As an affiliate marketer, building a list of prospects is essential. Once you’ve got a decent sized list you can literally send out an email promoting a product as an affiliate and see commissions landing into your inbox within minutes. If you don’t yet have a list then you need to start building one NOW.

Here’s how: You first of all need something that you can give away for free in return for people signing up to your list. This effectively is your ‘bait’ – it could be a free report, eBook, audio course etc. It could be something you have created yourself or something that you have outsourced or bought Private Label Rights to. The most important thing is that it is something that is attractive to people in your niche. Give away a great product that is attractive to your audience and you will find that your conversions are pretty decent.Once you’ve got something to give away, the next thing you need is a simple squeeze page. This will explain to people WHY they should opt-in and tell them a little bit about the product.Ideally it should be something that is highly related to the freebie – and it can be either something you have created yourself or a product you’re promoting as an affiliate.

Seeing as though this report is all about affiliate marketing then let’s assume that you want to put an affiliate offer behind your squeeze page. Just make sure that it is something related and that it isn’t priced too highly. It’s very difficult to get somebody to opt-in for a freebie and then immediately get them to buy a product for $97, so stick with something that is around $20 or less. Then, simply put your affiliate link as your thank you page URL when you set up your opt-in form in your autoresponder account Note that the above screenshot is taken from Aweber but it should be pretty similar with other providers too. Once everything is set up, you need to drive some traffic to this squeeze page… There are a number of ways of doing this. One popular method at the moment is driving traffic by buying paid ‘solo ads.’
This is quite simply where you pay another marketer to send out an email to their list promoting your website. Usually with a solo ad you will be guaranteed a certain number of clicks. So let’s say if it’s 500 clicks then obviously you will be guaranteed to get 500 unique visitors to your squeeze page. The more clicks you are guaranteed, the more you will pay. Let’s now imagine that your squeeze page converts at 50% (perfectly possible with a decent freebie and a good squeeze page). That means that if you get 500 visitors to your squeeze page then you will add 250 people to your list. The great thing about solo ads is that the results tend to come in pretty quick. You should see a whole load of subscribers coming in as soon as the solo ad has been sent out. There are however a couple of things to bear in mind. Obviously purchasing a solo ad will cost money – but if you follow my advice given above and stick a paid offer behind it then you should find that you’ll recoup back some (even all) of your outlay. The important thing to remember however is that you must TEST.

Recouping back the cost of your solo ad relies on the squeeze page converting at a decent level – and also on your paid offer converting well too. Sign up for a free Google Optimizer account and start doing some split tests on your squeeze page – and try linking to differing affiliate offers to see what converts the best. If you really can’t afford to buy a solo ad then another good option is to do an adswap. This basically works in the same way – but rather than paying someone else to send out your email you simply send out an email to YOUR list promoting their product in return. So – you’re building your list and hopefully making some affiliate sales too…