Did I say I feel overwhelmed?
With the coming of the warm sunny days, I’m getting more and more involved in external activities I can’t really postpone like, preparing the pool, mowing the lawn and starting the vegetable garden. This is a huge time aside I have to take on the weekends, away from my affiliate business.
In the last weeks, I was counting on the weekends to get my business tasks done, but for the next weeks, I don’t have the same freedom anymore.
Yes I feel overwhelmed.
In such a situation, this means it’s important to optimize the small amount of time I have, to focus on what really counts.
The 4 Core Areas Of Focus
This week, I am going to be a little more technical.
My intent is to show you what tasks an affiliate marketer must do to produce income. My mentor call these, the 4 core areas of focus, that is, the only four income-generating tasks that the affiliate marketer must focus on to be successful.
These four tasks, when done correctly, allow the business to produce income and to eventually become profitable. Let me explain what they are:
1- Traffic
Traffic is the people who come to see your online content.
Especially at the beginning of a new business, the affiliate marketer will dedicate most of his time at generating a maximum of traffic.
Your goal is to achieve eventually an audience of people that like you and trust you.
You will make sales if enough of the right people, at the right time, having the right mood, discover your offers. Nothing happens if there is no traffic generated in your business.
Paid traffic
There are two different approaches to traffic generation, depending on the time and money you have. All of these necessitate some form of content that you have to produce and put online.
If you have more money than time, you can pay advertising platforms to get control on the flow of some of their visitors.
Examples are Facebook and Google ads.
This is the fastest way to get traffic. If you can become good at it and know what you do, with paid advertising you will be able to get traffic much faster than with any organic efforts you could put in.
This approach allows you some form of control over the traffic you advertise to. That is, it gives you the ability to direct people to a website or link of your choosing.
Organic or “Free” traffic
If you have more time to invest than money, you should decide to work on organic methods of traffic generation.
Organic traffic, also called “free” traffic, is the traffic that you produce by working on some forms of content to attract the people susceptible to like your offers.
Note that there is no such thing as free traffic. The traffic you generate by organic methods will always be paid for by your time and efforts.
Also, you have to know that it is a slow and laborious process. Nevertheless, this is the approach I have chosen to start with.
My blog is an example of an organic method that generate traffic with contents. The cool thing with the blog is that it is “my property”. With it, I can promote my offers, place banners, and post content wherever and when I want to.
With other methods, like forums for example, you are linked to the policy of their websites. Obviously, forums usually don’t like very much that you deviate their traffic to your website to make money. So you have to be careful while doing your affiliate activities on forums to avoid getting banned.
Organic methods such as blogging and forums don’t give you control over your traffic. In fact, there are no way to predict when and how much traffic will show up and you have no control on it, that is, you can’t direct it anywhere you want.
2- Capture
Once you have your traffic, it’s time to capture your first leads in order to create your audience. For example, some affiliate marketers, including myself, use an “autoresponder” to build an email list of like-minded people interested into their topic. The autoresponder is a piece of software that allows you to do two things:
- Send a broadcast email to your list or a part of it whenever you like;
- Send an email periodically to all your subscribers.
The email capture is most often done using a very simple web page we call an opt-in page.
On this opt-in page we present a “lead magnet”, “a bribe” if you prefer. The bribe must be some digital content which the affiliate marketer is willing to let go for free, in exchange of his lead’s email information.
For example, on the side of this page, you can see my banner to subscribe to my Newsletter. For those who subscribe, I offer 2 FREE videos of Dean Holland giving value for those willing to start the adventure of affiliate marketing or even those who are just curious about it.
Close to the lead magnet presentation, there is a call to action, that is, I ask people to subscribe to my email list in exchange of the free goodies. Doing so, my new subscribers authorize me to send them emails with contents that can interest them.
An email list is a form of traffic that you own because you own the contact information of your subscribers and their permission to communicate with them.
That’s the reason why it is so powerful.
You have already paid the cost of it and no longer have to do so. With a mailing list, you can communicate directly with your audience to establish trust, and with it, a long lasting relationship where you can help people by giving your advice and, of course, promote your offers.
3- Follow-up
People usually don’t buy the first time they see an offer. You have to follow-up with them. The day you stop communicating with your subscribers, is the day they begin to forget who you are and, as a consequence, the day you start losing money.
Follow-up is an on-going process in which you must remain consistent. The marketer who follow-up with emails to his audience, or email list, must continue to offer value content.
Your subscribers are real people that don’t know you so it is important to nurture your relationship carefully in order to eventually bring them to Like and trust you.
The follow-up process is where your autoresponder is most useful because you have to send emails periodically.
In my case, since I have only my Newsletter I broadcast each week, I don’t have an autoresponder setup yet. This will be more useful when I will start with leads ads where I will send leads to a specific list setup, aside from the one I use for my Newsletter, in order to follow-up on the campaign they optin for. Typically, send emails every day for 7 days is what I’m required to do. During this week, I want to accomplish multiple objectives like establishing this relationship I was talking about. I want also to guide my subscribers to the next actions I want them to take, which is, typically, to make a purchase, or get them to subscribe to my Newsletter.
Even if a lot has been accomplished during this first week of follow-up, this communication must not end. You should continue to provide value with a well balanced combination of contents and offers.
4- Sales system
Affiliate marketers make money with their offers.
Offers are selected based on the marketer’s specific niche and audience interests. It is important that your offers reflect the niche you are in.
People having a problem to solve see in your offers a solution to their problem.
You must promote your products or services having at heart the best interests of your audience, otherwise, the relationship you have with them could rapidly deteriorate and you will start to lose their trust and money.
That’s it! These are the only four task’s the affiliate marketer has to do to produce money.
More About Traffic Generation
The most important for me actually is to create contents to generate organic traffic. After near 9 months of work, I still didn’t make a single dollar yet. However during these months, I grown and learned a lot.
The way I should apply the methods and work on traffic generation make a lot more sense for me now.
It’s all a matter of getting myself known, but at the same time, I want myself to be known and followed by people who really needs my help.
How I do this? By finding and getting exposure in front of the right people.
Actually, I want people to discover my blog, people that will bookmark it and come back from time to time to feel the experience of affiliate marketing.
If they are interested and feel rising the fire in them, they can subscribe to my newsletter and get exposed to promotions that will help them start their own business online, the right way.
It is important to expose your content in front of potential leads, that is, people like I said above, that have a problem to solve in your niche.
I’m active in Quora and TikTok, and my content there is getting an increasing number of views and followers.
I want my followers to be persons who are interested by my topics as much as I can. For this reason, I’m not in favor of those 10K campaign “let’s go , let’s grow” you frequently see on TikTok.
By participating to these campaigns, you could indeed increase your number of followers rapidly, but what followers?
These are people that have nothing to care about your content. They just want to be followed back.
There is no interest for me apart from the fact that I could reach faster 1K followers to get my clickable link.
I’m not that in a hurry yet.
Another way I found to increase your followers in both Quora and TikTok is to follow people that you know are looking for solutions in your niche.
I do this by looking in the comments of other affiliate marketers and try to spot people who ask questions or sound interested by the topic. Then I could go see their account and try to let them know I’m there also to help, leaving comments and liking their stuff.
You can also follow others affiliate marketers, and I found out that many of them will in return follow you back. However, if you are playing this game, you end-up with followers that actually are in competition with you, so they are less likely to be turned into leads.
I think by being strategic as much as possible in traffic generation, you can get in front of the right people. This, in time, is what will provide leads to your own asset.
There are many kind of people on these social media, the trick here, is to find the good ones.
This is what I’m working to be good at.
Before I conclude, I would like to say that I just started doing blog hopping outside of my circle of affiliate fellow partners. At least twice a week, I search for a blog of influence and leave a valuable comment. I will tell you if this gives results.
With only about one hour per day, I know I’m slow, but I’m making progress.
Please leave a comment below, I want to know more about you, my reader.
Bookmark this website, you will surely want to be here when I will call my first dollar made online!
Martin
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