Using Affiliates To Build Your List
Let’s talk about growing your list with cookies. No, I’m not talking about bribing your readers with cookies and milk. Instead, we’re talking about digital cookies and your affiliates will do the list building for you. This requires two things. You need to have a paid product and an affiliate program set up for that product. Once you have those things in place, you’re ready to use your affiliates to build your list.
I’m going to assume that you have your product and affiliate program in place and also have at least a few affiliates lined up to help you promote this and grow your list. The list we are growing is a free list, unlike the customer list your affiliates already help you build.
Take a look at your product, or even your products. Then come up with a topic for a short report that’s related to the topic of your product. Ideally this will be something that’s one step before you get to your product. Let’s run through a couple of examples, to give you a better idea of what I’m talking about here.
- You have a product about setting up a blog using WordPress. Your short report could be about registering a domain and setting up WordPress friendly hosting.
- You have a product about getting more traffic from Pinterest. Your short report could be about getting started with Pinterest, or how to read Pinterest Analytics Data.
- You have a product about Eating Paleo. Your short report could be about the dangers of consuming wheat and sugar.
- You have a product about paying off consumer debt. Your short report could be about budgeting your money.
You get the idea. Your free short report will focus on a topic or a piece of information your target audience needs before they need what you have to offer in your paid product. And chances are you already covered a lot of this stuff on your blog or website.
Write the short report, grab some PLR and edit it, or compile a few of your blog posts into a report. Within that report, you also want to promote your paid product.
Your next step is to set up an opt-in page where readers sign up with their email address and get the free report. It doesn’t have to be long or complicated, but you need that page for this to work. Once you have it up and it’s working, add a link to it in your affiliate area.
Email your affiliates and let them know what you’ve set up. Share their affiliate link for this free report page with them and explain that while they won’t get anything for the free signups, they will get a “cookie” and as soon as one of those subscribers buys your product, they get their affiliate commission.
