Mastering Affiliate Marketing: Strategies for Initial Traffic and Scaling Offers

When you’re trying to book that initial traffic to your offer, you might feel you are at a disadvantage without numbers to back you up. This is a common challenge, but not impossible to overcome. Here we show you how to rock out and get that initial traffic you need to succeed.

Be Humble And Honest

Even if this isn’t your first rodeo, this is your first attempt to drive traffic to this offer. So, it will take eating some humble pie and honesty to confess right out of the gate that you don’t have data yet. However, don’t look at this as a negative, or worry that affiliates will want you to provide data to convince them to book. Instead, use this opportunity to establish yourself as trustworthy, especially when dealing with big affiliates who will only give you one shot to pitch your offer.

Ask Your Network

Using people who trust you is the easiest way to book that initial traffic. Ideally, you have an existing network to help spread the word about your offer. If you don’t have a network of affiliates, you can also approach friends or contacts in the marketing business. You want to get people testing the offer so you can start building that data.

Invest In Tests

If you don’t have a network, we strongly advise paying to test your offer. You can test for as little as $100 to $200 dollars to generate enough clicks to create a decent volume of email traffic or sponsored posts with someone with a following of about 10,000 to 50,000 followers. By investing some money to test your offer, you’ll accelerate to the front of the line, find the people willing to test the offer, and have data to show it works.

Go To Events To Meet Affiliates

An affordable way to network and meet affiliates is to go to events in your area, which can often provide the perfect networking opportunity. This approach doesn’t even require investing in tickets to the event. Instead, you can do what we call a “Lobbycon.” Instead of attending the event, just go to the venue and mingle with affiliates hanging out in the bars and lobby. It is an affordable way to meet contacts and stir up interest in your offer. 

Facebook groups also provide hundreds of opportunities to introduce yourself. Join groups to find support for your offer or to help send traffic your way. Introduce yourself and your offer, and mention you are willing to prepay to drum up support. This is the easiest way to meet affiliates in markets around the world.

Ask For Referrals

As you make new contacts, not all of them will be ideal candidates for your offer, but never underestimate the power of referrals. Share your offer information and ask whether your new contacts know suitable affiliates interested in your program. For example, a partner with a finance offer might not be too interested in health products but might have contacts more likely to mail out or support your program. To make your request more tempting you can give them a second tier referral as an incentive.

Put Your Offer On Networks

Networks like Clickbank are also an excellent way to book initial traffic for your offer. They’ve been around for 20+ years and have established over 100,000 affiliate partners and vendors. These are the people with true potential to help generate millions of clicks. Clickbank has the process down and is quick to help onboard you. With $4 billion in payments under their belt, they’ll also pay your affiliates when they make a sale making your life a lot easier. Other networks include Goldenberri, Buy Goods, Digistore. You just have to look for the ones that appeal to you.  

Offer Card

Pros create an offer card for their offers. You can do that even without data. You need a link to your primary sales page and links to your upsells and downsells so people can see your entire funnel. Digital products always include a link where affiliates can test your product out. It’s important to share the ideal target/avatar so they understand who the perfect buyer is. For example, if you sell health products to promote sleep, your avatar might be women in their 40s. You should also explain how your offer helps that person, such as lowering their cortisol levels. Your Unique Selling Proposition (USP) is critical because it sets you apart from other offers. It can be an overview of the combination of ingredients and the results they produce, research providing evidence that the ingredients work, the types of relevant groups using the product, etc. This information helps affiliates understand your offer’s competitive edge to encourage them to jump on board. Other card stats include:

• Commission or CPA you are offering
• Links to your affiliate portal with banners, swipes, access to tracking, etc.
• Contact information for the offer owner, affiliate manager and customer service

Then as you start to generate critical mass, you’ll start adding data such as:

• Conversion rates (CR)
•  Earnings per click (EPC)
•  Earnings per lead (EPL)
• Average order value (AOV)
• Typical payouts

As you collect and update thisdata, it will help drive more traffic to your offer.

Our Building a Successful Affiliate Program course covers in-depth what you should include in your Offer Card.

Data Needed to Scale an Offer

Once you get the data you need, it’s important to share it in a way that helps scale your offer. What affiliates care about is how the offer performs on their side. How much money will they make? How does the offer resonate with their tribe? By showing them the advantages the affiliate partners will get, they can get behind the offer. Therefore your numbers need to match or exceed their expectations. For example, if your average open rates are 25% and the click-throughs are 10%, they won’t be impressed. 

However, if the average open rate is 25% and the click-throughs are 40%, they’ll feel more confident in the offer. Work of achieving high conversion rates, and you’ll quickly overcome possible objections.

On your side, the lifetime customer value and average order value are the most important numbers, as they tell affiliates how much earning potential you are willing to share and the scalability of your offer. 

After each affiliate promotion, ask for a testimonial and permission to share that affiliate partner’s mailing data. Now your data becomes more trustworthy.

Need Support Creating And Scaling Your Affiliate Program?

Supercharge Your Affiliate Revenue with everything you need to know to grow your partnership marketing channel in a free mini-course Everflow of Partner Connections.

You’ll get 15 lessons and 7 actionable tools designed to meet you at any level (beginner, intermediate and advanced) and help you build a steady affiliate revenue coming month after month, year after year!

TAKE IT – ABSOLUTELY FREE…

Sources:

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