How To Grow Your Email Lists As An Affiliate Marketer, Essentially For Free

Affiliate marketing can be very profitable when done right, and it does have its perks over other ways of making money online. In fact, many of our clients make great profits doing affiliate marketing. So you can say I’ve worked with a lot of successful affiliate marketers. And I’ve helped most of them become even more successful.

The one main benefit of doing affiliate marketing is that you can just focus on the marketing side of things. You don’t have to create products, fulfill orders, deal with refunds, customer support, and many other things involved with selling your own product or service.

There is one huge downside that most affiliate marketers take on, however. As everyone knows already, the money is in the list. In fact, most profit made on the internet comes from email lists. This is achieved by forming relationships, continued marketing, selling, cross-selling, and up-selling to a quality email list.

Traditionally, affiliate marketers have accepted the idea of merely sending traffic to a product landing page, and just relying on the commission from that product. Most would simply let that product vendor get the email address and essentially own the lead. That means they get a hold of the most valuable asset, but in exchange you don’t have to worry about selling. You just send some traffic and see commissions arriving on your bank balance.

However, there is a better way. A much better way to do this

You can own the lead, recuperate your advertising costs, and still get all the benefits of letting someone do all the selling. Sound good? But before we get into that, let’s look at the traditional methods so you can compare the pros and cons.

Traditionally affiliates who want to get instant profits would do this:

• You generate some sort of traffic in some way, whether that’s PPC, Blogging or Video. And you just send people directly to the product’s landing page

Advantage: You don’t have to worry about selling people on anything. The product page does everything for you. You just send the traffic and see your balance in the affiliate account increase over time.

Disadvantage: The product owner has their name, email address, and all that sweet data which produces most of the profits generated on the internet. They own the lead.

Alternatively, some affiliates decided to start using email-marketing:

1. You generate the same kind of traffic, but send them to your own landing page where you incentivize them to join your emailing list
2. You then proceed to send them emails and sell them on the vendor’s product from inside of your emails.

Advantage: You now own the lead and have them on your email list. This means that you can continue communicating with this person and selling them stuff, essentially for free.

Disadvantage: You don’t get those instant profits just by generating traffic. You have to build out those email sequences first and get good at it before you see the profit coming in.

There is a third way (the best of both worlds):

Let’s face it, most people get into affiliate marketing because they don’t want to bother with the selling part, and just want to get that instant profit. You probably like the idea of sending a certain number of people to a landing page and getting a certain amount of money as commission, deposited directly to your bank account.

However, if you also realize that most profits come from up-selling, cross-selling and long-term relationships, you know that you’re leaving a lot of money on the table due to instant gratification. Most profits come from building a long-term relationship.

What if you could get both, at your terms? What if you can get the instant profit now, and take your sweet time to get good at that relationship building stuff? Why not get the instant profit, and also get to own the lead, so that you can re-market to them in the future?

Fortunately, there is a clever way to get both. In fact, with the method I’m about to show you:

• You will get the person on your email list (tons of future profits potential)
• But you can get that traditional instant profit that we associate with affiliate marketing. Without having to first build a relationship through the emails and sell them on stuff
• And, since they’re in your list, you can take your time to build up the email marketing side of your skillset, all the while profits are coming in just fine

Here’s how this works

Let’s say that you are an affiliate for CBD oil, and you know that many of their testimonials involve people praising it for helping with arthritis. So what you can do is the following.

1) Create an easy 10-step PDF called “10 ways to reduce arthritis”

You don’t have to create the most perfect PDF on the planet for this to work. In fact, it could be a 1-page summary of the 10 points put inside of a word template and exported into PDF format.

The reason I say this is that I’ve seen people waste months trying to create the perfect PDF before they even get started with this method. To get started it’s enough to just have a PDF of any kind. Just something to put inside that welcome email which they receive after signing up.

You can always upgrade the PDF and improve it as you go along. And hey, it’s one more excuse to email people on your list again. Just email the people who got version 1.0 of the PDF that you now have an upgrade 1.1 version, and so on. Bonus-tip, you can track what version of the PDF they have inside of a custom field inside your Emercury account.

2) Create a landing page

• • You can share your “story” about how you spent a lot of time researching arthritis solutions, perhaps because you battled with arthritis yourself.
  • It helps if you have a video for this story, but text works decently well too
  • Tell the visitor that you have summarized your findings inside a free PDF that you’re going to share with them.
  • All they have to do in order to receive the “10 ways to reduce arthritis” PDF is to fill in their email address

3) Create a thank you page

• • After the person submits their email address they should be automatically redirected to your thank you page
  • On the “thank you” page you want to make sure to give them appropriate instructions so that they are motivated to go into the inbox and open your welcome email
  • And then, here’s the “magic trick”, you want to have a delayed redirect that will redirect them to the affiliate page for the CBD Oil Product after a certain time spent on the thank you page, for example, 20 seconds.
    • You may want to place a countdown timer that informs they will be redirected to a product page in x seconds.
    • It helps if you explain why you’re redirecting them to that product page
    • You may say something like “But if you’re in a hurry and want to instantly look at the most effective of the 10 steps, I’m redirecting you to a product that does wonders. You’ll be redirected in XYZ seconds”
    • Why do we do this? Why not just redirect them right after they give us their email address? Well, we actually want to thank them for signing up and give them those instructions they need to check for the welcome email. The delayed redirect gives them time to read the instructions, yet still ensures all of them end up on the product page.

4) Create an instant welcome email that sends them the PDF file, and link to the affiliate product again

Yes, you redirected them to the product after the thank you page. But you want to continue promoting the product to ensure the highest number of people actually visit that page. So be sure to mention it in your welcome email as well. The welcome email should make them excited about receiving future emails, deliver the PDF, and also remind them to check out that product if they haven’t yet.

5) Build an onboarding sequence that includes reminders for people to check out that affiliate product

These steps are in the order that the visitor experiences them. They see the landing page, then they see the thank you page, then they get a welcome email by you, and then later they get your onboarding sequence.

You don’t actually wait for someone to sign up and then send people the PDF manually. You want to build an Emercury automation that automatically sends them a welcome email. And then build an Emercury automation that automatically sends them an onboarding sequence. You would build these automations ahead of time.

Here’s why this method is so magical for affiliate marketing

1. Due to combining the redirect method, as well as promoting the affiliate link in the PDF itself and also emailing people that same link, the number of people who end up on that product’s landing page is almost as high as if you sent them directly
2. Yet, you’ve got their email address and data, and get to re-market them for essentially free
3. If you do this right, you should generate enough instant sales that you’re essentially getting an email address for free. At the very least you can pay back your PPC or traffic generating costs, or perhaps even get some instant profit right there and then.

That’s right, you’re getting to build the most profitable asset on the internet for free… That is, that product vendor is essentially paying you for building an email list that you own and operate.

Bonus tip: All of this is easier with a partner on your side

If you read this article and thought to yourself “Wow, this sounds pretty simple and straightforward”, you’re half right. In order to implement it, you also need a platform that makes implementing it simple and straightforward.

Welcome to Emercury, the one email marketing provider that’s more than just a piece of software. We go out of our way to help affiliates make more profits using email marketing. In fact, we’re kind of famous for it. Just look at our reviews and testimonials.

When you sign up for an Emercury account you get a platform that lets you implement these methods in a pretty straightforward way. This is because we focus on results, not fancy bells and whistles. You could automate this entire strategy today by just a) building a landing page with your favorite landing page builder b) automating the rest using our straightforward automation builder.

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