If you’re an affiliate you should know how to get leads for affiliate marketing. Collecting leads can be done from a website or a landing page. Place a form or pop up “opt in” on your website. You can then offer something of value in exchange for your visitors email. You should see a form on my website and here’s an example of a landing page opt in form:
A landing page software, such as Convertri, is well worth the investment if you’re serious about your affiliate marketing business. But you’ll also need an email autoresponder. Aweber offers a free trial period and up to 500 subscribers for free, so it’s a good idea to get an account if you don’t have one. An email autoresponder gives you the ability to place a form on a website or landing page and automate delivery of messages to your subscribers as they enter their details into one of your forms.
How To Get Leads For Affiliate Marketing: Landing Pages Vs. Websites
There’s a few ways you can drive traffic for your affiliate offers. With a blog website, you drive traffic organically from the search engines. With a landing page, you need to source traffic to get people to it. This is often done using paid advertising. Platforms such as Google Adwords, Bing, YouTube, Facebook etc. can be used to build advertising campaigns which send targeted traffic towards your landing pages.
You can then test several landing pages to see which one out performs the others. This is known as split testing and can be easily done with a landing page software such as Convertri. Here’s an example of two similar landing pages which can be split tested to see which one performs the best over say, 1000 visitors on each.
Using a landing page can be a much better way to get leads if you have a marketing budget to drive traffic. It allows you to test and optimise your lead generation very quickly. You can also scale up once you have a good landing page which performs well and gives you cheap leads. If you don’t have a marketing budget, you can create content on a website and drive traffic organically.
You can of course send organic traffic to a landing page too, although organic traffic can’t be turned on and off nor scaled. It can also take some time before your content starts to create organic traffic for you. See also how long does organic traffic take. How long it takes to get traffic to a website will depend on your niche and content.
How To Get Leads For Affiliate Marketing – Organic Traffic
To build organic traffic can take months or even years. Plus much of your traffic won’t even convert into leads either! To get the most out of content creation, you should first identify your perfect target audience.
This is the small section of the online marketplace who would be most interested in your products/service. This is also true when you’re running paid advertising, and sending it to a landing page. Identifying your target audience will save you a heap of wasted time or marketing budget. By getting the right people to your website in the first instance, you increase your chances of them signing up for your offer and becoming a lead.
So if you’re a content creator, this means creating content which will attract your target audience, or “customer avatar”. To do this bloggers will often target long tail keywords which have low SEO difficulty. This gives them more chance to rank their content and get free traffic. In a particular competitive niche, it’s much more difficult to get traffic to your blog for free. So by finding those longer tail keywords and writing articles for them, you have more chance of ranking for those particular searches.
How To Get Leads For Affiliate Marketing – Multiple Opt Ins
Many website owners will place multiple opt in offers on their website, to help encourage more of their visitors to take a particular action, and become a lead. You can place popup opt in forms, static forms, drop downs and other offers on your site.
Include banners which lead visitors to external landing pages. The more offers you have the more likely a visitor will take some action and become a lead. Despite most people feeling than pop ups are annoying, they clearly work for thousands of website owners. Otherwise they wouldn’t use them on their sites!
Here’s a peek inside Aweber’s form generation tool (see image below). You can see there’s many types of forms you can use including popups and drop down forms. There’s also a number of other plugins which you can use to create drop down banners on your website. I use Icegram Engage on this site and you will probably have seen my drop down banner at the top of the screen – offering a free webinar.
How To Get Leads For Affiliate Marketing – eBooks
eBooks are one of the simplest ways to get leads for affiliate marketing. A good eBook should align with your affiliate products in some way and offer huge value to anyone who downloads it. Many bloggers and website owners use ebooks to help them build their email lists into the tens and hundreds of thousands.
To use an eBook on your website, you will first need to create a pdf version of your book and a cover. You can outsource cover design (and even the eBook itself if you wish), using sites such as Fiverr.com or Upwork.com. I used Fiverr.com a few times for the designing of several ebooks.
Here’s an ebook I use to encourage my website visitors to join my email list:
If you click on the book, you’ll be taken to a lead capture page where you can sign up for the free downloadable book.
Use A Valuable Offer
Of course it also helps a great deal if you have a valuable offer to give your website or landing page visitors. With the right offer (and the right target audience), you’ll get more leads, even with less traffic. On my website I offer a bunch of free stuff you can access (related to the niche of online business). Here, you can access a free 90 minute webinar, in which an 8 figure earning online entrepreneur, (and one of my own personal mentors), explains the best ways to earn online:
Or, access a free video series which explains some of the best online business models you can use, including print on demand, affiliate marketing and direct selling/drop shipping.
Using the right affiliate program for your niche is a massive bonus, especially if the program you promote has a bunch of useful lead magnets which you can use to build your affiliate business. The most lucrative affiliate programs aren’t just the ones which cost the most, but the ones which help you the most in collecting leads and making the sale with their marketing materials.
Landing Page Titles, CTA (Call To Action) & Design
The fastest way to get leads is to pay for them. Set up an advertising campaign on a paid marketing platform using one of the following:
- Google Adwords
- Bing
- Yahoo
- YouTube
- etc.
There’s multiple paid ad platforms you can use to find your target audience and target a well designed offer towards them. Send them to a landing page and collect leads by delivering a valuable offer to their inbox.
Still, this can take some work to get right, and not all offers will convert the same. To make your landing page more efficient, you can test and measure different pages to see which works the best. Focus on the benefits not the features of your offer. Avoid titles and descriptions of what your offer is, and focus instead on what your offer can do for your visitors.
Your visitors only care about one thing: WIIFM – “What’s In It For Me”. A good landing page title describes the meaning of what you’ll get quickly and succinctly.
Cross test landing pages to find the best performing one. Do the same with your advertising campaigns.
Using Social Media Platforms For Lead Gen
You can also find a bunch of free lead generation tactics. These are typically much slower than paid marketing methods but they can work if you are persistent and consistent with them. Organic marketing through blogging is one which has been mentioned already, but you can also use Facebook, Twitter, Quora.com and other social media sites for promotion of your offers.
Here’s one example using Facebook. Set up your Facebook profile to showcase your offer. Place a clear call to action on your profile picture and a link to your offer. Then find Facebook groups where your target audience is likely to be hanging out.
Join those groups and spend some time each day interacting with people in the groups. Don’t spam, but connect with and ask and answer questions in the chat. Over time, and with consistent effort, people will find your Facebook profile from your chat input. They will see your offer and some will sign up. For more on this and other social media strategies for lead generation see this post.
Summary
Lead generation is a good idea for affiliates because it lets them control their traffic. To get traffic is either expensive of time consuming or both. But with your own email list, you have more control. A lead can stay on your list for years too, which isn’t possible on a website. Most website visitors are gone in a few minutes, never to return.
By building an email list, you can connect frequently with your subscribers and build trust too. Most people don’t buy immediately from a website, especially if it’s their first visit. They need multiple point of contact with you before they will buy. These are known as “touch points” and it usually takes between 6-8 touch points before someone will buy from you, depending on your product and niche.
There’s various ways to collect emails and you need both targeted traffic and an enticing offer to be successful. You also need to communicate the benefit of your offer in an enticing way which speaks to the needs of your visitors. Getting to know who your target audience is will help you to do this. See also the customer avatar worksheet pdf.
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