Wednesday, September 21, 2005
Which affiliate model is best for copywriters?
I wrote this for a private forum but thought I'd share
it with my blog's readers:
Here're some thoughts that might help.
There're 2 basic affiliate income models.
1. Have a passion, hobby, interest or dream you just love to write
and learn and teach about.
Build a huge website about it. Your content attracts other people who
share your passion, hobby, interest or dream.
Review and recommend products that relate to your passion, hobby,
interest or dream.
But you DON'T "sell" them -- you PRE-sell your visitors on these
products. You provide content related to them. You build your
credibility. You give examples of how you used them. Etc.
You get enough visitors and they like and trust you enough based on
what a great website you have, then they buy the products you
recommend and you make money.
You do NOT write a conventional sales letter for them -- you just
convince them to click through your affiliate link and let the
merchant's sales letter sell and close them.
Since Google started Adsense, you add that to your many pages and
make money from visitors clicking on that.
The epitome of this model is Ken Evoy's Site Build-It.
Make no mistake -- many people make good part-time to 6-figure
annual incomes doing this. Many people have been able to quit their
jobs through doing this.
2. Many other affiliate marketers discovered that they ran out of
passions, hobbies, interests and dreams before reaching their income
goals.
They learned that they could make money by putting up 1-5 page
minisites that were basically a landing page designed to send
prospects to the merchant's site. With maybe a few supporting
pages.
If they add "content" to build traffic through search engines,
it's public domain material, or articles you contract with
writers on eLance to write at $5 a pop (so it's silly to brag
on AWAI's board about getting such jobs, as I've seen happen --
they don't care about the quality of the articles, only the
keyword density.), or they pull from proprietary article
databases, or use scraping software such as Traffic
Equalizer or Directory Generator to build pages of related
links from Google search results, or they build pages by
creating HTML pages from RSS and/or affiliate feeds, or
they use search engine cloaking. Or all of the above.
And of course, you can monetize all this content with
Google Adsense. Some of these guys get 5 figures a month
just from Google. Not counting their affiliate sales . . .
Harlan advocates traffic through pay per click engines which
of course works as long as the clicks don't cost too much
and you have a high enough conversion rate.
The epitome of this model is probably XSitePro. This software
can be used to create large sites, but it's most useful for
people trying to build hundreds of minisites.
And if you spend all your time building more sites about more
niches and products, you should make more money than the
people who spend a lot of time writing 100s of pages for one
web site.
Many people doing this full time have hundreds of these
minisites. Some may well have 1000s. Who knows?
I hope you see that as copywriters we're most interested in
model #2.
And we have an advantage of being able to write sales copy that
could be better than the merchant's. While most minisite
affiliates produce simple landing pages that entice prospects
into clicking through to the merchant, we can take more control
of the process and sell the prospect right up front, then send
them to the order page.
The one flaw with that is we'll take longer to produce one site
because we're putting up a full sales letter that takes a lot
longer to write than a quicky landing page.
But well-done, higher conversion rates should make this
worthwhile.
Copywriting Books
it with my blog's readers:
Here're some thoughts that might help.
There're 2 basic affiliate income models.
1. Have a passion, hobby, interest or dream you just love to write
and learn and teach about.
Build a huge website about it. Your content attracts other people who
share your passion, hobby, interest or dream.
Review and recommend products that relate to your passion, hobby,
interest or dream.
But you DON'T "sell" them -- you PRE-sell your visitors on these
products. You provide content related to them. You build your
credibility. You give examples of how you used them. Etc.
You get enough visitors and they like and trust you enough based on
what a great website you have, then they buy the products you
recommend and you make money.
You do NOT write a conventional sales letter for them -- you just
convince them to click through your affiliate link and let the
merchant's sales letter sell and close them.
Since Google started Adsense, you add that to your many pages and
make money from visitors clicking on that.
The epitome of this model is Ken Evoy's Site Build-It.
Make no mistake -- many people make good part-time to 6-figure
annual incomes doing this. Many people have been able to quit their
jobs through doing this.
2. Many other affiliate marketers discovered that they ran out of
passions, hobbies, interests and dreams before reaching their income
goals.
They learned that they could make money by putting up 1-5 page
minisites that were basically a landing page designed to send
prospects to the merchant's site. With maybe a few supporting
pages.
If they add "content" to build traffic through search engines,
it's public domain material, or articles you contract with
writers on eLance to write at $5 a pop (so it's silly to brag
on AWAI's board about getting such jobs, as I've seen happen --
they don't care about the quality of the articles, only the
keyword density.), or they pull from proprietary article
databases, or use scraping software such as Traffic
Equalizer or Directory Generator to build pages of related
links from Google search results, or they build pages by
creating HTML pages from RSS and/or affiliate feeds, or
they use search engine cloaking. Or all of the above.
And of course, you can monetize all this content with
Google Adsense. Some of these guys get 5 figures a month
just from Google. Not counting their affiliate sales . . .
Harlan advocates traffic through pay per click engines which
of course works as long as the clicks don't cost too much
and you have a high enough conversion rate.
The epitome of this model is probably XSitePro. This software
can be used to create large sites, but it's most useful for
people trying to build hundreds of minisites.
And if you spend all your time building more sites about more
niches and products, you should make more money than the
people who spend a lot of time writing 100s of pages for one
web site.
Many people doing this full time have hundreds of these
minisites. Some may well have 1000s. Who knows?
I hope you see that as copywriters we're most interested in
model #2.
And we have an advantage of being able to write sales copy that
could be better than the merchant's. While most minisite
affiliates produce simple landing pages that entice prospects
into clicking through to the merchant, we can take more control
of the process and sell the prospect right up front, then send
them to the order page.
The one flaw with that is we'll take longer to produce one site
because we're putting up a full sales letter that takes a lot
longer to write than a quicky landing page.
But well-done, higher conversion rates should make this
worthwhile.
Copywriting Books
