Epic Guide Ch.4

My Example of Affiliate Marketing

Once I figured out my formula for affiliate marketing wealth, I began to wonder if others could copy my success. I created a free guide called “Deadbeat Basics” and started passing it around to my followers.

It worked! One after another, people who regularly read my blog told me that they too were starting to see money roll in from using my “deadbeat” simple websites.

I’m talking about total beginners with no experience selling anything, knowing a lick about making websites or having any followers.

My Deadbeat Basics guide was taking off big time!

When people start promoting products online, they tend to look around at other websites and feel that they can’t compete.

“That website over there is fancier than mine. I’ll never make it.”
“I’m just a regular person without any authority. Who would listen to me?”
“I don’t have selling skills so I can’t earn money”.

These are typical thoughts from untrained folks out there. And every single one of these excuses I crushed in my Deadbeat Basics guide.

To cut to the chase, I made the guide only 12 pages long and spelled out in detail what a beginner needs to do to get started in under an hour.

In this chapter, I will use my own success as an example of what is possible for you. And of course, if you wish to download that free guide before you continue reading, click here and come right back!

Authority Can Be Borrowed

With all the big-name authorities out there, you probably think no one will take your advice or product recommendations.

You might even think you need to start with thousands of dollars because “it takes money to make money.” Those things apply to the big fish.

If you are starting out and you are a tiny little affiliate marketer, the obvious thing to do is borrow the authority!

How do you borrow authority?

Easy! Just sign up to the affiliate programs that already command huge audiences. I recommend Amazon’s affiliate program.

Recently they raised the bar for who gets approved, but it is still a much easier path to take as an affiliate marketing newbie than anything else you can try.

Because the Amazon brand is recognizable, and most people already have an account with them, promoting one of their thousands of products becomes that much easier for you.

And because it’s hard to compete with Amazon, your sale is as close to guaranteed.

All the heavy lifting is done by Amazon. The only thing left for you to do is create some content on your simple website that sends people to them.

Less Is More

No, you don’t need a fancy-pants website to make sales as an affiliate marketer. You can have one, if you want to.

Recently, I did my deadbeat happy dance because I bought a domain I had wanted to get for so long: deadbeat.com.

The name costed me 5-figues to acquire but I am playing at a higher level now, and I know the value of what I am getting.

But you as a beginner won’t have any huge mountains to climb. Any name you choose, with less than $20 bucks to spend to get a domain is enough.

I started with a site that had a max of 5 pages and it made me $100 a day.

That’s $3k a month… with only 5 pages total. Does that sound like a giant mountain to climb? I’m sure with a quick nap to start your Saturday morning, you could have this up and running in that same weekend (two weekends, if you are really lazy).

Believe me, less is more. And I am proof that you can make plenty of money by doing less work.

Get a domain, slap 5 pages on your website, and pick a product that sells itself.

The approach you want to take is to be the product reviewer person. You bought it, used it, and now you are writing your opinion based on your experience. Give all the juicy details about what you liked and hated.

Compare it to similar products and point out what really stood out about this one in particular.

Posting your opinion is not only extremely easy, but you will see how quickly the Benjamins start to stack up for you within a few short months of effort on your part.

Selling Without Any Skills

Okay, so you have your lazy website, and you are borrowing authority for now. Will you need slick salesperson tactics to get people to buy?

Nope.

What I discovered was a category of products that almost sell themselves, with very little persuasion on your part.

These kinds of products tend to be bought by buyers who are very emotionally attached to getting them, either because they are in desperate need for it in that very moment or because they are hobbyists who love to buy the latest new thing that just came out.

The moment they see it, they’ll buy it almost instantly. No selling skills to learn!

One important thing to keep in mind is that the product should be a physical product.

For now, stay away from digital products and software, because it takes a ton of explaining and teaching and way too many features to talk about.

Too many questions thrown at you will slow down your money-making machine. We’re going for lazy money, right? People don’t have any suspicions when it’s a physical product they already recognize.

And there are so many physical products to promote. I spent over 40 hours researching products I could sell and I still had so many categories to look through. Amazon is so huge, guys! Jump in and start here!

If you shop on Amazon, you probably shopped there before. That’s because they know what they’re doing and make it addicting to keep buying more stuff.

They have the “people who bought this also bought this other thing” feature, which can mean one of your customers who buys from your link might end up earning you a lot more than the single product you recommended.

It stacks up without extra effort on your part! One day, I got commissions for having sold a kids playset that costed $1,500. I don’t even sell playsets on my website!

What we are going for is less work. Amazon has a system set up that works perfectly for lazy affiliate marketing.

Finding the Right Product To Promote

Getting a good mix of high price and low price products is the way to go. What proportions should make up the mix?

You want to have more high ticket products. Amazon’s commissions are in the single digits, so you’ll want to promote mostly products that cost over $100 so that it’s worthwhile for you.

I recommend sticking to a 90/10 mix.

You will want to streamline your process as much as you can, so stick to products that have all the good things going for them and almost nothing negative about them.

What I do is look at the star rating system and promote products who have at least 10 or more reviews written by happy customers.

When your visitor clicks your link and lands on the product page, they’ll have tons of positive comments to read about the product, and this does wonders for converting the visitor into a buyer.

Of course, products with 3 or more stars should be default. Personally, I would never buy a product with 2 stars or less.

However, because some of the reviews can be fake, insincere or just angry customers venting in the comments section for the wrong reasons, make sure to read through a few of the reviews when the product is barely in the 3-star range.

People will wonder why it’s got only 3 stars and what kept buyers from giving it higher ratings.

This info can reveal insights that tell you if you should stay away from the product or go ahead without anything to worry.

Now, what tends to happen during the buying process is the buyer will look around to find the best deal.

They want to make sure they are getting the best product for their money and will search for similar others.

When you pick a product to promote, make sure it’s a product that has 5 or more similar products and this will give you a few extra related products to talk about on your website.

If they don’t buy one thing, they might be in the mood for something close enough. Or if they need accessories, they might come back to buy from your site because they assume you’ll talk about the related accessories.

For example, if you promote a grill, you should probably also talk about a stainless steel toolset, grease cleaning kit or rotisserie trays.

Can you see how easy it will become to flesh out a 5-page website this way?

What NOT to Promote

So you picked the 5-star rated product with the best reviews, and the price is high enough to get worthwhile commissions? Great!

That sounds like a popular product, which is a good thing. However, that might also mean that thousands of affiliates are promoting it already, along with every other grandmother and nephew in town!

When you think about triple-digit prices (and your commissions), the first things that pop into your mind are the same things that others think of, so stay away from these high competition items:

• LCD TVs
• DSLR cameras/camcorders
• luxury watches
• laptops/tablets
• desktop computers
• smartphones (iPhones, palms, blackberry)

Your mind is on the right track when thinking in terms of $100+ products, but think about these better:

• barbecue grills
• top-of-the-line lawnmowers
• in-season women’s boots

Not many people think of these, yet they can make you just as much.

One important thing to check before you pick the product is whether it’s actually being searched for.

Since the act of searching for something on Google is what sends visitors to your site in the first place, small to zero searching means no one will find your website.

Make sure people are looking for the product by using a search tool like the Adwords Keyword Tool (by Google).

Type the actual name and even model of the product, just as the visitor would type it. While the numbers shown are estimates, anything above 4,000+ searches a month sounds good to me.

Also, if this product is riding a wave that is currently trending, chances are a few related products should also be trending along with it. For this, do a bit of research on Amazon to find similar products to the one you picked.

Then use the keyword tool and make sure they are also getting enough monthly searches.

This way, the product you choose isn’t just experiencing a bizarre spike in popularity that will run out of steam soon.

If it’s truly in demand, then it will have competing products going toe-to-toe with it, and the search volume you see inside the keyword tool will be a number you can believe in.

This extra research effort will help you laser target a product that has lots of search momentum behind it and that means money coming to you for months and years.

Turning Up Profits By Turning Them Down

Once you get the hang of building your first 5-page website that promotes Amazon products, you’ll be addicted to build another.

Soon, you’ll have a dozen of them, each bringing in a few hundred bucks a month and adding up to possibly a full-time income.

If you’ve ever played the horse race game at a carnival, this is how I think about the performance of my websites. I put in effort to nurture and “raise” as many as I can handle.

For beginners, 5-10 new websites is a good amount to play with. Then, stand back and see how each one performs. They can’t all be winners. Some will seem to sputter along while others are showing growth every month. And everything in between.

But once in a while, one of your many websites will suddenly leap ahead of the rest, making you 80% of your monthly income from just that single website!

That’s your stallion! The others are your ponies.

At this point, a beginner affiliate marketer might make the same huge mistake I did in thinking, “Great! It’s working. Time to make more websites!”

Don’t start diverting your attention into getting more ponies into the race, so to speak.

What you should do with your limited time and energy is shift everything you got to maximize that one stallion’s performance. That one winning website.

At this point, let your other smaller profiting websites cruise at their current level and go crazy improving the winning one.

I suggest creating more websites about the same exact niche (product category), using original blog articles.

Really push to promote this winning website and replicate the success across new sites covering the same niche.

Taking this one level deeper, each of your other websites that has a collection of related products will also tend to produce one stallion among the other ponies.

If you find a particular product is selling well, focus on promoting that particular product above the others.

Follow this approach and you won’t scatter your efforts by building more generic websites.

That’ll just take up your limited time. Instead, look for that gold nugget growing among your group of websites and turn up the profits by turning down the effort on the others.

It doesn’t get lazier than this.