyone needs email software. Everyone needs help with their social media. You can choose what to recommend based on quality or based on the referral fee, and try to find something somewhere in between.

Before 5 10 years ago, when you recommended hosting, they paid you a percentage every single month. If I recommended hosting to you and you were paying $5 a month, they might pay me a dollar every month for each recommendation seems small, but adds up once you've recommended 10 2030 40 people. As their accounts grow, people rarely change hosting and people rarely change their auto responders. I've gone back and forth between a weber and get response for my email response service for years.

I simply use them for different segments in different parts of my lists and for different projects, the thought of changing everything and switching to a whole new provider. It's very challenging. I've tried it before. I switched to another company, and it was just such a Reagan Meral moving your list over and all of that. It's very hard. Most people never do it because it's so hard to change.

Most companies make it very easy to switch to them, but then they also make it very hard when you want to leave when you're looking for offers. Whatever market you're in, you start by simply typing the names of things you use and in the words referral or the words affiliate. Many of the tools software programs use every single day have amazing affiliate referral programs. Some of them will pay you in credits. Some of them will make your tools free.

My friend just recommended a research tool on Amazon research tool to me that I'm going to start using over the next few days. He gets paid a little bit every single month. If he gets three recommendations me and two other people, his own account with the software becomes free. In addition to what they're paying him. That's pretty nice. He didn't even know about the program when he recommended to me. I said, Do you have an affiliate program?

Can you get paid for talking to using this software? And you found out that yes, you can. And it's recurring, which is wonderful as long as I use the software. As long as I'm paying that monthly fee, he gets a little something to a little taste. Start by looking at all of the things you use, whether it's an exercise program, whether it's your favorite meditation CD, Everything on Amazon has an affiliate program. Amazon is really amazing. It's one of the good places to start.

They pay you 4% of anything that person purchases in the next 24 hours. If you recommend a yoga DVD to your friend, they go through your affiliate link to the Amazon page. They see that yoga DVD. They click, add to cart, then they see some other things that are interesting. Some yoga pads. Maybe they decide to buy their husband on a baseball hat. Maybe they decided by their kids some new toys, the end of adding couple other things while they're there they click.

Check out everything in that shopping cart you get a little taste of and as you build up, that 4% goes to 6% in the 8% Amazon. If you send enough, sales per month, will actually increase your percentage so you can get to a pretty nice number. And that's a great place to start. Most of us recommend things on Amazon all the time, don't we? We recommend movies to our friends. Sometimes we recommend clothes or speakers or different electronics or different toys.

All these different things we recommend. All you're doing is getting a little bit of credit for it Now. At first, when you're just recommending things to your friends and you feel a bit small scale maybe only 2030 people that you recommend things, too. It feels a little disingenuous to get paid to recommend things that's really the way the world goes round. That's how most businesses put together. You're recommending something anyways. You might as well get a little taste.

Some of the things that I recommend on my website I don't get paid anything for not every company not every business will pay you for a recommendation. Many businesses they don't care. They don't want to build their structure that way. They won't have total control of their traffic sources, so they only pay for advertising. They do direct paid advertising and they don't pay for people to recommend. Their service is when it's the best of the best. I recommend it anyways. I can't help it.

I use scrivener. They don't pay anything. They'll never do it. But it's the best. So I always recommend screaming. I have no choice but to tell you what the best is. You'll run into moments where you have an ethical quandary when looking at hosting options. There's certain companies that pay really large bounties for getting people to sign up for their hosting service is for their websites. Some of the companies that pay the biggest money to $300 for a recommendation they provide.

The worst service is their abysmal. They treat their customers like garbage. When you type in the name of that company and then the word review, you'll see a bunch of glowing positive reviews followed by a nice little affiliate link. People are recommending something that they would never use on their own site because it's garbage. They get blinded by that large affiliate commission, and I can be honest with you. Sometimes it's very tempting. Sometimes people want something that I know isn't right for them.

But the affiliate commission is hundreds or even thousands of dollars, and I have to talk him out of it. It's hard when you have to find your ethical boundaries. Sometimes you could really use that money, but it's not the right thing to do it. You don't want to recommend something you don't believe, and you find that balance when you're looking for offers, start by looking for things that pay really well. So look at everything in your area that interest thio that fits your message.

Whether your messages about personal development messages about exercise messages about woodworking messages about hunting, whatever you're working on, building on your voice, fine products that you're interested in, that you would actually use yourself and that pay a nice commission. Sometimes I'll look at two products. They're equally good. They're both excellent. They're very similar to each other. One pays 10% want pays 20%.

I'm going to recommend the 20% if it's not a dip in quality that I'm going to recommend the one that helps me out just a little bit more. That's okay. We haven't slipped down that ethical slope because we're still recommended. Something just as good. I recommend almost exclusively things that I use. This is why, if you're on my mailing list, you don't get an email every day with a new offer.

I don't recommend this and that and this and then overwhelm you with every single idea I could ever think of. The reason I do that is it's important to build your voice and former connection with your audience As you're writing your block post. As you're working on your first podcast as your recording your YouTube videos, you begin to find what you sound like and the things you really believe in.

The things you feel comfortable talking about the things you don't Not every product that seems amazing is the right fit for you. This is where we find the balance between our voice and the message we're sending out and things that we think could be useful for our audience and things that would fit that voice. There are certain things that I'll recommend toe one of my lists and not another list, cause it doesn't make sense.

If I have a list of people that bought my book on potty training, I'm not going to send them an offer that has to do with survivalism. It doesn't make any sense. It's weird. We want to make sure anything. We recommend our people, fits our voice and fits what we believe in. I don't send really expensive offers to my list.

I don't recommend 23 $5000 courses because I know most people on my list really would be overwhelmed by something that expensive and are looking to start their business. And when you're looking to start spending, that kind of money can be very stressful. It's how I started first course. I bought six payments of $500. I had spent six months fighting to pay that off. It's how I started my business. It was really hard.

I would rather people go one step at a time, make your 1st $100 from some free training. Take that to get a course that cost 100 to make 1000 then buy it more expensive. Course work your way up building skills and growing that way. So you're building out of profits rather than building from debt. That's something I believe in, and that affects the way I recommend things to my audience. The message you have the voice you speak with will determine the way you recommend offers.

The frequency with which you recommend offers your perspective, recommending offers. Sometimes if I like something, I'll just have a review on my block. I have a really long review of Graham early. I wrote that not because I want to be the biggest family affiliate in the world, but because I actually use it, and it dramatically affected the quality of my work. It directly affected several of my projects in a row, and I wanted to share my experience.

When I went out looking for Graham early reviews, I found that all the ones I read didn't have the information I wanted. They didn't answer the most important questions to me. My most important question would look into that software before I made that purchase was what's the difference in the free and the paid version? Very hard to find the information anywhere online.

Most of the people writing reviews Don't mention that, and it leads me to believe they don't actually use the software because they don't know the answer to that question. Integrity is very important when connect with your audience, as I mentioned before in some previous episodes, the importance of trust I cannot express.

How important is the main train trust and warmed and well being with your audience and the next lesson, we're gonna talk a lot about the importance of paying it forward and avoiding the temptation to be selfish. It's very important to instead give value, be honest with your audience and on Lee, connect with him about things you really believe in. A few years ago, I made a mistake in a recommendation.

Someone came to me with a really amazing offer that they wanted me to promote about building your own mobile app. The Webinar was amazing. The software was amazing. The person who presented the webinar was someone that I knew had integrity. A person of my audience.

After watching the Webinar did some research and found out you get the same software for 10% of the price by going directly to the company all they've done is gone to a software company, get a reseller account and then sell the same thing for 10 times the price for $1000 instead of 100. It really hurt my feelings. It really upset me that someone would go out there and be so sneaky and so disingenuous.

The whole Webinar was about how he designed the software and how we've done all these other things. And the guy presenting on the software wasn't even the person behind it. He was the face. Someone else was the name on the brand and everything else. And the reason you hired this other presenter was exactly that. He got in trouble in the past for doing some suspicious things. I'll never promote anything that this guy comes to me with again. I'll never get within 1000 miles of him.

It damaged my reputation with my list and maybe only the one lady who caught what happened, noticed and maybe no one else on my list notice. But it really affected me deeply that I got a little bit misled. He damaged his relationship with me permanently, and it art how I felt with my list And that really worried me that I would recommend something, a piece of software that people getting ripped off on. They could buy it for list somewhere else.

I would never want to give you the highest price for something. When you get it somewhere else cheaper. My affiliate link is going to save you 10% of this link out there. It's going to save you 30%. I have an obligation time, but the other link, it's just the way it iss having integrity. Sometimes it's just about you and yourself. Integrity is really about what you do when no one else is watching and you can mail offers you don't believe in.

You could recommend stuff all the time that you would never use and you might not get caught. That's not what it's really about. That's a small component of it. It's really about what do you hear? How do you talk to yourself in the middle of the night when there's no one listening?

I need to be able Thio be proud of what I d'oh Recently I was doing a big promotion for a project, and some of the people I talked to on the phone who are very interested in being part of project, simply couldn't afford it. And they talked about putting on a credit card or borrowing money for someone else. And I told him, No, I don't do that. I don't want to put you in that much of dire straits.

I told you a few minutes ago that I believe in earning money and using the profits to then investing more expensive and better coaching and better courses and all of those things. That's really what I believe in. I practice what I preach. Yeah, it'll be nice toe, make a little extra money, wouldn't it? Were on the phone with someone and they're offering and give you a little bit of money. If they can't really afford it, I don't take it. I can't be that person.

I've been in that situation before. When I was younger, I went to situations where I don't have any money for one or two weeks. When I was in my early twenties, I didn't eat anything for an entire week, seven days of not eating because I don't have any money for food. So I have tasted a little bit of what it's like to really be lacking. Certainly many people have been in worse situations. Many people been hungry for longer, dealt with tougher things.

I know that that's just my little experience. I know enough about it that I don't want to put anyone against the wall when it's your last bit of money. When you have to borrow money to start a project, you have no ability to focus because there's too much stress. There's too much riding on it. I don't want anyone to be all in with me.

You can make if you just listen to my podcast episode about getting paid, to write and on my website and serve no master. There's an entire block post with a list of different places that will pay you to write blood poster articles for them and exactly what they pay some of them. If you get in the higher echelons, pay 35 $800 for a single article. I teach you exactly how to Rick. You ate up the chain and guess what?

I'm not an affiliate for any of those providers. I don't get paid a penny for recommending any of that stuff. Why because it's the best. There are ones out there that will payment a field commission, but then they pay you guys the least. I can't do that. That's my own voice. That's my own measure of integrity.

I want to help you because I know that if I help you make money the right way from the beginning, when you're down the line and you want to get to the next level, you want to get that next course. When you want to recommend something, I'm the person you recommend cause you know you can trust me because I look out for you first and me second. I don't need to live off the profits of this podcast right now. This podcast is not profitable.

It takes a while to get there. No one's podcast is profitable on the fourth day unless you already have a falling millions of people. This is a totally new venture for me. I'm still very early in developing this.

And maybe if you listen to this a couple of months down the line or maybe even in a couple of years, when I'm continued to grow this podcast, it will be very, very profitable But right now I'm starting it from a place up, just giving out as much information as I can and giving away a lot, a lot, a lot of value because I want to form a connection with my audience. When you're looking for things to promote, you'll notice there are two structures.

There's the launch structure, which is all about creating an event. The product will only be sale for sale for 7 10 14 days, and you build up all this buzz you have a massive contest ever gets excited. Tons of people are recommending the same thing at once, all because they're competing with each other to get the most sales. And some of these contests. They give away cars, they give away hundreds of thousands of dollars.

They have these massive, massive contests and the whole lot structure and the Internet marketing field. The field that I'm in right now. The field we're really talking about is structured that way. It's all about the event. People get excited and sales go through the roof. When you know that you only have a limited window to buy something, you're more likely to buy it. If you have time to think about it. Sometimes you realized I don't really need that. I know that exact feeling.

I've been on both sides of the sale cycle if you watch infomercials, and I love to watch infomercials that very educational those way they structure every single episode. They're always trying to create that sense of urgency that you need to purchase before the video ends. And they say, Oh, you don't place your order right now you're gonna miss all these great opportunities. But you know, when I know that you're watching a recorded video, no one thinks and infomercials live, we know that they're pre recorded.

So all of those things they've added in their artificial, But they haven't there because they work, creating structures, creating that time Pressure does convince people to buy what I'm looking for, things to create, looking for things to promote. I want things that work. I'm interested in money for the long haul.

The reason most of my products are and courses are in parenting or in had a build your own business, how to understand the structure or in a relationship spaces because those air evergreen there are always going to be people looking how to get back together with their ex. There are always going to be people trying to convince their boyfriend to propose.

They're always going to be parents teaching their kids how to sleep through the night, teaching their kids to be happy when they're struggling to the terrible twos. Teaching their kids had to use the potty teaching. The kids had out to wet the bed, changing. Their kids had to be prepared for different types of emergency teaching. Their kids had a swim, those air permanent markets. And that's what I really like. I would rather work on something and then make money for months or even years or decades.

That's the way I approach business. That's why I approached the things I recommend. I really like to find offers that I can simply add into my email sequence that are wonderful offers, and I don't have to worry about constantly changing them out or getting caught up in the hype of a launch. Those air very profitable. Honestly, with you, I could make a lot of money if I get pulled in and promote a whole launch with you really, really hard.

But usually the reason a product is all in launch and it's all in hype is because once it gets out and once people see what it's about, most people don't really do it, or the method only last for three or six months and then disappears. I'm not really interested in a flash in the pan business writing books, whether it's fiction, nonfiction writing articles that baseline that business will exist for the next 100 or 1000 years. That's a permanent business. I love that business.

That's what I would rather teach you. Learning copyrighting. If you listen to my episode about learning how to copyright, you make $10,000 a month within 12 months, you make a living as a copywriter. Even if the Internet disappears. Even if an MP blast goes out and televisions and radios never work again, you can still make a great living writing mailers. Writing for newspapers. Copyrighting is a skill in an industry that will never disappear. It's disaster proof, very wonderful.

These are the types of business in the type of lessons I'd like to teach, rather than a Facebook ads method that's gonna work because there's a loophole for the next two weeks. But once Facebook catches on, the method would disappear. It's not the kind of thing I want to teach now, what I want to share with you. I don't want you just been time invested in learning a skill, and then by the time you master it, it's too late. They've taken it away.

There are a couple of ways to promote things, even if you don't have a list, and I want to share with you some of these techniques because they're great ways to make a little bit of money online and sometimes toe make back the cost of a purchase. There's a method or a technique called launched jacking. This is where you find out the name of a product before it's been released. I thought about doing this recently.

My friend has a product coming out that I know is an evergreen product. I could recommend really nicely, but I haven't done it. I've decided not to do it right now I've done in the past. Sometimes you create a whole website. Maybe it's like product name dot com or product name. Bonus dot com product name review dot net. Sometimes when there's a big launch.

You'll see a bunch of websites with names like that, and they'll have reviews and offer lots of bonuses if your partner's through their link. They're all competing to get traffic of people that are typing in the name of the product into Google anyways, So they make reviews and other things, and this is a way you can start. You could make a review of a product really like that's about to be on the market.

If you know the name of something before anyone else does, you can post a video describing that ranked a video for that key word before anyone searching for it. You could be number one for a term because no one's competing yet very simple S E O method and you can start to catch some of those sales and get in a filly commission simply by making the first review video of something their arm or advanced techniques.

This is really the very basic idea of launch stacking, but it's simply find out the name of the product putting up videos. Websites block post with the name of the product before the product gets released, rather than generating your own traffic you're siphoning off a little bit of the traffic that's already interested in that product, running them through your filling Lincoln getting a little taste that way with reviews and bonuses eye right now and very into the review model.

That's why did a big review of Graham early big piece of software that I use It has my feeling of the bottom. I like to give a lot of value, but when I write a review, it's gotta be long. Has to go a lot into detail to really explain the good and the bad. I'm testing right now, a piece of software that I'm actually very excited about. I'm 99% sure I'm gonna recommend it.

The only reason I haven't mentioned the name of it yet is that it's not good on its own. It works really, really, really well intended with another piece of software I have. It's a key word research tool. The problem is that it delivers false positives. If you only use this tool and you just grab its recommendations, sometimes you'll get results that are wrong, and it's not because of the tool. It's because of the algorithm.

It's pulling information from, and the only way to check it is manually. So I'm going through this process right now where I'm deciding how I'm gonna recommend it. And I believe I have to include a training video with it to show you exactly how to use the tool correctly and to avoid getting false positives so that training video will probably be the bonus I offer.

If you bite through my leg by through my length, you'll merely get a training video that helps accelerate or advance your use of the tool. When you have a review of a great product and when you have a bonus for people who buy through your link you're now capturing in providing a lot of value, you can capture a lot of those sales. Sometimes when there's a big product out there, people will go online and they'll search for a coupon or they'll search for a bonus.

Was hyping product and bonus and proud name coupon. This is why launched tracking sites target those keywords so strongly when you have a really great review or really amazing bonus, you can capture and connect with a lot of sales. You can turn a lot of customers for another product into your own customers. When you're designing a bonus, you want to create things that really, really add value to the course when you're first starting out.

If you try to do this for a $3000 course, you couldn't actually afford to buy yourself. It's very tough to make a bonus for product you haven't seen. The reason I don't really love promoting launches anymore is you have to recommend a product you've never seen or used. It's not ready yet. I don't like to recommend things sight unseen. Have you been burned a few times in the past? It's a tough position to be in.

I'd rather have the time to go through the product, review everything, see where there's opportunity, make a bonus and then create that. That's where you can create a lot of value. But these are things you can d'oh. To begin to understand, the structure of Philly market begin to find products to recommend begin to find ways to get paid for things you do all the time. Anyways, we all recommend movies to our friends and books to our friends.

If you're using an Amazon link Now you just get paid a little something for doing it. Even with a small list, UH, 50. 100 200 people that are interesting what you have to say. You can send out an email and make a few $1000 in a single day. That's the power and the beauty of affiliate marketing. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of Serve No Master. Make sure you subscribe, so you never miss another episode.

We'll be back next Tuesday with more tips and tactics on how to escape that rat race. Head over to serve no master dot com forward slash podcasts Now for your chance to win a free copy of Jonathan's bestseller Serve No master, All you have to do is leave a five star review of this podcast. See you Tuesday. Thank you for listening to serve no master podcast.

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