Every site needs traffic to survive. The question every website owner has to answer is how to get that traffic. The way I see it, there are three ways to generate traffic:
- You can buy it. That means bidding on keywords, placing ads on people’s websites, etc.
- You can build it. That means using things like article marketing and posting to social networking sites.
- You can leverage it. That means recruiting JV partners and affiliates to send you visitors.
But even if you use the first two methods, you’ll want to use the third one. Why? To leverage your efforts and grow your business exponentially. And you need to have this system in place before you start promoting so you can maximize your profits from the traffic that you and your affiliates drive to your site.
Your affiliate program will leverage the traffic you generate and build more traffic without any extra work. In other words, when a prospect becomes a buyer, that buyer can also become an affiliate who will promote your product creating a snowball effect.
For example, let’s say your front-end product is converting five percent of your visitors into buyers and that one out of five buyers becomes an active affiliate. If you get 100 visitors a day, that’s one new affiliate per day who will promote your product and bring you more traffic, customers, and affiliates.
Let’s say you get 10 JV partners to promote to their lists and their combined efforts send you 1,000 visitors. That’s an immediate influx of 50 new customers and 10 affiliates who will promote for you. Now if those 10 affiliates send you 1,000 visitors over time, that’s another 50 customers and 10 affiliates who can do the same.
See where this is going? If you leave out the affiliate portion, there is no leverage or perpetual growth of your business. But if you have an affiliate program, once it’s all set up you just throw traffic at it and your business grows automatically!
There’s a saying that goes, “I’d rather have one percent of a hundred men’s effort that a hundred percent of my own.” That’s the kind of leverage I’ll show you how to get from your affiliate program.
Read on…
How Affiliates Multiply You
It might sound technical to talk about having an affiliate program, or it might just sound like showing off. It’s neither one. It’s really about a simple concept-leverage.
Let’s look at some different ways that you can generate traffic:
- Forums
- Press Releases
- Viral Software & Tools
- Banner Advertising
- Utterz
- Viral Reports
- Starting a Podcast
- Search Engine Optimization
- Blogging
- Offline Marketing
- Squidoo
- Stumble Upon
- Digg/Reddit/etc.
- Article Marketing
- Ezine Advertising
- Google Adwords
- Craigslist
- Webinars
- Teleseminars
- Twitter
Long list, right? Now, are you an expert at each of those things? I’m certainly not.
I get a lot of traffic at my blog. But the main purpose of the blog is to communicate with my subscribers, customers and affiliates. And it took months before I saw consistent traffic from search engines, which is minimal compared to the traffic I get from my affiliates.
I’ve written several viral reports. But those are tools that my affiliates use to promote me. I give them the branding tools and they take it and run.
To get the amount of traffic I get from my affiliate sales force, I’d have to learn about and implement each of those traffic strategies on a regular basis. I don’t know about you, but I just don’t have that much time on my hands.
I’m only one person with only so many skills. But I have thousands of active affiliate who are promoting me and many are experts at one or more traffic strategies that drive traffic to my sites.
If you search on Google, you’ll find that my affiliate team has:
- Posted my articles and banners on their blogs
- Created Squidoo lenses to promote my products
- Bookmarked my pages with links to my site
- Posted my free reports on their blogs
- Set up Adwords campaigns at Google
- Posted in forums with affiliate links in their signature
- Uploaded videos to YouTube
- Sent my solo ads and free reports to their lists
If you take the time to recruit and train affiliates, you’ll get more done-and make more money-each day than you would by yourself in a month
And the good news is…you only have to do the work once. After you’ve created the tools and training materials for your affiliates, you could have 100 or 10,000 people using the same tools to promote you!
The real beauty of this system is the fact that you actually make money while building a list and recruiting an army of affiliates who send you traffic for free. It doesn’t get any better than that!
Technorati Tags: affiliate, affiliate marketing, leads, traffic