Welcome back to part 2 of “Affiliate Marketing Superstars,” in which I’m going to share with you the “dirty secret” of affiliate marketing. (Just keep reading to find out what it is.)
I’ve been doing affiliate marketing for most of the decade just finished. Throughout this series, I’m going to share FOUR of my most elite and most secret methods for eclipsing the competition.
If you missed part 1, I advocated taking the approach of building an online marketplace when you do affiliate marketing. That is, use affiliate marketing to provide everything and anything that is relevant to your customer base.
Why? Because the more income streams, the more stable your business. That’s the purpose of doing affiliate marketing.
Just joining ONE affiliate network defeats the purpose.
Unless…
About mid-way through last decade, I joined an affiliate network that made a unique promise. Many of you reading this joined the same network.
The unique promise was the paying out of “back-end” commissions. That is, any follow-up sales off the back of an affiliate’s sales were ostensibly commissionable to the affiliate too.
A number of affiliate networks have promised this. Like the one I joined, they all scorn other affiliate networks for “robbing” their affiliates of follow-up commissions.
These networks usually provide offers in the form of coaching programs that act suspiciously like the online marketplace concept I outlined earlier. That is, a variety of different products are sold off the back of these coaching programs.
They’ll say this removes the need to join any other affiliate networks, because you can provide your customers with a whole online marketplace through promoting just this one coaching program.
But it’s all a trick, and the reason is two-fold.
Firstly, these coaching programs don’t really act as online marketplaces at all, because they don’t promote a variety of THIRD-PARTY vendors. The so-called “marketplace” consists of products sold by the same vendor.
So, if the affiliate network were to close, you lose ALL of these income streams at once. This doesn’t remove the need to join multiple affiliate networks at all.
Even worse is the second reason.
Third-party sales WERE made off the back of the coaching program I promoted…
Except they DIDN’T pay me any commissions!
In other words, this affiliate network was “robbing” its affiliates EXACTLY as it was scorning other networks for doing.
So, when we affiliates promoted the coaching program and expected to earn off the follow-up sales, we only earned off the follow-up sales from the same vendor. But the vendor would also sell our customers third-party website builders and CRM’s through its OWN affiliate link.
It’s very likely that the vendor is continuing to earn re-bill commissions from the third-party website builders and CRM’s that it sold to our customers. Meanwhile, we earn nothing from these sales.
This is the DIRTY SECRET of affiliate marketing.
Let’s be fair. From a technological standpoint, paying affiliates follow-up commissions is much harder when those commissions are coming from third-party vendors.
But it’s NOT impossible, and since becoming aware of the dirty secret, I’ve been able to start earning commissions on third-party sales made off the back of my affiliate offers.
How?
Again, I’ll be honest. There are technological limitations to this. But that just means you need to liaise with your vendors and ensure they are set up with the correct technology to make this happen.
To be clear, the correct technology I’m referring to is such that inserts YOUR affiliate link into THEIR marketing materials whenever YOU send them a customer and they do their own affiliate offers as a follow-up to the initial sale.
Not all affiliate networks have this technology, so you need your vendors to be listed on the affiliate networks that do have it.
And if they’re not listed on those networks?
Then you need to turn the tables a little bit. Usually, affiliate marketing is done on your vendor’s terms. You as the affiliate join the affiliate network that your vendor chooses to list on.
Instead, you will need to set up your affiliate marketing partnerships on YOUR terms, and recruit your vendors into one of these affiliate networks that supports the correct technology.
This is how I’ve been able to earn commissions on third-party sales made off the back of my affiliate offers. I’ve simply been setting up processes that recruit my vendors into affiliate networks of MY choice.
I’m currently writing a book that will walk through the full detail of exactly how I do this, and how you can adapt the same processes for your business.
So far, I’m thinking the title of this book will probably be “How to Create an Online Marketplace.”
Please send me a message or comment below if you’re interested in this book. If you contact me before the end of FEBRUARY 2020, you will get the whole book for FREE and I’ll share the content with you as I write it.
If you’re not sure whether you need this book, then don’t forget there are still TWO more parts to this series, “Affiliate Marketing Superstars.”
These will reveal two more of my most elite and most secret methods for affiliate marketing. I will share them right here, 100% free, in the next few days.
To avoid missing them, like this page right now (or send to a friend who might like) or join our group.