Let’s talk about one of my favorite and one of the fastest ways to grow your list. If you have a product for sale and an affiliate program in place, you can get your affiliates to grow your list for you.
It only makes sense, doesn’t it? Affiliate marketers are busy building an audience and growing their own lists. If you can leverage that, you can grow your own reach much faster than if you did everything yourself.
Affiliate Programs: Setting Up
If you already have a product and affiliate program in place then great. If you have a product, but no affiliate program, look into setting that up as soon as possible. If you don’t have a product of your own yet and are an affiliate marketer yourself, consider creating a simple digital product (an eBook or video series for example), and start getting affiliates on board.
Next, you want to make it a win-win situation to get your affiliates to send their subscribers your way. You get new subscribers whenever your affiliates send traffic to your opt-in pages. That’s an easy win.
But what about your affiliates? That’s fairly easy too. They want to make more affiliate commissions. The way to do that is by having a good series of follow up emails in place that will get new subscribers to buy and generate commissions for your affiliates.
Gaining Affiliates
In other words, you want to make this a no-brainer for them. If you can help them make more sales and increase conversion by getting potential customers on your list and following up with them, why wouldn’t they want to share it with their list?
The easiest way to make this happen is to create a lead magnet that’s closely related to your paid product. Then set up a dedicated opt-in page for your affiliates and create a link for them. Alternatively, or additionally, you could add a signup form or an exit pop up to your product sales page.
Next, create an email sequence that will encourage new subscribers to buy your product after they sign up. If you can get good conversions from those emails, your affiliates will gladly send you new subscribers on a daily basis.
For this alone, it is well worth creating a product. As an added bonus you make some cash when your affiliates do. And, of course, once you have these new people on your list, you can market other products and services to them.
The Rundown
Don’t get nervous about affiliate marketing. You can learn from others, join a network, and if it still doesn’t feel ‘natural’ to you, skip it. Find a different path or a different way of creating an affiliate network and make it your own. Ditch what doesn’t work and create something that does.
