Why Most Internet Marketers Fail. Big time.
Most affiliate programs suck. Few visitors care about them, few visitors end up buying them, the payout is low, and it’s usually just a one-time pay out. If this sounds like your program, think about starting over. Your success depends on your program: if it fails, you’ll fail. If it’s hopeless, the best thing you can do might be to just start fresh.
To find the best affiliate program, just do some number crunching. I know, I hate math too. But this is essential.
Let’s say you are selling an ebook. The ebook is 30 bucks. Let’s say that you have a great conversion rate, and about 1% of people will buy your program. For most ebooks, this is unrealistically great. But let’s play with the idea for a second. Let’s suppose the affiliate program is generous and you make 10 bucks a sale.
If a thousand people go to your website every single day, and one thousand people see an advertisement for the program, let’s pretend like you’re a great marketer. Your amazing copywriting gets about half of these thousand visitors to click. That’s 500.
Now let’s say that these individuals click the link, and 1% of them convert. They decide that they just can’t live without this program, and that it’s worth spending 30 bucks to read. That means that you make 50 bucks. After hours of work and years of labor, you’ll make about 15k per year. And that’s presupposing you have a super-high source of targeted traffic, which isn’t going to happen for most people. This is unacceptable.
While writing this, I actually laughed out loud. It’s so sad, really. It takes over a thousand targeted visitors to make 50 bucks for most affiliate marketers. If this is true for you, do yourself a favor: Start over with a better program.
I market SiteBuildIt almost exclusively, because I would be wasting time to market anything else. SiteBuildIt is basically an all-in-one hosting package. It’s marketing, hosting, ebooks, community, blah blah, amazing amazing, blah blah. I’ve used it before, and it’s actually what it’s cracked up to be. But that’s not why I market it. I market it because to NOT market SiteBuildIt would be stupid. Remember the 1000 visitor statistic above? Let’s look at how SiteBuildIt works with it. Let’s say I have a webpage about websites and making money online. I can turn pretty much any article about internet marketing, making money online or working at home into a long subtle landing page for SiteBuildIt. This means it’s easy to get the 1000 visitors.
The program has an average conversion rate among the entire industry of about 3%. That means you make 3 sales per hundred visitors. Supposing I’m an amazing copywriter like the one we talked about above, this means that 500 people will click the link. My conversion rate is about 5%, but let’s just downplay it to be realistic. Let’s keep it at 3%.
This means that I make 15 sales per thousand visitors. We’re just getting started. Most ebooks or programs would pay 10-20 bucks. SiteBuildIt pays $75.00. That’s $1,125 per thousand visitors. That’s a buck a visitor. The best part? It’s not just a one-time payment…it’s residual. That means that if I keep up the 1000 visitors per day, Ill make over 300k the first year. Since it’s residual, I get paid again next year from last years traffic… PLUS next years traffic. That means next year I make 600k. Next year is 900k.
It’s pretty simple. If you market affiliate programs related to finance, making money online, or anything like that, you can’t afford to not market SiteBuildIt.
$50 or $1,125? Do the math. Click here to join the SiteBuildIt affiliate program.
Stop Ignoring the Smart People
The biggest business “sucker” is the person who buys because of emotion. An emotional sales pitch leaves them with a lame PDF and an empty wallet. Unfortunately, there are tons of these people. Unfortunately, a lot of greedy “marketers” have noticed this. They target the sucker, so they can suck money from the poor little mental sapling.
It seems both sinister and kind of smart. After all, you don’t have to have a great product if you are targeting the morons of the world, right? They’re morons, for Thor’s sake. They live their life making dumb decisions. They might as well make one that makes someone some money, right?
Most internet marketing scams do that. Rather than provide a quality service for a fee (like Ken Envoy’s Site Build It! or Brian Clark’s “Teaching Sells“), they’ve decided to write a 50-page e-book with stuff a half-hour spent a great blog could teach you. Sure, they do make some money…but they’re missing an opportunity.
Here’s a list of reasons you should target the smart people of the world rather than the idiots:
6. Smart people have money
The idiots of the world typically have less money. No, I’m not saying that if someone’s broke that they’re an idiot — there are brilliant poor people and genius idiots. But statistically, there’s more than just a correlation between being smart/discerning and having extra money.
Plus, if everyone’s targeting the idiot, chances are, they’ve already been ripped off. This means they have even less money, plus, they’re suspicious of you. Stupid or not, that’s a hurdle for your sales pitch.
5. Smart people + quality product = sale
If you have a great product, the smart people will know it. If you give your potential customer /enough information/ or a free report with enough information that they can trust that you know what you’re doing, your chances of making the sale increase incredibly.
4. Smart people become contacts
The smarter the person, the more likely they’ll succeed with whatever you give them to succeed with. For a lot of internet marketers, this means that a customer today is a contact tomorrow. Ripping people off doesn’t do this.
3. Smart people are under-served
There are a billion sites that are written with copy specifically for the idiot who will buy a product without any real knowledge about it at all. There are rarely (comparatively — there are some fantastic resources for smart people, like Steve Pavlina’s personal development for smart people website) websites geared towards the intelligent person. Target them, and you generally have less overall competition.
2. You still sell to the idiots
If you target the smart people, the idiots will figure it out too. They’ll still like the product, if the sales pitch is done right. Win-win.
1. You’ll feel better
We don’t want to be the person who goes to sleep at night thinking about the people they ripped off. Sleep better, market ethically, and make more money while you’re at it.
With good business, everyone wins. That’s why the billionaires of the world typically do good business. It just works.