Today’s GSDdaily is episode 149. Today, we’re going to continue to talk about affiliate marketing. But we’re going to talk about expanding past affiliate marketing. So Monday we talked about, we kind of introduced this concept of affiliate marketing, we talked about ClickBank, we talked about Amazon. Then on Tuesday, we talked about automating affiliate marketing. So I gave you a couple of different tips and tricks on automating your affiliate marketing promotions through email, through courses, like that kind of stuff. Then yesterday, we talked about scaling your affiliate marketing business. So I gave you some tips there on running paid traffic and some different ways that you can leverage traffic sources to work through traffic.
And today we’re going to talk about expanding out of affiliate marketing. So this is really if you are an affiliate or if you were looking for a low-risk way of launching a new product or service. Affiliate marketing is a really, really good way of doing it. So this is a strategy that I actually learned about like fricking forever ago in the four-hour workweek. So Tim Ferriss writes about how to basically do a demo, it’s how to launch a product without actually creating a product. And what it is, is you set up your sales material, you set up your order form and all that stuff. And when they click the button, they just go to a blank page or they go to a page that says, “Thank you so much, but we’re not ready to get started yet.”
Affiliate Link
Now it’s a great strategy and it helps you figure out your sales material. It helps you figure out your marketing, helps you figure out what is going to work. There’s actually a more effective way of doing this and that is including an affiliate link. So if you are … so let’s say you have ambitions to create a course that is health and fitness related. You want to put together some 15 workout plans from home, let’s say. Rather than send traffic to a page and then have them click a button where the ghost is supposed to load an order form. Why not just have that same button. Direct it to the affiliate link where you can make 50% of a purchase, as opposed to 100% of purchase for a product that isn’t created.
Basically what we’re doing is we are using an affiliate product to tell us that there is demand in the market. That’s what we’re doing. The reverse of this is also true. Let’s say you have a health and fitness list and you’re building this list and you’re promoting affiliate products through this email list. You have 5,000 people on the email list, every day you’re sending out an email, you get a couple of sales here and there. So you’re making a good, consistent, passive income of five to 10 grand a month or whatever, as affiliate commissions. And really the asset you have in your list.
The problem is you’re making 50% of all the revenue you’re generating. You don’t have to write sales copy, you don’t have to do customer support or any of that other stuff. But you’re still only making 50% because that’s what the affiliate commission is. Now as an enterprising business owner, you want to make a hundred percent of that income. You want to have your own upsell paths, maybe you want to include some coaching or consulting or whatever on the backside of that product. What’d you do is you perfect your sales and marketing with an affiliate product and then you create your own. And then you already have the traffic source, so you just swap out the links from the affiliate offer to your offer. And now you’re making 100% of the money all the time.
Building Your Own Product
So this is a strategy that I have used a couple of times in niches. I don’t do much with niches anymore, but at least directly, we do it all the time for clients. But years ago, when I was in a lot of different niches, we used to sell language products. We sold language products, green energy products, health and fitness products, business opportunities, business development like we were in all kinds of different niches. What we would do is we would build a presence, website, hub site. Then we would feature some affiliate products on that hub site. And then once we started getting traffic flowing, we would introduce our own product.
So rather than take 50% commission on somebody else’s thing, it would take a hundred percent of the commission and we would own the product. That was a product that then became an asset that we could then sell our own products. We could leverage into other things, we could have our own affiliates promote that product. So it gives you a lot more leeway as a business owner to sell your own products, it’s an asset. So it’s an asset you can sell your own products on Flipkart or any other site. I mean, there are lots of things you can do once you have that product, that asset, and you have revenue-generating through it. It becomes something that you can sell and liquidate.
Those are two ways that you can expand past affiliate marketing. You can use it in running your own business, running your own traffic, building your own products, and everything else. Use it, affiliate marketing, as a springboard to push past. And then ultimately claim a hundred percent of the revenue that you’re already sending. So in other words, build a better mousetrap.
For Questions and Guide
If you would like to talk about creating your own product, doing your own sales funnel, your own traffic. If your business just in general needs help, go to consultingsession.com, fill out the little form. I’ll be happy to walk you through an action plan and I can put together an action plan for you. If there’s anything else I can do, just let me know. Tomorrow we’ll be here with the five-minute guide. I’ll show you how to do something cool in five minutes or less.
