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It’s important to get an affiliate marketing education which lets you keep an open mind. Many times people don’t even think about promoting an online affiliate program to an offline audience.
I’d like to show you a case study of how I took a friend of mine and together, generated over $7000 a month income. We were promoting a high-value affiliate program to targeted offline clients.
You can do this with any affiliate program you like. But the main thing is that it needs to be the most highest paying affiliate program that you can find.
The basic idea
What I did was to have my friend advertise a free website. He also advertised a 2 year free, .com domain name and a full email address at the chosen .com domain. I told him to call this a ‘domain exclusive email address’.
So basically we’re giving people a free website. We’re giving them a free domain name. And we’re giving them free email addresses at the domain name. To get this, all the customer has to do is use our monthly hosting.
Time spent
We spent around two hours per day dealing with sales. I also spent an extra hour arranging websites for people. These websites all came from free web templates. This made the whole process a lot quicker.
Remember, this was only whilst the work was being done. If we stopped taking on new customers it would only take one of us half an hour a day to maintain this model.
Marketing efforts
All of our offline marketing was outsourced. We kept our advertisements very simple. All they were was simple white A4 sheets of paper. They looked like this:
This simple flyer for our affiliate marketing
was printed in black and white.
As you can see it’s nothing fancy. Simple black text which gets the point across quickly: You can get a free business or personal website. If you want one, contact us. If you want to improve it you can also add text like:
“The first 100 websites are free – call us to get yours before they’re all gone!”
Or something like that.
You want to get these flyers out to wherever your prospects will see them. The more the merrier. Just be careful that you don’t step on anybody’s toes or get in trouble with the local districts.
Good places to distribute your flyers are:
* Village notice boards
* Store messaging boards
* Local shop windows
* College campuses
* Foyers of professional places
* Sports centres
* Meeting areas of local businesses etc.
You can also have your flyer made up into a business card. Just order a few thousand business cards. Then get a few plastic holders and put them in local shops and community centres and other places that display business cards on the side.
In fact, the business cards have an advantage. People will take them home and so they will easily be able to remember your contact details.
You also need a phone number for this. Just use a Skype line which will allow you to make as many calls as you like, for a nice low price.
Next you’ll need a domain name and an e-mail account. Just get the cheapest reseller account you can find. We always use Hostgator. That costs around $25 a month.
When it comes to your domain name choose something simple. It needs to be something that can be easily remembered. And it should also be a .com:
* GetAFreeWebsite
* JamesFreeSites
* YourFreeSite
* FreeSiteDesigns
* DesignsAFreeSite etc
You get the idea.
So once your flyers go out people will definitely:
* View your site
* Email you
* Call you up
What will you give them?
You tell people that you’re offering them free website design. You are also offering them a free domain name, and free ‘domain exclusive email address’. You can also show them other websites online who charge for these services.
The bottom line here is to let the customer know that they are getting a good deal with you. If they tried to get these services elsewhere, they would have to pay for the website design, the domain name, AND the web hosting.
With you all they pay for is the web hosting.
You need to explain this all when they get in contact with you. Tell them that that this is a limited time offer which won’t always be free. Also let them know that they can get started as quickly as tomorrow.
Let them know that they can have a .com. Also find out if they’re interested in a business or personal website. Give them example’s of domain names that they can use. They love this part!
Then let them know that if they sign up, they will get free dedicated e-mail that is hosted by Google. They can access it anywhere. Their e-mail can also be checked with a cell phone.
You can easily set this up for free using Google Apps.
Further details
You can actually host their site in two ways.
If you just want a one time commission then choose option 1. But personally, I think you can make more money with option 2.
That’s the one I’m going to talk about.
Let’s say you do pay $25 for a reseller account. This can easily host 100 websites. You are targeting people who are new to having a website. Their websites wont use a lot of webspace. And their websites won’t get many hits either.
The payment details
When you tell your potential customer all of these details, they will be happy to hear them. But they will also wonder how you’re able to offer such a great deal.
This is where you let them know that they get all the freebies but will need to pay for the hosting. If you have shown them the other sites which charge for web design and domain names, then this step will be a minor point to them.
Let them know this too:
“When you’re satisfied with the website design and the domain name we host it for you for just 12 bucks a month. That includes everything mentioned – even all your e-mail and additional e-mail accounts you want to give to friends and work colleagues if you want”.
This is a great deal for them.
Also, since we’re working with the reseller option here, we can choose how much we wanted to charge them each month. It’s a good idea to try different price points.
Your website
All this needs to be is a quick sales page explaining the offer. Or you can simply have it forwarded to a ‘get started’ type page.
Next you simply tell them to go to the ‘get started’ page on your website like:
YourDomain.com/getstarted.html
On this page you’ll need to collect:
* Name
* Address
* Phone number
* E-mail
* Preferred .com domain name
* Agree to terms – yes?
Have a clear terms and conditions page.
Then have a submit form that brings them to a free 10 day trial. That will be followed by the $12 a month recurring billing. Use Paypal to set this up or even use the webhost’s billing features for a small extra fee.
It’s a good idea to walk them through this ‘get started’ process over the phone. You can explain that the 10 days is for you to get the website up to their standards.
Once you get to this stage you will need to work on their site.
Building their site
I’ll show you how to do this quickly.
Create an account in CPanel. Next, install WordPress with Fantastico. This will take you around two minutes.
Then, find a theme, and go to settings. Add a page as the front page. You can also use the blog as an ‘updates’ or even a ‘news’ feature.
Ask for all the information from your client. Get them to e-mail you with all the text and images which they want on the site.
Then, make a page or directory on your site which looks like:
YourDomain.com/TheirName
Put a welcome text introduction there. Also add the link to their site. It’s also a good idea to add a quick Camtasia video that shows them how to go to their site and do a few basic things like:
* Logging in
* Editing text
* Adding images
* Updating the blog
* Logging out
* Viewing any changes
We also install a basic stats package and show them how to use it with a different Camtasia video.
If they’re happy with the design then tell them you will register their chosen domain and upload the site properly, on day 10. That way you will definitely get the money for registering their domain name, in case there are any problems in future.
It sounds like a lot of work but you can actually get this process down nicely. Ideally, you can get multiple numbers of clients paying you each month, and you can use some of the money to pay someone to build the sites for you.
Satisfaction
When everything is all set up your customer should be pleased to pay your monthly free every month. Let them know that if they cancel at any point, they will lose their domain name and access to their new e-mail account.
Make sure you stated this in your terms and conditions too. The end decision is yours, but if you are asked you should just refund anyone who isn’t happy.
Also when they are happy, get them to refer a friend to you.
The figures
We charged $12 a month for this service. My friend takes care of the details and I have arranged a guy from Elance.com to take care of building the websites for a small fee.
The sign ups look like:
The above table shows our customer
numbers over a period of 90 days.
That’s an average of 6 customers signed up each day.
That is also 594 * 12 = $7128 income each and every month.
Yeah, that’s not all profit but once you get it rolling your monthly costs will be low. Expenses will be around $1000 a month for outsourcing of offline marketing costs and website creating, as well as minor hosting costs etc).
This is after 3 months.
If we carry on growing like this we’ll hit around $22,000 a month net profit at the end of our first year. We’re trying to reach the $15k a month level as quickly as we can.
It’s all written out for you above. Take the idea and use it.