Do You feel that selling other people’s products is very difficult?

Well, you’re not alone… As I was venturing into Internet marketing, I did feel just as you do at the moment. Yet I have been curious as to what makes some people earn very good money on the Internet by successfully selling affiliate products.

This means that the problem must be in the use of wrong processes…

This is what most marketers do in promoting affiliate products:

• They use their affiliate links to send people directly to their respective merchant sites and hope for someone to make a purchase. Of course they get luck - sometimes good and sometimes bad… who knows? This works to the advantage of the merchants since the affiliates provide them with free traffic.
• Another method that affiliates use is to create their own landing pages instead of sending customers directly to the merchants’ sites. They use the landing pages to capture the prospects’ names and email addresses by using autoresponders. They then promote the affiliate products by sending a series of 5-7 follow-up emails to try to ‘push’ the prospects into making a purchase.

Why are people doing this? I have one of the most common reasons - commissions. If a merchant gives you a 60% commission on a product valued at $49, it means you will be earning $29.4 per sale. All you have to do is simple … send traffic. If you send a lot of traffic and are fortunate enough to make 100 sales in a month, you will earn $2,940 from the merchant. And you won’t have created any product at all. How sweet…

Then why is it that very many people are struggling quite hard to earn just a few hundred bucks?

Let us follow this logical reasoning. If your sole motivation is getting commissions, there will be thousands of people all over the world with the same desire. Right? This in turn means that all of these people will be your competitors. Does this make any sense to you?

So, does this mean that affiliate marketing is doomed? No,not really … so long as you think and act differently.

Try to imagine of this scenario. You are sitting in a coffee shop. Someone approaches you, says ‘hello’, and talks nicely with you. Then after a few minutes of conversation, he takes a pen from his bag that he persuades you to buy.

Well, there are many different ways in which you may react. But, let’s suppose that you don’t ask him to leave your table …

Which question are you likely to shoot first? Will you ask about the price, features, and quality of the pen? Or will you trust the person wholeheartedly and buy the pen without any question?

Although I don’t know about you, nine out of ten people will say the price is the first important question. If the price is way too high, chances are that you will lose interest and ask the salesman to leave you alone. On the other hand, if it appears cheap, you may think that you will not really lose if you try the product. Let’s say it’s just $2.

When you go to your office and start using your $2 pen, you find it surprisingly comfortable. It grips well without slipping and the ink is of good quality. You feel that $2 is rather too cheap for the quality of the pen.

A few weeks later, you see the salesman in the same coffee shop and again he says ‘hello’ to you. What will you do? Ignore him? And if he offers to refill your pen, will you tell him to leave you alone?

Of course not. Since he didn’t sell you a poor-quality product, you will develop more trust in him.

This demonstrates the process of building trust and loyalty in your customers. It may take weeks, months, or even years to develop this trust.

By the way, that salesman is an affiliate too. He didn’t make that pen.

I hope this anecdote gives you some insight into becoming a better affiliate.

Good luck…!

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