He will make a few sales…very few. Of course, he won’t be working very hard either, and maybe he is very happy being an average affiliate marketer. There is a problem, however, with being average. Average is a very crowded place. Average! Why would anybody want to settle for average anything? Doesn’t ‘average’ mean ‘common or ordinary…nothing special’? If you are not happy with being an average affiliate marketer, then you need to keep reading.
What puts one affiliate marketer above the average affiliate marketer? The answer is uniqueness.
Being unique is a quality that sets one apart from all others. If you want to be better than just average, you will need to develop some uniqueness in your marketing techniques that will set you above just an average affiliate marketer.
Average affiliate marketers just don’t grasp the idea that in order to sell a lot of products, their offer needs to be more valuable than the offers their competitors are making. Most affiliate marketers won’t offer any incentives to their lists for buying a specific product from them rather than buying the same product from someone else.
Some affiliate marketers will offer some bonus incentives. Still, they will be pretty ordinary and things that are really not of much value or even unrelated to the product that is being promoted.
The really GOOD affiliate marketer will offer bonus incentives that are BETTER than anything that is being offered by any other marketer and are directly related to the product that is being promoted. The really GOOD affiliate marketer will give his customers a very good reason to buy from him.
Actually, the whole idea of offering better incentives to customers is just plain old common sense. If you can buy two ears of corn from vendor A for 20 cents or two ears of corn from vendor B for 20 cents and vendor B throws in some butter to go on the corn free of charge, which vendor are you going to buy from?
Affiliate marketing is the very same thing.
You have to offer bonuses, and you have to offer better bonuses than those that other affiliate marketers are offering.
For example, Let’s say that there is an E-Book about Email Marketing that you are an affiliate marketer for. It’s a very good book that an Email Marketing Guru has written. It is selling for $100, and your commission is going to be $50 per sale that you make. There is an elaborate live launch for the product. Your competitors are offering an additional E-Book or two as bonus incentives.
How can you get an edge here? The only way that you can possibly get an edge is to offer something that your competitors are not offering. You could have set up a free teleseminar that will take place within a few days of the launch for those who buy from you, or you could offer a free 30-minute downloadable audio tape that further explains certain points in the E-Book.
The people who buy from you will be getting a better deal than they could get from your competitors. The product will always be the same…but the bonuses that are offered are where you get the edge.
Tip: Never underestimate the power of ‘free’. Everybody loves getting something for nothing or getting something extra. They especially love getting something that everybody else is not getting. And that brings me to another finer point of offering bonus incentives.
If you can offer something such as a free teleseminar that is related to a product launch, you need to limit the number of people who will receive the bonus. That makes it more exclusive and thus more desirable.
This is tricky.
You don’t want to make customers mad, but you do want to make those who get the bonuses feel like they have gotten something others have not gotten. You might phrase your offer to say that the first 200 people who buy the product from you will be allowed to join the teleseminar live, and others will receive a transcript of the teleseminar. Like I said, this is tricky, but it can be done.