Lights Camera Click: 10 Things the Movies Can Teach Us About Internet Marketing

By Debbie Campbell Fowler and Raymond Aaron

Lights, Camera, Click is a book about internet marketing and how you can launch your own business as an affiliate marketer. This book helps you understand the steps it takes to build your own business, find customers through social media, buying ads to generate sales, use email to connect with your customers, and create an irresistible sales process.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Mar 29, 2018
• ISBN: 9781772772050

Book preview

Author

Chapter 1

Children of the Night, Shut Up!

Let’s Talk Affiliate Marketing

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is a way to make money, using the Internet, to either sell your own products or promote someone else’s products. If you promote someone else’s products, then you get a commission from every sale that you make. Affiliate marketing is a great way to make a passive income or even replace a full-time job. The goal is to find your niche, and reach untapped markets to increase your leads and sales. That will be covered in a later chapter.

It is important to mention up front that this is not something that will make you rich overnight. It may never make you rich at all. Affiliate marketing takes work, dedication, and motivation. It is possible to make a full-time income working as an affiliate marketer. If you can see yourself replacing your day job, then treat your affiliate marketing venture as a business. The more work you put in, the greater the potential rewards can be.

It can be time consuming to manage all the affiliate offers you are promoting, so it might be best to start out with one or two, and see how it goes. Choose offers that resonate with you. Always promote products that you have used yourself. That makes you a better salesperson because you can attest to the value of the product and believe in it yourself. This will also build your credibility if you promote good products and avoid sending potential customers to something that will not deliver.

If you are promoting your own product, then the sky is the limit. You can set your own rules for promoting it, and you can set up our own affiliate network to have others promote your products for you. You set the commission rate, but keep in mind, your affiliate’s goal is to make a ROI (Return on Investment). If you are only offering 3% on a $100 item, it hardly seems worth it.

There are several ways to promote affiliate offers. You can use social media, solo ads, banner ads, pay-per-view, pay-per-click, or blogs. You should choose the one that works for you, master it, then move on to another source. If you only use one method of getting sales, you could find yourself in trouble later. While the methods might still work, some may not work as well as others.

Do you need a website? No, but it helps if you do. You can drive traffic to offers in various formats. If you have your own website, you can use it as a blog, and then place banner ads on your site for products that you are promoting. The links are provided by the company you are an affiliate with, and they include a tracking code that alerts the merchant when someone buys product with your code. You will, in turn, get a commission on that sale. Something else you can do is sell banner space on your website and make extra money that way.

Why Are You Interested in Affiliate Marketing?

You need to ask yourself why you are interested in affiliate marketing. Do you want to create a passive income, or do you want to replace your full-time job? Some people want to get involved with affiliate marketing because they think it will be easy. It can be easy, but it takes time to learn the skills. The money does not start pouring in when you place your first ad or make your first sale. Your commissions will vary depending on the choice of the affiliate network you join.

In most cases, the startup costs for being an affiliate marketer are relatively low. You don’t need to worry about renting space or keeping up with inventory. If you start a business, you don’t need to think about employees or payroll. If you are feeling overwhelmed, you can outsource some of the work to help you. The best part is that you don’t need a product because you can promote someone else’s. If your goal is to make a passive income, then affiliate marketing is the right place for you. You can make money while you sleep. You only need a computer and a little imagination to get up and running.

You also don’t need to be an expert on the subject. You just need to know the market, and drive the right people to your offer. As I mentioned, you should own, or at least have tried, the product yourself, so you can feel confident in what you are promoting. In later chapters, we will talk about driving traffic to your offers and the various ways you can do that.

A logical question to ask is, Can you actually make money with affiliate marketing? The answer is that it depends. If you put in the time and effort, and take it seriously, then it can definitely create a full-time income. If you only work 1–2 hours a week, then, sadly, you won’t make very much money. You probably won’t even break even.

Affiliate marketing is rewarding because you can work from anywhere in the world. The hours are flexible because you are your own boss. It is essential for you to create a daily schedule, especially if you do not think you are disciplined enough to stay on track. When you’ve been someone else’s employee for years, you get used to someone telling you what to do.

Don’t run off and quit your day job just yet. It is tempting, but you must think logically. Sit down and write out all your bills. Find out how much you spend a month. Analyzing your financial situation can help set a more realistic timeline on when you can finally wave goodbye to a job you desperately want to get away from. It could be a few months from now, or it could be a year.

There are also a few other reasons you want to keep that day job for just a little longer. If you are paying for your ads with credit cards, or by borrowing money, you will need a good credit rating. Having a day job makes this a lot easier. Also, keep health insurance in mind. Before quitting, look into your health insurance options. If you plan on turning this into a business, self-employed insurance will not be as good as insurance with a larger company.

Joining Affiliate Networks

There are a lot of affiliate marketing networks that you can join. The most well-known is Amazon. You can also check out ClickBank, Commission Junction, LinkShare, ShareaSale, eBay, Flexoffers, and Rakuten (formally Buy.com), to name a few. Do a web search on the term, affiliate marketing networks, to find a list of programs that you can learn more about. With each affiliate marketing network, you get paid a percentage from the items that you sell. That can be 3%–90%, depending on the company and the product.

What types of programs are the best? Almost every affiliate marketer will tell you that if you really want to make a living with affiliate marketing, you need to promote high ticket affiliate marketing products. Why? Because the payout is much higher. Some programs pay out $8,000–$10,000 per sale. Now, that product you are promoting is pricy, but well worth the money to the customer. That is called high-ticket affiliate marketing. There are a few programs that offer high-ticket commissions.

Just to give you some ideas, here are a few niches that can produce high-ticket affiliate programs:

•Health and fitness

•Insurance

•Debt relief

•Medical equipment

•Gold and precious metal investment

•Web Hosting

•Education

There are a lot more niches that you can choose from. Take, for instance, Shopify, which is an e-commerce business solution for anyone looking to start their own online business. They have a long list of products that they provide to their clients, including shopping carts, web hosting, website building, store management, analytics, and a lot more. Affiliates with Shopify can earn up to $2,000 per customer. Shopify even has their own dashboard so marketers can track their campaigns.

Another high-ticket affiliate marketing network is SEO Power Suite. You can earn $197 per sale if you join as an affiliate. SEO Power Suite is a program that allows you to do keyword searches and rank monitoring; it will also do website auditing for your personal page and competitor analysis. With Liquid Web, you can earn an extra $900 per sale. They are a web hosting company that sells cloud hosting; they manage WordPress hosting, and they offer dedicated servers, and so much more. With WPEngine, you could earn up to $7,500 per sale. They offer WordPress hosting services for businesses. These are just a few examples of high-ticket affiliate marketing programs you can join. Do some research, and