A lot of marketers, when they work with their Top Business Ideas, think of affiliate marketing in terms of getting a visitor to click a link, then hope they buy something. It’s a never-ending battle of having to find new visitors to replace the ones that clicked on a link and left your site. While this can work, it not only creates a lot of work, it also leaves a lot of money on the table.
Here’s the way to look at it. If 100 people visit your site every day and click an affiliate link (or just leave the site) you need to get another 100 visitors every day to maintain your revenue. If you want to improve them, you have to get even more.
What would your results be like if you could get some of those 100 people to come back to the site in the future? Your traffic would just keep growing over time, wouldn’t it?
Building an email list is how you can accomplish this. Building an email list means you’ll have to give up some short term revenue (you want those visitors to join your list, not click an affiliate link) but you can take control of your own traffic when you have an email list.
Once you get those people signed up for your email list, you can contact them over and over again, with various affiliate offers instead of just the one they might have clicked on otherwise. Provided you’re delivering value, you could have them on your list for years.
Isn’t that more logical than hoping someone clicks an affiliate link on your site?
The trick, mind you, is convincing all those people to join your email list. There are several strategies that can help with this.
First, if you can offer your visitors an incentive for subscribing, your results will be better. Something that’s relevant to your market and that your visitors are likely to be interested in. This could be a special report, an ebook, an email course or any number of other things.
Second, you want to put the opt-in form in highly visible locations on your website. You want every visitor to see two things – the opt-in form and the incentive you’re offering.
Exit pops are an effective way to collect opt-ins when someone tries to click away from the site. This can catch some of that “nearly lost” traffic before it is gone forever.
By using these simple strategies, you’ll be able to build an email list pretty fast, which means you can send traffic to your site with a single email.
Work with the examples above to find your best way to improve your Top Business Ideas