Affiliate Marketing – Is there a better way

Affiliate Marketing – Is there a better way to make money with Affiliate marketing?

The Problem

Let’s talk about the main problem with Affiliate marketing, I’m talking about the typical Affiliate Marketing business model that most of us learn when starting out in the Affiliate Marketing business.

You will have seen many advertisements about how you can make money while you sleep and how “they” made millions with Affiliate marketing. What they are showing you is the typical “hit and run” approach and try to tell us that this is the model that they used to get rich quickly.

In Real Life

Affiliate Marketing
Unfortunately, in real life, it doesn’t work like that and we soon become disillusioned. I have a real problem with this “typical” business model. Typically we are told that you build a website, join an affiliate marketing program, like Amazon, click bank or whatever network has a merchant with your niche market stuff, sign up with that merchant, get their data feed, download it to your website and attract customers to (hopefully) make a sale and receive a commission. You hope that you will get enough money to cover your costs plus make a profit. (i.e. find an offer, promote it and once you make a sale you get paid).

It is possible to make money doing that, bearing in mind, there is no shipping, no holding stock, no order fulfillment, you just send the traffic, make the sale and make the money right? Well that’s fine if that floats your boat BUT!

So What’s Wrong

Affiliate Marketing
What is wrong with this scenario? This business model is fundamentally flawed. There is something the people selling Affiliate Marketing courses are not telling you?

Let me give you a typical example, you join an affiliate program and get traffic to your site. A customer comes to your site, clicks on your affiliate link which is sent through to your merchant and the customer makes a purchase. You will receive a commission for sending that customer to that merchant, great you have made some money.

The Problem

Affiliate Marketing
BUT, here’s the problem, WHO OWNS THE CUSTOMER! Simple, THE MERCHANT DOES! The merchant has all the customer’s details, YOU DO NOT. No details have been left on your website to allow you to see any detail of who this customer is. The merchant needs this detail to be able to send the item purchased to the customer along with their email address. THE MERCHANT gets to keep the customer.

So What

Now what is the merchant going to do with this customer’s details? They are going to try to sell this customer more stuff, they are going to up-sell related products based on the item already purchased. Now here’s the thing! How much commission do you get on these additional items sold? Nothing, nichets, nada. Why you ask? Well because now the customer belongs to the merchant. You do not get commission on any further purchase your customer makes. Yes there is a cookie period offered by some merchants ranging from 1 day to 30 days, which means if that customer buys more stuff from that merchant within the cookie period, you will get the commission (provided! The customer does not clear his cookies within that time).

The Consequences

So, if you are doing this typical type of affiliate marketing, you are not going to make any money from that customer’s future purchases because, they now know where to go to buy more things like they just purchased and the merchant will continue to bombard them with special offers. The people selling affiliate marketing courses do not tell you about this flaw in the system when bragging about how much money they make, you can be sure that, if they are practicing what they preach, they will be grabbing the customer information first before sending the sale to any merchant; creating an email list of their own to be able to send those customers more offers.

The Solution

So how do we do this? How do we encourage our customer to leave their details before we send them off to the merchant? So Affiliate Marketing – Is there a better way?
One way would be to get their name and email details before revealing the “special offer” price.
Another way would be to have them subscribe to your newsletter.
Or offer a free gift in exchange for their details then allow them to click your affiliate link.
If you have any other ideas on how to get customers to give their details, we would love to hear from you. CONTACT US.

There is another way we can do e-marketing without the need to carry stock, dispatch goods or hold debtors and that is…

Drop Shipping

but that is a discussion for another day after I have had another coffee.

Buy me a Coffee

As usual, if you like to learn everything there is to know about Affiliate Marketing and Drop Shipping, CLICK HERE buy me a coffee and download our FREE eBook.

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