The Ultimate Conversion Funnel for Affiliate Marketing [OMP 004]

Show Notes

[TRANSCRIPT]

Hey, what’s up? It’s Nicolas again and this is Online Marketing for Profits. And, welcome to Episode 4.

Today, I’m, yeah, I’m really excited. I was really looking forward to recording this episode because affiliate marketing is kind of where I started this whole journey about 15 years ago.

If you watched, if you listened to Episode 1 rather, you kind of find out my journey and the actual first website I created that I eventually sold about maybe seven years after that was pretty much all based on affiliate offers. So, I’m very experienced in this field and this way of monetizing a website.

And, since then, I have also consulted with a lot of affiliate marketers to improve their own funnels and to get more people to convert in the end. And, it’s not the easiest thing because when you have your own product, when you have your own service, you control the whole funnel from A to Z. You can place banner ads. You can have, you know, blog posts at funnel people through your offer.

Again, use social media to do that also. And then, when you present the offer to your visitors, then you’re in control above, you know, all of the sales pages and maybe there’s an opt in in there and you control the e-mail marketing that’s, you know, behind the scenes to get more and more people to convert and eventually purchase or hire you.

So, it’s much easier to do that.

When you are an affiliate, you are doing a lot of the work beforehand way before the purchase and you’re kind of relying on the merchant to do his own job. And, that’s not always the case. And, that’s why today, we’re going to talk about also some very, very important point just before you even get started in affiliate marketing which you should be doing to maximize basically your effort because you don’t want to work for nothing. You want no one to put in all these, you know, these hours of working and setting up some pages or a funnel for an offer that at the end is not going to convert.

How to do this right?

And, the best way, I mean, really… Today, I’m going to talk about seven things you can do to optimize your conversion funnel. There might be… I’m sure there are some things in there that you’re already doing.

Hopefully, there are some things in there that you are not and you perhaps see the value in doing them after this episode is over.

1- Research is Boring, But THE Key to Success

But, the number one thing, and I can’t stress this out enough, the number one thing you can do before doing anything kind of, you know, affiliate marketing or promotion is research.

Now, I know research is not the sexiest thing, sounds like a grind.

But, it’s really, really worth it and it’s not just worth it because you will convert more any offer and then you’ll sell more and all that.

But, most importantly, it’s worth it because if you have a website on a specific industry, the more research you do, the more you’re going to get to know your audience.

And, the more you know your audience, then the much, it’s much easier down the line to select good offers, to sell them good offers and most importantly how to sell them the offers. So, it was… I love this quote…

You might have heard it before.

Abraham Lincoln once said, “If you give me six hours to chop down a tree, I’m going to spend the first four sharpening my ax.”

[bctt tweet=”On doing online research: Abraham Lincoln once said, “If you give me six hours to chop down a tree, I’m going to spend the first four sharpening my ax.””]

And, that’s basically what research is.

You need to sharpen your ax first, make sure that your tools and you’re in line with your customer base and your visitors’ want in order to, you know, eventually get to the end goal which is chopping down your tree or getting them to convert.

Chosing the right offer

So, your research is basically split in two things.

The first one is choosing the right offer and that’s really, really important. If you miss out on this one, if you’re actually pushing an offer your audience doesn’t want, or if you’re pushing an offer that is not converting as much, then you are putting a lot of work in to something that’s, you know, really not going to be a success.

So, how can you choose the right offer?

There is a couple of things you can do.

First of all, most of the affiliate size and if you look at, there are basically two kinds of affiliate size. There is those big joint venture types affiliate size –like ClickBank, JVZoo, Commission Junction. These have, you know, thousands of offers being promoted by, you know, thousands if not millions of affiliate marketers.

The good thing about these sites is that they provide you with a lot of statistics that you can use when you’re selecting your offer. So, they’ll provide you with things like how many affiliates or what’s the percentage maybe of affiliates that are pushing this offer that are actually getting a conversions, conversion, how much money they are making in the end.

So, those are things that you certainly want to be in the lookout for when you’re selecting your offer. But, be mindful that these numbers do not tell the whole story. They will give you some indication of an offer if an offer is more popular, more likely to convert than others, but at the end of the day, it doesn’t tell you how the affiliate is marketing this offer.

It doesn’t tell you how, you know, may, where his traffic is coming from, is he purchasing, you know, banner ads or ads on Facebook, on Google or another search engine or somewhere else, and then, you know, getting that traffic to the offer, or is he carefully crafting out, you know, a blog post and then fondling people to the offer, or is he doing, you know, ads then the blog post and then the offer on the merchant site.

So, it doesn’t tell you the whole story. So, that’s really, really, you know, you need to remind yourself of that when you’re looking at these numbers.

But, to some extent, it does tell you, if perhaps, the copy is a bit better on some of these offers and others, and, you know, more… The… You know, if a lot of marketers are selling it successfully, you know, there’s a bigger chance that it’s, you know, it’s like more likely to be a success for you.

So, when you look at these bestsellers, always be mindful of who is selling it.

If you don’t know who is selling it, who’s behind the product, that to me should be a big red flag.

[bctt tweet=”When chosing an affiliate offer, if you don’t know who’s behind the product, that should be a big red flag.”]

I mean, there’s a lot of offers and take bugging these other market places and you just don’t know who’s behind the product. And, that to me is a big red flag because you’re going to base your entire funnel in to using these kinds of info, that kind of information and who’s behind it.

And, if you don’t have that information, it seems a bit, you know, it’s more likely to be shady and if it’s shady, then it has a bad, it can get bad rep for you. So, you want to, you know, you don’t want to go there.

If you are not going the market place type of offers like ClickBang, JVZoo, Commission Junction, then you’re going to go to possibly one, you know, SaaS service or one product out there that has its own like in-house affiliate system.

The good news about that is that you know exactly who is selling it. If you are an affiliate for this brand, then you know that this brand is in, you know, if you know the brand already.

It’s in, you know, it’s going to be a reputable brand and, you know, it’s going to be well-received by others and you don’t have to kind of swim against the current to convince people as much that the, you know, the brand is reliable and can be trusted and all that. So, that’s certainly good.

The back side of that is that oftentimes, they don’t provide you with much information about statistics and how other affiliates are doing and how they are marketing it. So, it’s just kind of a give and take between the two approaches.

What you really want to do when you’re doing your research about an offer is ask for a review copy. Most affiliates, most marketers out there will provide you one without any problem.

So, basically, you can… If it’s going to be a video course or an e-book or a SaaS service or whatever it is, oftentimes, you can get access to those for free as an affiliate especially if you can convince the marketer that, you know, you are doing this in good faith and you are not just trying to scam them in to giving you a free product. So, if you can show that, you’d been, you know, selling other offers on your website already or things like that.

That’s even better. But, ask a review a copy and make sure that the quality is there.

You don’t want to, you know, push an offer that’s crap on your audience.

The second thing also is that by actually reviewing the copy that way, you get to know the product a lot better and that will help you down the line to sell it.

Which also want to do is study their funnel.

Are they offering any up sells?

How much is a product?

Are they offering upsells, down sells?

Is there a continuity program at some point?

And most importantly, how much are you getting as an affiliate if the prospect signs up for these?

Some offers out there will give you a percentage of the first offer, but then nothing on the upsells and downsell which I think is wrong. You should prob-… You should get, you know, a piece of the pie for every single transaction.

So, that’s something to be mindful of because some offers, because of this, will be much more profitable than others. So, same thing also as you’re requesting a review copy.

You can also ask the merchant or the marketer if you, if they can give you like a swipe of their conversion funnel so they’ll probably have some screenshots of this is Upsell A, Upsell B, downsell of this and on this.

All of these, they probably have on hand. If they don’t, they should. And, that could be a red flag if they don’t. I mean, so the more that they have these stuff already for you, the, you know, they kind of give you an indication of how more serious and probably more reliable they are.

And so, make sure you get all these information at hand before you even start promoting that offer.

Some red flags, when you’re looking in these offers is, for example, if they have alternative payment options.

For example, some marketers out there will display their product on ClickBank, but then when you get to the sales page, they’ll have a Add to Cart button that leads to the ClickBank system and then they might have like a Paypal button that leads to Paypal.

Now, for all of those transactions on Paypal, you won’t get a penny because they are not tied to the ClickBank system.

So, make sure that you go through the funnel if you can and make sure that there’s no, nothing fishy about the entire funnel.

Also, make sure that you’re going to get paid. If, you know, if you’re using ClickBank or if you’re using JVZoo, these are, you know, pretty reputable places.

But, if you’re using, if you’re going to promote an offer that’s going to be in-house, make sure that it’s a reputable site and look for any, you know, Google something like, you know, problems with payment form this merchant or some things like that and any kind that there’s, you know, maybe a high level complain or something like that, just be very careful about promoting an offer like that.

Because the last thing you want to do is spend your time, spend your money and getting people to convert in the end while not having, not getting paid for it.

Understanding the Customer Mindset

Now, that was the first kind of research.

Choosing the offer and doing your research around it.

The second type of research you want to be doing is actually trying to understand the customer mindset, their likes, their objections and basically what’s the audience you should be promoting this offer to.

And, when I said, you know, it’s going to be a long term play and research is good, that’s mostly what I’m talking about.

Choosing the offer as obviously some good, you know, you have a good reason to do your research for that.

But, knowing your audience and the mindset and what they like and what the, what are their friction points, for example, for choosing an offer and buying it, that’s very, very important. And, that will really help you down the line in your market.

The more you know your customer or your audience, the better it is.

So, when you’re doing that research, look at the product website and look at the kind of copy they are using, the angles, how they are selling the benefits to the product or the service.

And, don’t forget to look at their competitors.

I’m sure, you know, most products out there have competitors which is good because that means there’s a, you know, a need for it, how their competitors are selling their product or…

So, that will give you a lot of ideas and you can come up, you know, can have an Excel spreadsheet or something like that with lines of copy and angles and all that. Look at, you know, headlines, angles, what type of imagery they are using, what type of, how they’re, yeah, how they’re writing their benefits, what kind of call to action they are using on their buttons and things like that, what labels and copy.

That’s really important because that will help you out in your own funnel when you get to that point just in a bit later which you can do also taking another step a bit further and call their sales and support team. Call them out, see how they respond to your questions.

If they have scripts, if they are, you know, a reliable company and they get a good number of calls, they probably have scripts so that, you know, you record the call or maybe check if it’s legal to record the call and all that, but you can take as many notes as you can. But when you call them up, oftentimes,

I found that their sales or support team on the phone are much better at selling you the product. And, one big mistake that most companies make out there is that their sales team on the phone will be super good at converting, but somehow they kind of forget that they should be using the same scripts or the same angles that they are using on a phone on their website.

They kind of don’t do that. So, oftentimes, they have a much better conversion script on their, on the phone than they have on the website.

So, you know, take the extra step. Why not?

And, call them up.

And, try to figure out where the, where do those prospects to, where do they hang out? Forums, for example, blogs, social media.

What are they writing about?

What questions do they have?

If I’m going to push an offer, I might want to research a few forums for maybe a few social media posts or some blogs out there that, and see which blog post are the most popular.

Maybe I can use that as an angle to get in and maybe they’ll make my copy, you know, much better. If I look at forums, which questions come back over and over again or which questions, you know, got a lot of comments or, and views?

Those are probably some big, you know, objections or some big questions that people have that might become friction points before they actually buy a product.

So, you need to have all that information before even starting to promote it.

So, number one is research and doing it right is really the key to all things.

Because after that, I mean, people often say writing good copy is hard and they are right.

But, once you have the research and you know what people want, you know what people like and you know what people are kind of uncertain about, it’s much easier to craft the right copy.

You just have to answer those questions, highlight the good stuff, what they like already and counter those objections.

Then, you’re more than halfway there.

You’ll be such a better copywriter if you do that already than if you miss out on the whole research.

So, number one on the funnel which is, isn’t really a step in itself, but it’s certainly very, very important.

You could, you should probably spend, you know, half of your time on the research anyway.

2- Where To Promote Your Affiliate Offer

Number two is where to promote your offer.

So, you selected an offer. You have done your research. And now, you have to decide where are you going to promote it. Now, if you’re, you know, if you don’t have cash to invest in advertising and things like that, well, you’re probably going to have a blog.

And, if you do that, then you’re going to rely on SEO and organic traffic and there’d be social medias, your shares and things like that which is fine. So, that’s okay.

Be sure that, you know, your blog post or your entire website is appealing to the audience you are trying to seduce with this offer. The last thing I want to see is kind of an offer on a website that doesn’t, where it doesn’t make any sense. If you’re pushing an offer on how to design a Christmas tree and I see that your website is about SEO, that kind of throws me away. I’m not going to be doing that.

So, I’m not going to be buying from you. So, be sure that your blog and, you know, your posts and all that are in line with the general audience that you are trying to sell on this offer.

If you’re only going to use an ad network to promote the offer, and we’ll talk about how to do that in a second, but ask yourself which one is, you know, suits this offer a bit better.

Google has some guidelines.

Facebook has some guidelines and all the other networks have guidelines.

And, make… You know, ask yourself, even if it’s just on Google, is it better to do it on the, you know, search engine results page or on the content network?

The mindset is different.

So, you need to know what you’re targeting here. If you’re going to do ads on Facebook, then that’s fine.

But, you know, the, again, the mindset is quite different. So, you need to carefully select which ad network you’re going to go for to promote your offer. If you’re going to use an e-mail list because maybe you already have one, then that’s fine also. But, you know, again, the mindset is different.

People might expect e-mails from you. They might expect e-mails that give them value and now you’re pushing them an offer. So, it might be okay. It might not be. It depends on how you shape it and which angle you go at it.

But, again, be mindful of the way you’re, the mechanism, the way you’re going to deliver this offer to your audience and when you’re thinking about how you’re going to deliver it.

3- Why You Shouldn’t Use The Merchant’s Banners

All right. Now, we come to the nitty-gritty where you’re actually going to start to map out this conversion funnel.

How do we do that?

Well, unfortunately, most merchants out there and this is both for, you know, SaaS services to solopreneurs on ClickBank and even, you know, Fortune 500 and unfortunately, they don’t provide you with that much good stuff.

Most of the time, honestly, I mean, some of them won’t even know at this point their customer base as much as huge, you know, if you have done the research right. Some will, of course, but some might not.

And so, the tools that they give you, if they do give you some, like banners and, you know, maybe bits of copy, typically aren’t that good. So, you need to, oftentimes, you need to dismiss the merchant’s own creatives and use your own, make your own up.

So, if they provide you with banners, oftentimes, the copy is going to be bad, the call to action is going to be bad and it won’t have the same mindset, the same angle that you might want to use in your own funnel.

So, if you are going to promote this offer through an ad or a network or maybe an e-mail list, make your own, you know, make your own creatives. Create some banners yourself and pro-, you know, with different headlines, different copy, different bullets if there are some, different imagery, different call to actions, different designs to see which one, you know, converts more.

And, we’ll talk about tracking at the end of the episode. So, don’t use the merchant site.

There might be some very good affiliate marketers especially I’d say more in the ClickBank, JVZoo type of offers where there’s some very, very good, you know, marketers out there that understand their market already.

They have done the research themselves and they’ll provide you with some very, very good copy for your e-mails or some good copy for a blog post and things like that. So, you… Again, it goes back to selecting the right offer, who is selling it and if they are a legit, then you, you know, they can show a tracker code and all that.

So, the more you trust the marketer to have done his job basically and know their industry and provide you with some good quality material to promote, the more you can use them.

But, if you’re not sure and most of the time, most people just throw an affiliate program out there, don’t really bother about it too much.

They don’t do the proper research and they don’t do their job basically. You’ll be much better off making your own banners, your own bits of copy and all that. So, you know, you’ll have a better call to action which will be also, most importantly, more in line with your own funnel.

All right. And, we’ll take a quick break. And, it’s time for the offline ignition minute where we talk about your body language as an entrepreneur and I’ll be back after the body language minute for the rest of the funnel where we’ll talk about preselling, what’s going on with on the merchant website and how to track everything. So, I’ll talk to you then.

4- The Secret is in the Pre-Sell Page

All right.

Back to the Ultimate Conversion Funnel for Affiliate Marketing.

So, the first thing we did, we selected the good offer, we studied our market. Now, we, you know, we decided where we wanted to promote our offer whether it’s going to by buying some ads or actually doing organic traffic on our website.

Next step was to check out what kind of creatives they had, our merchant and to select if it’s good or not.

And then, comes really the good part.

The most important part of the entire funnel and it’s the presell page.

Now, if you are doing ad buys, you still want, you don’t want to make the mistake of doing an ad and sending that traffic to the merchant.

That’s never can, going to convert as much as sending it to your own presell page and then to the merchant. If you are doing SEO, then basically that SEO page, that landing page is your presell page.

You want to control the conversion from as much as you can.

So, that presell page is really the key to the whole thing.

Now, what does that presell page look like?

Well, basically, it wants to showcase the benefit. Just think of yourself at the mer-, as the merchant.

Think of yourself, if you own that business, what would you do to promote it, you know, rightfully.

So, it needs to have good copy. It needs to have a good headline. It needs to have all the good stuff that we would showcase on a merchant site. People often forget.

They’ll just throw in like a review and just have, you know, a bit of copy in how good the benefits are and this is a great product and click here to buy it.

You can, you need to go a bit further than that.

You can include some testimonials about the offer.

They don’t have… They are not going to be testimonials that say, “You’re demand.” They are going to say testimonials that says the offer and the product or service you are pushing is demand, right?

Endorsements.

If they have that, and that’s all part of your research, right?

If you research that merchant properly, now you’ll know if they have good testimonials, maybe endorsements, places they have been featured on, media mentions, you know, maybe if the New York Times have mentioned those and things like that, case studies.

Those are all the things you should be using on your own presell page to do exactly that, to presell it. If you don’t presell it enough, then there’s a very good chance they won’t convert as much on the other hand.

And, on the other hand, if you, you know, do a very good job of preselling it, it’s almost a formality that they’ll be converting on the merchant site. So, be weary of that.

You need to presell it well. And, that means, you know, and that’s when you research, if you found out that the copy look good and the benefits and the angle that the merchant was using, the competitors were using, use all of that in that presell page.

If they provided you with some, which you think is some good junks of copy, use that on your presell page. Don’t just use that. Use bits of pie-, and pieces of it, you know, on your own presell page.

And, your presell page should really sell it.

Don’t be afraid to go long and really, really go thoroughly on it.

And, remember that you ask for your copy, so you have your own.

Inject your own input in there.

What do you think about the product?

How did it help you in the end?

So, if you have, you know, an authority blog, if you’re trying to position yourself as an authority, your opinion needs to matter and that’s why you need to sell it at a good offer in the first place because the moment people don’t trust you anymore because you’re trying to push them crap, you know, that word, your word goes out the window and you’re kinda screwed.

So, that presell page is very, very important. Don’t remember to use all the good trust builder types of, yeah, I guess, tricks like testimonials, endorsements, media mentions, case studies and things like that.

Now, at the end, and… And, at the end of the day, the whole purpose of this presell page to send people to the merchant, right, so that they buy it [inaudible] with your affiliate code embedded in it.

So, the call the action that you’re going to use on the presell page is going to be very important. That’s something you should test also on your own. You should be testing, by the way, that presell page all the time. Good. Good.

You know, different headlines, different layouts, different bits of copy, different call to actions.

And, don’t be afraid to just ask for them to, you know, “Click here. Click here to get, you know, to purchase this.”

And then, they’ll get to the merchant site. Okay.

Once they have left your website, you’re kind of, you kind of done everything you can, right?

So, you, maybe you purchase an ad or you’re, you’ve been using the best SEO practices to get people to that presell page.

You did your best on that presell page and then you’re sending your baby off to the merchant site.

What can you do to make that transition a bit better?

Well, there are actually some stuff that you can do beforehand on your presell page that will help.

First, use as much if you can if it makes sense, use as much as the website’s, the merchant’s colors and templates and all that in your own presell page.

I’m not talking about, you know, the banners and all that.

I’m talking about try to mimic a little bit what’s going to happen when your user leaves your website and gets to the merchant’s website, what’s going to happen, and try to make that transition as smooth as possible, and that you can roll this back also to the ad you bought.

So, if you are able to use the same color schemes, for example, as the merchant website, it’s going to be much, you know, much better flow if they see, I’m just going to make this up, if they see like a, you know, a blue banner with gold lettering, then they get to your website. You got some blue colors in there and then the same gold lettering maybe for your headline or some action colors or whatever.

Then, they get to the merchant’s website and they see again the same color scheme. You know, it makes the whole journey a lot smoother.

They are not going from, you know, red and green website which is yours to the merchant’s website which is blue and green, and then just a big disconnect there. You want to make this transition as smooth as possible.

SIDE NOTE: If you want the best option to build your page or you entire funnel, I recommend Clickfunnels. Click here for my ultimate Clickfunnels Review.

5- The Best Merchant Offers Have Dedicated Landing Pages

Some merchants, and these are the best ones I feel, will actually allow you to have dedicated landing page on their website.

So, your users are actually on the merchant’s website, but they’ll actually, you’ll be able to showcase your own logo, maybe your side name, maybe bits of cop-, you know, bits of copy here and there.

So, again, that’s transition, you know, makes the most sense.

When they are leaving your website and now they are on the merchant landing page, they still see your logo, your branding, your name and the, you know, maybe the same copy you have been using throughout your whole funnel.

This will add a lot of trust to the experience. And, again, it’s going to be much more in line with your own funnel, with the angle that you’re pushing for this offer.

So, that’s critical.

That step from the presell page to the merchant site. If you can, make it a bit smoother for your visitors, you’re much better off and much more likely to convert.

Test Capturing Their Email Too

Now, so that’s basically the funnel.

There’s a bit… There’s… I guess, there’s an optional bonus you can throw in there at any of these steps which would be to capture their e-mail. If you are using, you know, a, an ad network to push your offer, SEO traffic, if you can, test a way for you to capture the e-mail at some point. It might be before you show the presell page.

It might be on their way from the presell page to the merchant. You know, these are the kind of things that you need to test to see how much it affects your conversions either way.

But, you know, building that e-mail list and getting additional chances to push the offer after they have opted in, if they don’t buy today from the merchant, you know, much more likely to grow your revenue that way. You know, you can put them through an auto-responder series.

If after a while they have still not bought that offer, perhaps you can push them related offers. You could get them back to your website.

So, there’s a lot, obviously a lot of benefits of capture, capturing that e-mail address and getting an opt in pages, an opt in page in there somewhere.

But, this is something you need to test because, of course, if they go to the presell page, then an opt in, then the dedicated landing page on your merchant site, it’s much likely that there’s going to be much less people that actually get to the merchant site.

They might, you know, get a lot of friction from that and that might kill your conversions.

So you, you know, you need to be care about that. But, it’s something you need to test for the long run how much worth, you know, how much it is to you to capture that e-mail address and get long term money instead of just that specific cell at that moment.

Bonus Points If You Track Everything

Now, how do you track all of these?

There’s some basic way you can do it.

Because oftentimes for affiliate offers, tracking is the name of the game.

You will want… If you are using ads, you’ll want to have like a specific way to track each ads separately.

Now, if you’re targeting multiple audiences, you should have, you know, a way to know which audience will convert more if you are testing, you know, different presell pages.

You want to know which page is doing better.

And, if you have dedicated landing page at the merchant’s site, you also want to do, to know which one converts better. So, the easy way is to use tools like Bitly and some WordPress plugins like redirections or redirection or pretty links.

These are just basic, basic, basic plugins that you can basically attract the number of people that clicks on your link, on your presell page for example and get to the merchant. That’s the basic stuff. You need to do that at the very minimum.

If you really want to take it a step further, you want to use pro tools like Proper 202, iMobiTrax, and I’m sure there’s others out there that are alternatives to these tools.

And, these tools will allow you to track from the actual ad to your presell page to the merchant and to the conversion point especially if the merchant allows you to put a pixel once the, once the purchase is done.

So, there are some merchants out there that will allow you to do that and that’s really also a key to having a high quality merchant. If you’re able to put in a pixel which means basically it’s a snippet of code that the merchant will allow you to put on the thank you page once the purchase is done, once the transaction is done by your visitor, it will trigger that snippet of code and it will report back to these tools like Prosper 202 and that will allow you to know which part of your funnel is converting better.

So, if you are running Facebook ads and maybe you have come up with five, ten different ads, maybe 20, whatever it is, it should be just one, you need to test this stuff out.

So, your… You’ve got your, you’ve got those let’s say 15 ads that are running and then you get to a presell page that maybe you’re adding an AB test on, then you get to a dedicated landing page.

Maybe you are sending some traffic directly to the merchant’s, you know, home page. Some of them are on your dedicated landing page or you kind of having AB test running in there.

And then, eventually, they buy. You want to know and you’ll be able to know with these tools which ad going to which presell page, going to which page on the merchant gets you the most conversions. And, that’s where the money is. That really is where the money.

If you don’t, then you’re probably wasting a lot of money in good time, in good clicks on some part of your funnel that are not optimized. Because out of those 15 ads on Facebook, there might like five that are making you money and 10 that are losing you money.

So, it makes the big difference. If you can turn those 10 off and just focus and just run those five and eventually find, you know, find maybe alternatives to those five and variations on those five that are going to be profitable also.

And, the same thing for your presell page, if one is doing much better than the other ones. So, it’s, you know, it’s all part of kind of optimizing your own process and the only way you can really do that is if you have a good tracking tool.

Now, some of these trackers are cheap. Some of them are self hosted, so, you know, it’s probably up to you to decide which one is best. But, honestly, without the tracking, you’re really leaving money on the table.

You know, if you just want to get started and just have an affiliate offer done tomorrow, you know, go the, you can go the easy way and just, you know, cross your fingers. But, if you really, really want to take in a step further, you can use these tools and especially even more if you’re want to be doing and driving mobile traffic because these tools have ways to detect which operation, operating system and which types of cell phone are being used.

So, you can also turn off some campaigns that would be, for example, they might be super profitable when on the iPhone 6 but not so much on the iPhone 5, so you’ll just…

There are ways you can show your ads only to iPhone 6, you know, an iPhone 6 audience. And so, that way, you, you know, you optimize your funnel that way. So, these tools are very, very complex.

They get the job done and, without it, I think you, yeah, you… If you are really serious about affiliate marketing and doing an entire funnel like this, your tracking is really, you know, the basics of your overall success long term.

So, that’s the ultimate conversion funnel for me for affiliate marketing. Doing your research first, you need to nail that down, spend probably half of your time on this. It’s crucially important before selecting an offer and understanding, you know, the visitor base and your audience and all that. You need to do that. You need to nail this.

Then, decide where to promote it because if you decide to promote it at some place, it doesn’t make any sense for your audience you’re doing from the start.

Then, selecting creatives and banners and all that, carefully check if it’s worth it to use the banners from the merchant. Usually, it is not. The presell page is where the money is. Be sure to have a good one constantly optimizing and then AB test it.

It’s really, really important.

If you can, have some extra oomph to the all, to the entire funnel by using the same, you know, templates and coloring and style as a net merchant site do that.

And, see if you can get a dedicated landing page to make that flow, that funnel even more seamless.

Check to see and test if you can capture e-mail at some point between, you know, before or after the presell page. And most importantly, track everything. You need to track, track, track and analyze so you can, you know, optimize your entire funnel that way. It’s a lot of work for one single offer.

But, once you’ve had this down, it’d be much easier to come up with additional offers. And, most importantly, you’ll start to pay attention a lot more to the offers that actually are making you money because you might have 50 on your site.

There might actually only be three or four that are making you money, and so, you can start optimizing those funnels before all the other ones that aren’t profitable or aren’t making you much at that point.

All right. That was the ultimate conversion funnel for affiliate marketing. I hope you enjoyed this episode. I did. I shared that this is how I got started in online marketing. So, I’m, you know, I’m very passionate about affiliate marketing.

If you want the show notes, the links, the slide, the transcript of this show, and especially the video about the eyebrow flash that I talked about in the offline ignition minute, hit me up on onlinemarketingforprofits.com/4.

And, what I want you to do is give me a rating on iTunes, give me a comment. If you have any questions, hit me up on iTunes.

Let me know how it’s going about the show and let me know if you have any questions about this topic today, any topic, whatsoever, or topic I have discussed in the past. And on our next episode, we’re going to talk about testimonials and how important they are.

You probably heard about social proof and our testimonials can really make a difference in your growing your revenue, growing your own business. We’re going to talk about that. We’re going to show you, you know, the right way to do them because most of the time, honestly, they are done wrong. I’m going to show you the right way to do it and how to carefully select a good testimonial and why.

And, I’m going to also give you a quick tip. If you don’t have testimonials at this time, there are some really great ways you can leverage huge corporate brands to your advantage and to kind of add testimonials that way. So, I’m going to show you that next time on our next episode of online marketing for profits.

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Show Links

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Next Steps...

1 See which tools I use & recommend to clients:

I've hand-picked the best performing tools and resources I use every day or that I've seen my clients use with great success. To get tactics and copy to build a better funnel see Dotcom Secrets, Copywriting Secrets and Funnel Scripts. If you do affiliate marketing, I recommend you take a look at The Affiliate Bootcamp, ClickMagick and Active Campaign.

2 Get My FREE Funnel

Get 3 “Done For You” + 100% Automated Sales Funnel. They're free. I will share these with you in PDF and via ClickFunnels.

3 Book your FREE 30 Min strategy call: ​

Since 2012, I’ve helped generate over $100 Million in extra sales for Fortune 500s and SMEs. Let's see how I can help you and what you need to grow your sales and revenue. I use psychology, persuasion and science to get more leads or sales and I'll be 100% transparent on the best strategy for you, even if that's not me. Book your call now.

Finally, you can also check out my other articles on funnels and Shopify and ecommerce.