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Building Your Affiliates from Your List

One thing I do want to say to you now is, if you have 65, 70, 80%, or even more to give away through your products commissions, don’t be afraid to tell people about it. Not so long ago in fact, there was a craze of big affiliate commission sites popping up that offered anywhere from 80-100% commissions that did incredibly well on the resource building side of things simply on the basis of promoting their high commissions more than the product itself.

So whatever you do, don’t think that gaining affiliates is all about that little button at the top of your sites with 80% for affiliates written in big letters. Hey, we spend money to promote free products to build our lists all the time, why can’t we do the same for our affiliates? Well we can, and to be honest, one good affiliate is more valuable than a hundred subscribers, even a thousand subscribers in my eyes, for the simple reason that they may have an audience of tens or even hundreds of thousands on their lists that they’re willing to give you access to. Imagine the resources that would land in your lap and the power you’ll have for future promotion when a few ads like that start to go out.

So the rule here is just this. If you’re following the charts I’ve put up for you (see Part 1 of this post title), this guide will built around your own needs, and your commissions are higher than the average fifty percent, go ahead and make sure people know about it through your promotion. Make it a prime concern of yours and you won’t be disappointed.

How to Turn Your List into Joint Ventures

Now as far as turning your list into joint ventures goes, this is a pretty easy but also open ended and rather variable in results until you actually see what these people are capable of further down the line. Similar to previously, when we talked about gaining feedback from your list you can in the same way, gain joint ventures from your list, again, as in the above example with the affiliates, this is often far more widely used, and for good reason.

I urge you once again, not to relegate your joint venture prospects to those who visit your website, and the individuals you pick out through the top performing affiliates, but to actively seek them through your list. The reason we’re doing this is simply because there’s a good chance someone will be out there that won’t progress down your line of resources otherwise. If they’re experienced, have a big list of their own, or the ability to get in touch with your target market, you’re going to miss out if you’re not telling them that you want their services.

For example, an experienced marketer that subscribes to a selection of lists to keep up with what’s going on around them, happens to subscribe to your list where you’re selling an info product such as this. He or she won’t buy your how to product, because they’ve got their system set up already and it just so happens, that they only promote their own stuff to their own lists, unless it’s a joint venture (this is very common among the big guys by the way), they won’t buy your big product for the same reason, and they won’t be joining your affiliate program for the above reason. He or she is a heavy hitter with a big list, but you’re missing out. These are the people you’re aiming to cater for here. It’s not good if you’re leaving massive holes like this, because you’re missing out on some massive profit potential. In fact, as we speak the majority of marketers out there are very obviously leaving these types of holes.

The problem with joint venturing through a list at this stage is it becomes kind of a lottery if you’re not careful. You can’t just send out a mailing asking for anyone with a list over ten thousand people to contact you for higher commissions, because then everyone else feels cheated and you may alienate some potential affiliates. In general terms joint ventures should be a private thing, the deal will also vary from person to person, depending on your product, their list size, what they want in return and what you can grant in return. The best way to go about this is to keep it that way. Don’t do a mass mailing just requesting joint ventures for the reasons above, we can’t do that for this particular resource.

What I’d suggest you do instead, which you should be doing with your list anyway, is carry on as your normally do, sending out your un-intrusive surveys to help with your research and find out as much info as you can about the people on your list, for something in return. For example a short valuable report that you’ve written on your area of expertise. In exchange you’re getting vital info that not only allows you to tailor your ads to your list providing a better response rate, but at the same time you’re building up a picture of who the good joint venture prospects are. Once you’ve done that, you can go through the results you’ve collected, and pick the top performers, the knowledgeable, and the people with the most resources, and contact them individually.

What to Do With Your List

So you see, your list is your first contact that you have with your customers and the potential is there to turn them into the other four resources further up the food chain if done as above. If it’s related to your business, and other people should be seeing, reading, using, buying or promoting it, your list should know about it at least once, in it’s unspecialized, most basic and standard form. Leave them in the dark, and you’re missing out on potentially thousands, tens of thousands in profit, or more.

What to Do with Your Customers

Moving on from your list and your most general and untargeted form of targeted marketing, let’s take a look at the first specialized section here, your customers. The people that have either only bought low priced introductory products from you before, or have only purchased from you once.

What you’ll start to see is as we get more specialized and move up the food chain in terms of profitability, things start to get easier to figure out what to do and when to do it when crossing your resources over. It’s also important to note, that with paying customers, and them being lower in numbers than your list, it’s easier to make a mistake and lose profit potential rather quickly if you’re not careful about where you’re setting foot.

When thinking about what to do with what resource, remember to always think in terms of where these people are going next in the standard form when setting orders in the way of importance. For example, with our short-term customers, in the standard flow of things, they’ll be turning into your big buyers. The people that buy the most products from you at the highest price, so again, short term, they may not seem like much now, but in the future, this is where your big profits are going to be coming from, hence their major importance, and the general attitude is that you should give them something a little extra for their time. That’s not because they’re more demanding than your list, but because the profit potential is much higher for you, their numbers are much smaller, and the margin of error also is much smaller.

Organizing: Now, before we even start, we’re seeing a new problem emerge. The organizing and managing of five different resources that all overlap can become a complex, time consuming and confusing task, and that’s not what we want. I can rightly see why many just take all their five resources and just bundle them into one list. I’d highly suggest you avoid doing this unless you’re just promoting other peoples stuff or very rarely create your own products. If your business is, and will in the future remain all about the products you’re creating and selling, keep them separate. If you carry this section out correctly, it won’t mean a huge amount of extra work, aside from five short mailings per product promotion drive or launch instead of one.

The reason I mention the above is that when you get to this stage, the people out there that do things this way and keep their resources separated, try to give them the earth. For example, if I told you how valuable these people are, and you wanted to turn them into affiliates, how do you do so?

The general answer would be to give them higher commissions. This however is not worth your trouble, because we’re overlooking one serious flaw in that plan. Unless your product is geared to give higher commissions in the beginning to people who purchase it, these people aren’t necessarily suited to affiliate material, and in my experience, it’s best not to bombard them with affiliate signup pages and adverts about how much they can make unless that is a specific benefit of your product.

I’d suggest to you that the only way around this is not to do the above, because your main aim is not to make them promote for you, but to buy your higher priced products and move up the ladder. So the solution is treat them as such. When you’re mailing them about a new product, include information about how much they can earn promoting for you. I highly recommend not deviating from the original plan and flow of the chart with these important people, especially when it comes to trying to turn them into affiliates. You’ll gain plenty of them via the other resources, leave well alone trying to give them bonuses or bigger commissions at this stage, because otherwise you’ll just end up with a big tangled ball of yarn and a headache. We’ll get on to just how we make them valued in a moment.

But first, let’s look at turning your customers into your list. To start with, you’ll find that most of your customers are on your list anyway. Not much needs to be said about this subject for that very reason. Any customers that aren’t on your standard list will still be receiving ads for your products, high cost products and low cost products as part of your introductory series each time you launch something new using the backend sales flow chart. What they won’t be receiving are the mails that you use to try and separate your list into one of these categories for the same reasons as with the lack of affiliate mailings as explained in the previous point.

Any of your customers that are not on your standard list won’t be missing much in the way of making you money by not being there, because they’re already where you want them, in a prime position to buy a premium product from you. In my experience, customers are more than ten times more likely to buy from you again than your standard list, and this is the reason I said that your list is the least targeted and lowest quality of the big five resources.

This post will be continued to next part; Part 3 for “How to Convert Your Standard Customers to Long-term Customers”.