How To Make Affiliate Sales

I love it when a student becomes the teacher. Here’s some excellent affiliate advice from one of my top clients. – Craig

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How to Make Affiliate Sales
By Shawna K.

Hey Gang, I’ve been helping a few people individually with how to present affiliate offers and they suggested my posting this for all to hear…

I know that many of you are shy to start to make affiliate offers to your list. It’s scary to know what to offer, how often to email, what to expect and fear unsubscribes.

Let me tell you that you need to just START doing something. You need to sell YOUR OWN stuff and you need to start to sell other offers.

By making affiliate offers, it does a few things: once you’ve made a few sales for others, it’s easier to ask for their support and it also teaches you about your own list and how to reach them.

Consider your email frequency and stick with your regular schedule, or SLOWLY start to increase your mailing frequency. Don’t all of a sudden blast your list with an email a day with a hard pitch if you’ve only been emailing 3 times a week.
To begin, send a few emails just providing *great content* from an affiliate that has a great match to your list and add a very soft pitch link. You could add recipes, info about cooking, a workout or whatever your list needs, but make sure it’s *great info*.

Establishing a relationship with the author of the program you’re promoting is really helpful too (eg. I got this recipe/workout from my good friend… and add a picture if you have one).

Then on the 3rd email, put the link higher up in the email, remind your readers that you’ve been talking this topic all week and then ‘ask for the sale’.

Don’t tip-toe around it!

Study your open rate and click-through rates (ctr), especially on the last email, and see how many sales you get. Your goal is to increase open/ctr’s as you continue to mail and of course to get some sales, but it’s all about learning how to write to your list at first.

Your initial goal is to learn list behavior. How do they respond? Be willing to accept some unsubscribes. If they unsubscribe, they’ll never buy anything anyway and they’ll be your highest needs customers so be willing to part with them. Don’t be afraid to sell and share a strong opinion to connect.

You could also survey your list, ask on your FB page or on your blog ‘what do you need?’ This will help you know what they want so you can present appropriate content.

Knowing your list and being true to it by not selling out or presenting every offer around the corner is the key.

But having said this, don’t be afraid to SELL.

Hope that helps.

Shawna
PS – On a side note…

if you find an offer that your list likes, you could consider taking that email and adding it to your autoresponder series…