Flyers AdSwaps Influencer Marketing and More

Advanced Techniques – Flyers, AdSwaps, Influencer Marketing and More

We’ve looked at an awful lot of different ways to market your product which included everything from creating PPC ads and landing pages, to setting up complex sales funnels.

But really great marketing isn’t just about using a few automated systems to generate more sales. Great marketing is about using your ingenuity and inventiveness in order to find new ways to connect with a bigger audience. Affiliate marketing is just like any other form of marketing and there are limitless options for how you want to go about it.

To demonstrate that, here are some lesser known methods and some more advanced methods. Hopefully these will also help you to see some more exciting opportunities and to come up with your own ideas.

Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is often described as a ‘growth hack’ which means it’s a strategy that marketers and businesses alike can use in order to reach a much larger audience, much more quickly.

Normally, building an audience takes a huge amount of time. Even with an amazing blog and a great squeeze page and autoresponder sequence, it will likely take you years to build up a gigantic audience. You can use PPC to skip this stage and go straight to the selling but if you don’t have money to invest then this might not be an option that’s available to you.

So what if you don’t have the luxury of time and you want to get to the big leagues right away? Good news: you can!

With influencer marketing, what you’re effectively doing is finding someone who is already at the top of their game and then using their exposure in order to make it big. It’s like having an affiliate to promote your affiliate product!

So how does this work? Simple: you find someone who is massive and land a blog post on their blog, including a link to your landing page. Or you ask someone who is already massive to post your link to their Twitter, meaning you reach a million different people overnight with no need to grow your own audience. This way you can make thousands of dollars or more overnight – it’s an incredibly effective method!

Of course it’s not quite so simple as that. The problem with influencer marketing is that these influencers have to actually want to work with you and that means you have to offer them something in return.

One way to do this is to just pay them. You can simply find an influencer on Twitter or YouTube and then sponsor them to send out a message to their followers. This means you need to invest money though and they’ll probably want to say that the message is sponsored which makes it a little less effective.

One common way to buy an influencer’s ‘audience’ for a message is through a solo ad. A solo ad means an ad that goes out to a list that someone else has built. Of course you do your research to ensure that the list you’re going out to is targeted to the right audience but in theory this means you get the benefits of having your own gigantic list but without actually having to build one!

Another option is to trade something with the influencer. An example of this is the guest post model. Likewise, you can do something similar by promoting their message to your list in exchange for them doing the same. When you do this via e-mails this is what’s known as an ‘adswap’.

When trying to exchange lists and audiences though, make sure that you don’t target influencers who are too big. If you go straight for the biggest names on the web, then they likely won’t stand to gain as much from the deal as you which means they’re quite likely to just ignore your message. To ensure this doesn’t happen, you need to go after smaller fish – ideally people who are at a similar level to you or maybe just a little bit higher. Each time you do this, you can potentially add a big percentage onto your audience and that means you can go after someone slightly bigger next time and eventually target the really big players. This way you can slowly climb the ladder.

Of course if you’re really good, you can get an influencer to share your link for free. You can do this simply by creating such great content that they want to share it and then bringing it to their attention. Or you can do it by finding influencers who have a huge audience but who are oblivious to just how influential they are. These are people too and occasionally they share stuff!

One strategy people often use when trying to get guest posts is to post regularly in the comments sections on the blogs they’re trying to target. This way, they hope to get known by the blogger, so that when they eventually get in touch their e-mail will stand out and won’t just get deleted.

Another strategy you can use is to do business with the blogger. If they offer any kind of service or product and you pay for that, then they will be obliged to contact you during which time you can form something of a relationship. From there, if you then go on to ask for a guest post or for a retweet, you may find they’re much more receptive because they already know you.

Tools for Influencer Marketing

There are lots of tools you can use in order to find influencers to work with. One of the best is Twitter Analytics. If you sign in here, you’ll be able to see some interesting metrics about your account, including which of your tweets performs best, when people are most engaged and also who your ‘most valuable’ followers are.

A valuable follower is anyone who regularly engages with your content and anyone who has a big audience of their own. If you can find someone who ticks both these boxes, then they provide you with the perfect opportunity to reach a big audience right away. Just retweet what they say, or comment on one of their tweets and they will be likely to share it, thus giving you more exposure!

Another great tool to use is LinkedIn. This is where LinkedIn really comes into its own in fact as it lets you see how you’re connected to some of the biggest names on the web. If you have a mutual friend or you know a friend of one of their friends, you can contact anyone on the network using the ‘InMail’ system. LinkedIn even shows you  which people are the biggest influencers when you’re looking at their profile pages!

Want to grow your LinkedIn network more quickly? An awesome strategy is to use the excellent ‘Rapportive’. This tool allows you to see the LinkedIn account of anyone who contacts you through Gmail, thereby letting you add them instantly!

Real World Marketing

Don’t assume that all affiliate marketing is internet marketing. You can actually sell online products in person and as long as you’re using your affiliate link, you’ll still get the profits!

An example of this is to use flyers. If you’re promoting bingo accounts for instance, then you can print off flyers and hand them out in your local area. If those flyers include your affiliate link, then that can lead immediately to a lot of recurring income!

Likewise, you can also use direct TV ads, radio ads and more to send people to a landing page. One particularly good ‘route to market’ is to aim for small niche magazines. If you can get them to write a story about you, then this won’t cost you anything! Alternatively, if you pay for an ad, it will likely be very cheap.

The real world is also useful for a lot of other things. In particular, it’s excellent for networking. Go to networking events and this is an excellent way to meet influencers who you can work with later – and it’s much easier to make a lasting impression in person – just make sure it’s a positive one!

Video Marketing

YouTube is another great place to sell your affiliate products. If you create a vlog then you can build trust and subscribers and use this just the same way as a blog. What’s even better about a video though is that it’s more engaging and you can make it much more persuasive. If you’re selling a physical product, then you’ll even have the benefit of being able to show the product in use on the screen. This makes a massive difference and gives people the ability to imagine holding it themselves. YouTube is a search engine and works similarly to Google, so create videos people are looking for and fill them with persuasive content to make sales.

Videos are also a great way to enhance the effectiveness of a landing page. To help grab attention even more than you already were, have a video auto play when someone lands on the page and then start reading out your sales pitch.

Note: You don’t need to be Steven Spielberg to make persuasive marketing videos – you can simply save a slideshow created in PowerPoint as an MPG and then record yourself narrating it!

Press Releases

Another mini strategy you can use is to create press releases. These are short ‘news pieces’ designed to be read by journalists and turned into stories. You can send them directly to big blogs, websites and magazines and include a link to your landing page where they’ll be able to buy the product via you. Likewise, you can also upload these to a site like PR.Com where many writers go to get new stories.

The key to success with a press release is to make sure that your story is news worthy and that you provide all the information that a blogger needs to turn it into an interesting piece for their audience. A special discount isn’t something people generally consider newsworthy – however big rebranding, perhaps a launch event or something to that effect can be.

Advanced Affiliate Business Models

If you want to get clever about it, there are actually all kinds of advanced versions of affiliate marketing and ways you can ‘work the system’.

One of the best examples of this is the ‘cash back website’. A cash back site is essentially a site that sells affiliate products and shares the revenue with the buyers. So if you make 60% from each sale, you could offer to give buyer 30% back. This gives them a very strong incentive to buy from you, while at the same time giving you profit.

Another option is to sell affiliate products and to get marketers to help you do so, thereby splitting the revenue with them instead. This is called a revenue share model but in order for it to be worth their while, you need to offer them something they wouldn’t have otherwise – perhaps access to products that don’t have affiliate schemes normally, or maybe access to a big audience.

Get inventive and you’ll find there are loads of different ways you can take the basic affiliate model and then scale it up to epic proportions! This is the perfect example of how you can use inventiveness to make a lot more money as a marketer!

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