Affiliate Marketing – How to Grow With Personal Branding!
Firstly, what is this animal called ‘Affiliate Marketing’?
Affiliate Marketers are those guys and gals who sell other companies’ products and services to earn commission payments. The Affiliate Marketers market these products/services either with free or paid marketing promotions – such as adverts, email marketing, weblinks – and make their money back from sales. As a result, the Affiliate Marketing Companies don’t have to spend much on marketing themselves – as this is taken care of by the Affiliates. Should be a win-win situation, as long as the Affiliates are selling, and earning well from the sales.
What’s good about it?
Well, it’s easy money, or should be! The products/services have been created, manufactured and/or stocked by other companies, and in some cases, the Internet Marketing promotional content has been prepared for you as well. As an Affiliate Marketer, you simply have to promote these products/services and as long as customers buy them, you’ll earn commission. Usually customers buy direct from the Affiliate Companies (with commission being paid automatically to the Affiliate Marketer who referred the customer), so Affiliates don’t have to have payment processing facilities or handle any stock.
What are the downfalls?
Affiliate Marketing Companies will usually take on as many Affiliates as they can, often with the view that the more Affiliates promoting their products out there, the better. Problem is the market (on the Internet) can become flooded with lots of people promoting the same products/services over and over, which might reduce the Affiliate Marketers’ chances of being individually successful. For example, if you’ve signed up to quite a few newsletters or free ebooks recently, you may then be accosted with the same email autoresponder messages, from a few different people, all trying to sell you the same products/services (because they’ve all signed up as Affiliates promoting the same products/services).
Also, often Affiliate Marketers will use the original Affiliate Marketing Companies’ template websites/lead capture pages and autoresponder emails, because it’s convenient – these are often pre-prepared by professional copywriters and may be available to the Affiliate Marketers for free or as part of the Affiliate membership package. The Affiliate Companies will often claim high conversion rates with the use of their promotional material/content, which further encourages the Affiliates to use these. Unfortunately this means a lot of the same marketing promotional stuff out there, and no Affiliate will stand out as different from the next Affiliate.
So then – how to stand out from the crowd as an Affiliate Marketer?
Personal branding and offering unique added value is the way to go – if you think about it, your particular personality and skills are really the only things you have that are uniquely different to anyone else on the Internet, so use them to your advantage!
Personal Branding means building up your presence as an expert on subjects related to what you’re selling or on the art of Affiliate Marketing (depending on your target market). You then build relationships with your potential customers/list and promote yourself and your knowledge/expertize/understanding to help others, rather than marketing your Affiliate products/services upfront. The idea is that customers will grow to know, like, trust and respect you – and thus will come to want to buy what you are selling because they trust your solutions to their problems.
You can add value by offering information, expertize, solutions, empathy and understanding to your target market – via personal contact (emails) and your individualized websites/blogs.
Choose the products/services you will be promoting carefully – and around a theme, so that your potential customers are offered a full range of everything they need (and you get to gain because customers will often buy something else related to what they’ve just bought, if you sell it too).
What does this mean for Affiliate Marketers?
It means preferably don’t use the standard template Affiliate Company websites/lead capture pages and pre-prepared autoresponder emails; or if these are working for you to some degree, then supplement these with personalized contact with your list, to build strong relationships with these potential customers.
It also means more work! Work on building relationships with your list, work on increasing your knowledge and expertize and sharing it with others, work on creating a personalized space on the Internet where you can showcase your uniqueness and your ability to help others – via your own website or blog.
Make sure you’re promoting quality products and services that really do work in the way promised to your customers, and market these in a way that fits with your personality. This means your list will get to know you, perceive how you are different from other marketers, and sense how valuable you are to them in a multitude of ways.
Ultimately, all of this should mean more money for you, the Affiliate Marketer! Maybe not as quickly as you hope, because building up a unique online presence, growing a list of potential customers, and becoming known, liked and respected, all takes time. But there are Affiliate Marketers out there, who experienced a ‘eureka’ moment, where after a lot of hard work, it all started happening very quickly for them. The common denominator for most of them was their personalized marketing and relationship building, and that their customers had got to know and like them over time.
By Anonymous
http://ezinearticles.com/?Affiliate-Marketing—How-to-Grow-With-Personal-Branding!&id=4123325
affiliate marketing
Tags: Affiliate, Affiliate Marketer, Affiliate Marketers, Affiliates