Editor’s Note: This is the fifth in a series of five quick affiliate tips by guest blogger Robert Plank. Videos of each are also posted at the end of this article. Enjoy!
– Michel Fortin

The best favor you can do for yourself and your business is to always focus on one task at a time, and always finish what you start.

How the heck do you do that on the internet, when there are distractions everywhere you look, and in affiliate marketing… when there are new offers every day ripe for you to promote?

The answer is: if you’re going to promote a new affiliate offer, write all your emails and blog posts in one sitting, before you get bored or distracted with another offer.

Sounds intimidating? It doesn’t have to be.

Remember that when you promote someone else’s offer, they tend to give you at least one cut-and-paste email. Schedule it as a future broadcast and paste it in as-is, because time is limited!

If the email they provide is more than a page long, I’ll split it up into two parts and schedule the second email to go out a week later.

Once you have those first couple of emails, look at the sales letter and see if there are any huge chunks of sales copy you can paste into an email to further promote the offer.

Any decent sales letter usually has an interesting story, a benefit list and a feature list… so there’s three more emails right there.

After checking out the sales letter, I’ll tend to think of one or two things the sales letter hadn’t thought of, and I’ll write two quick emails explaining each one. Emails don’t have to be long, just a couple of paragraphs will do, with a call-to-action at the end to get people to click on your affiliate link.

And finally, I’ll type up a couple of reminder emails for people who might have missed the offer and need to see it again.

Now you have 7 or 8 emails to promote the affiliate product. Don’t save them in a text file for later… schedule them in your autoresponder right now to send out a month apart.

Using this technique, you can schedule over six months of email promotion for just one product, in 10 to 30 minutes.

If you were really motivated, you could find the hottest converting products in your niche (I prefer to look at the Clickbank marketplace since those sort by the best pulling offers first) and in one day, fill up your autoresponder with affiliate email promotions.

Or simply make it a point to add one new offer to your autoresponder every Monday morning, before you do anything else.

If you have a blog of your own, you only need to write posts and schedule them on the same dates the emails get sent out… don’t overthink it.

That’s the key to finishing what you start: work in sprints so you can schedule it on a timer and not have to work on that promo, or even think about that promo ever again!

I hope you enjoyed this series on affiliate marketing. Please leave your comments below so I know people like it and I can write more of these. If you want back-issues, here they are!

1. Add Your Own Unique Slant to the Offer.
2. Interview the Originator or Add Your Own Bonuses.
3. Bring Something to the Table: List and Traffic.
4. Invest in Your Business: Don’t Ask for Review Copies.
5. Write Affiliate email and Blog Posts in One Sitting.

I know your time is valuable so I’ll get right to the point.

Product owners and affiliates for the last couple years have lived a happy co-dependent existence. In the beginning, affiliates had limited choices. Today, it’s an ocean of opportunity.

The reason I’m writing you today is because I feel the industry needs a wake up call.

Here are the problems…

1. Affiliate marketers are becoming less dependent on product owners
2. Affiliates have more choices then ever before
3. Affiliates have evolved with the times but product owners have not
4. Product owners are relying too heavily on affiliates

Affiliates Don’t Need You Anymore

In the old days, an affiliate could simply link to a product owner and that was enough.

Then over time, more and more affiliate marketers were created by the product owners — so many new affiliates that, in order to start making sales, you had to offer some sort of bonus or incentive that no one else was offering.

Now in 2009, you need to go even further than just bonuses, because almost everyone’s doing bonuses at this point.

To compete with the massive amounts of affiliates, you now have to capture leads from your traffic, offer a bonus, and then point the prospect to the product owner.

Don’t forget that more and more people everyday are learning that they can sign up as an affiliate themselves and buy through their own links.

Affiliates are now generating their own leads, creating their own offers, and then sending the customer to someone else. How long before the affiliate thinks: “If I’m generating the lead and creating the offer, then why am I sending the customer to someone else?”

Basically, to compete in today’s world of affiliate marketing, an affiliate has to do all the same things a product owner normally does.

Most affiliates become affiliates to avoid the responsibilities of a product owner. You must alleviate some of the work your affiliates are having to do or risk losing them or worse gaining them as a competitor!

There’s a Network On Every Corner

Back in the day, Amazon, Clickbank, Linkshare, and a handful of others were the only affiliate networks on the scene. Now you’ve got over 32 “major” affiliate networks, not to mention all the small or start-up networks.

It gets worse, too, because new networks are constantly springing up and these networks are offering much more then the typical product owner.

Inside any one of the 10+ affiliate networks that I’m a part of, I’ve got all kinds of affiliate tools and a dedicated affiliate manager.

The average product launcher just scrapes by with a basic affiliate promotion kit. Banners, emails, keywords, and some links are not enough anymore.

Today, affiliates need brandable videos, landing pages, reports, e-courses, interviews, and articles… The Internet in 2009 is a content beast — your affiliates need content!

If your eyes are opening and you’re seeing the problems, then you should check out what the adult industry is doing for their affiliates.

The adult industry offers their affiliates free hosting, dedicated managers, a plethora of brandable landing pages, even whole membership sites that the affiliate can promote the product owner with.

Independents can beat the big networks by offering more customization, unique tools, and personal touch. If they don’t, then they’ll lose their affiliates. Which actually leads me into the third problem I see happening…

Affiliates evolved and optimized their methods for their product-owning partners. However, the product owners are still offering the same resources they offered 4, 5, and 6 years ago. Not only that, but it seems product owners have gotten greedier and lazier.

Product Owners Should Be Responsible For Conversions

In this last part, I’m going to speak for myself, and if anyone is feeling the same thing they can let me know in the comments.

The other parts I’ve already spoken with many other affiliates so I was comfortable speaking for the majority. This next part could possibly just be a weird fluke I experienced and could be totally alone in it.

But I doubt it!

Here goes…

Lately, I have been making some showings in the top 10s of different joint-venture leaderboards, which sounds great. However, for most of them my conversions have been almost totally dependent on my offering a bonus.

“Wait,” you’re saying, “you make more sales by offering a bonus to your subscribers who buy through you?” No!

What I’m saying is, if I don’t offer a bonus, then I don’t make sales. I know because I tried it on the last JV leaderboard I got on. I was in the top 10 for leads, and then when it came time for sales, I never offered a bonus.

Sure enough, I got an egg in my sales column as my reward for that test.

In the product launch right before that, I offered a great bonus and came in top five in sales, making several thousand in commissions plus winning a 52″ flat screen TV.

Here’s my problem though…

I could have just emailed my list, charged for my bonus, made the several grand myself, and not shared my customers with the product owner.

If the product owner’s sales funnel requires that the affiliate offers a bonus in order to make sales…

… Then what does the affiliate need the product owner for?

(Read that again.)

I understand there is a “game” to be played, but this is not the ideal situation for affiliates. And as a product owner you want to take care of your affiliates as best you can. For example, I’ll never promote for that guy again.

In my eyes, he charged too much money for his product and the price seemed largely based on knowing his affiliates would offer a much bigger bonus to compensate for it.

Meanwhile, the affiliate is only getting 50% of revenue. Yet the affiliate is motivating the crowd, generating the leads, creating the hot offer, and generating the sale…

… While the product own just created the product!

Creating the product is a big piece of the pie, but what I’m saying over and over again, here, is that, if I have to offer such a great bonus in order for your product to make sales, I might as well just sell my bonus!

More and more of the top affiliates are getting fed up with this.

Lazy launch days are numbered because affiliates are getting sick and tired of the product owners not evolving their methods to keep the affiliates hard work secure.

Here’s a quick solutions list so you can easily identify what you need to be doing to make sure your affiliates are happy.

What You Must Do To Keep Affiliates Happy

1. You must offer something unique to your affiliates or risk losing them to the networks.
2. You must provide every resource an affiliate would need to make the sale, including a variety of different bonuses.
3. The more you update your affiliates tools (e.g., emails, videos, reports, landing pages, etc), then the more they will go out and promote those new tools.
4. As your affiliates’ job requirements evolve, so should yours as the product owner to make sure the affiliate has what’s needed and is doing what’s required.
5. Protect your affiliates’ commissions during launches, and make their job as easy as you can — you are the CREATOR, they are the PROMOTER.
6. Never steal from your affiliates by denying commissions on backend sales, especially during the launch.

I’m not saying I’m the perfect product owner, either, since I’m missing a few of these elements in my affiliate program myself. Although, you can bet I won’t be letting much time go by before I start making sure I have them all.

Thanks for listening to my rant. And please post your comments and tell me what you think of this situation. I’d love to hear them!

Editor’s Note: This is the fourth in a series of five quick affiliate tips by guest blogger Robert Plank. Videos of each are also posted at the end of this article. Enjoy!
– Michel Fortin

No product vendor likes potential affiliates to ask for free “review copies.” It reeks of inexperience and penny-pinching. If you want to promote a product and need to see what it looks like on the inside, just bite the bullet and pay for it like everyone else.

As an affiliate, you have two relationships to work: with your buyers, and with the product originator. When you try to go the cheap route, you burn too many bridges early on.

Let’s also remember that whenever you pay for something, you’re more likely to take action with it. Just imagine you’ve work and saved your entire life for your dream car. Once you buy it, you’re going to actually use it and take extra care of it, right?

Then imagine somebody gives you the car outright. You didn’t earn it, you didn’t work for it, and didn’t pay anything for it. You still might cherish the car but you aren’t going to enjoy it the same way.

The same is true for getting “affiliate review copies” of products. If you actually buy the product, you’ll have more of a drive to promote and make your money back.

There is also no excuse for trying to save money buying from yourself as the affiliate to get your review copy. People have tried to justify themselves doing this for years, but there’s simply no way to explain it without sounding cheap.

Can you really see Michel Fortin, John Reese, or Frank Kern asking for review copies from each other? No way… $20 or even $100 is a drop-in-the-bucket investment for their business. You want to model those people.

Did you know that Russell Brunson and Matt Bacak attend each other’s $20,000 workshops, and pay each other for hourly coaching? There is no “keeping score” to see who makes more money off the other’s coaching.

If one of them needs an extra boost in their business, they pay for the tools and it pays off.

Usually I will pay full price for even my closest business partners’ products, even though I “could” get it for free — I’d prefer to have the tax writeoff, stronger relationship, and extra motivation that comes with paying full price.

I don’t always buy the products I promote as an affiliate… but if you want a review copy, pay for it instead of calling in favors. You owe it to yourself, your product originator, and your customers to actually invest in your business.

Editor’s Note: This is the second in a series of five quick affiliate tips by guest blogger Robert Plank. Videos of each are also posted at the end of this article. Enjoy!
– Michel Fortin

As someone who runs affiliate programs for over 50 of my own products, I can tell you 99% of affiliates are worthless.

They’ll signup and send no traffic, or send traffic and only bring in a couple of sales. What’s the common thread behind all these affiliate failures I see again and again? It comes in two parts: not making an effort, and not bridging their mailing list to your offer.

I would be thrilled if an affiliate came to me and said:

“I want to interview you for 20 minutes about (a topic directly related to both our products and skills). My list contains (size of list) subscribers, and the last offer I promoted converted at (this percentage) and brought in (this amount of sales). I’ll record the interview, convert it into downloadable form and get it out to my subscribers within 24 hours, with a link back to your offer with me as the affiliate, at the end of the interview. What’s a good time for me to call you up?”

Do you see all the points this e-mail hit?

Most important: this affiliate already brings in results. He has a decent sized list, already had a previous success promoting affiliate offers in this niche. He’s doing most of the work: he chose the topic, he will be interviewing you, calling you, and recording the call.

He’s also going to take immediate action once the interview is finished, and promote this offer to his subscribers within 24 hours.

When you interview the product originator with you as the affiliate, it shows that you care about giving your subscribers a good offer, and not just cutting and pasting the e-mail he gave you.

It shows you have an “in” with the originator so if your buyers aren’t getting support or need a refund, they can get to that person through you… they trust the product originator because they trust you.

Finally, it simply injects your personality into the offer. This offer isn’t being made by some outside source, it’s from you and the originator at the same time.

If the originator isn’t available or you just don’t want to go the interview route, offer one of your products as a bonus to that affiliate offer, that way it’s a blended offer.

If your subscribers trust you but don’t trust the product originator, they can still order from the originator with confidence… because if that product doesn’t deliver in value, your bonus will.

It ticks me off when people spend too much time on headshots, graphics, and other name recognition devices when they should be focusing more on web sites that actually make money!

Branding is one of the last things you should worry about — so if you really want to get to the point where you’re working on branding to get that extra 5 percent boost in sales, get through these steps first…

The big formula is: List + Traffic = Offers.

Step 1: Choose Your Niche and Skill Level.

A niche is an area of expertise like copywriting, stress relief, PHP, article writing, etc., and a skill level is how you will turn that expertise into a shippable product. A skill level might mean freelance projects, affiliate marketing, or site building.

Before you do anything you need to know what your area of expertise is. Everybody has one, because everybody has read books, had a favorite job, had a favorite subject in school, subscribe to certain niches of magazines.

If this is your first time choosing a niche, make it a skill you can prove. If you haven’t made any money online, don’t make your niche the “make money online” niche!

Not only that, you need to make up your mind about what your offer will be. If you are brand new, choosing freelancing since that is how you will make some quick money.

You might be an article writer for your niche, create videos, make graphics, write autoresponders or copy — but it needs to be limited to your niche so that you can establish yourself as an “expert” in that niche and charge more.

Maybe someday you can move onto site building, affiliate promotions or even your own products, but don’t make that leap until you have some freelancing experience under your belt.

Step 2: Create a Squeeze Page.

Present an ethical bribe to sign-up to a mailing list so you can start following up with prospects about your future offers.

This means you’ll have to sign up for an autoresponder like Aweber and paste the sign-up code to a very simple HTML page that also lists a couple of quick benefits explaining why they should get this information in the first place.

You do this to get people on a list, so you can send them offers later. These offers aren’t necessarily products but could be entire sales for sale or your freelance services.

You don’t even need to create the content.

Find the 7 best articles in your niche and grab them off article sites, leaving the bylines and resource boxes intact so the writer still gets credit. Compile all those articles into a Word document, put your contact info at the beginning and end of the book, especially if you are going the freelance route.

Then convert the Word doc to a PDF using either Microsoft Word 2007, OpenOffice or a free online tool (you can Google search for many great “doc to pdf converters”).

Step 3: Fill Your Follow-up Sequence With 7 Offers.

This might be 7 more articles in your niche and set them as e-mail follow-ups spaced 3 weeks apart. This will keep the leads fresh, and ready for when you have offers for them.

Do you offer freelancing article writing in a certain niche? Your offer then might be that three slots have opened up at a special price. Or the offer might simply be an affiliate program you are promoting in that niche for people who want to pay for the even better information.

Step 4: Create Special Offers, an Affiliate Program, and Joint Ventures.

Here is the fun part. Now that you have made a couple of sales, you can offer special deals to your list and repeat customers.

Maybe you want to order a “rush order” option to your article writing services so for 50% more, people can get their articles from you in half the time. Maybe you’ll give a 30 minute telephone consultation to each person on your list who buys a particular product through your affiliate link.

Next, you’ll want to setup your OWN affiliate program. Most people think that an affiliate program means you offer an e-book for sale, people refer traffic, and get a commission. But you can also offer an affiliate program for your freelance work!

Just get an account with an affiliate processor like Clickbank, setup a pitch page explaining your services, a payment button where people can pay you for services. Now you’ve given your friends and business partners a reason to promote your services — because they get a cut of the profits!

Take affiliates to the next level — find joint venture partners. Co-host an interview or webinar to provide content (with a link back to your web site).

Contribute to their content by giving them a ridealong product (a report of yours they can bundle with their paid product). Write a guest blog post.

Create a special offer just for that joint venture that they can place on their thank you page after they’ve made a sale, where they can get commission. Basically, customize an offer for them and make it as plug-and-play as possible.

Step 5: Brand Yourself.

Once you’ve got your niche and skill level, squeeze page to build a list, offers, affiliate program and joint venture partners, it’s finally time to establish your brand.

But it’s not as hard as you think. If the domain name with your name is available, for example, MichelFortin.com, register that domain name and add a blog to it.

You don’t have to make a big deal about your blog. To be honest, for the first few months I had only my resume on my blog. Later on I added a couple of articles, but it’s not worth your time until you get some traffic.

Let’s recap…

• Step 1: Choose your niche (copywriting, stress, blogging, etc.) and your skill level (freelancing, affiliate offers, site building, your own products)
• Step 2: Get an autoresponder, and add a squeeze page using a report compiled from free articles as an ethical bribe. Then use even more articles as follow-up messages.
• Step 3: Create seven offers for this list which might be affiliate programs, your own report for sale, a site for sale, or even your services for sale.
• Step 4: Create an affiliate program and joint venture system to reward people for sending traffic over.
• Step 5: Register YourName.com if it’s available, add your picture and post a couple of your articles.

That’s all you need to know about branding.

When you sell anything on the internet… whether you do it using e-mail marketing, forum marketing, blog posting… if you sell e-books, physical products, e-classes, even a newsletter… the best way to sell anything is using direct response sales copy.

But not all of us can be world-class copywriters like Michel Fortin. I consider myself a pretty sloppy copywriter, and althought I can whip up a headline, quick story, bullet point list of benefits, testmonials, feature list, guarantee and a call-to-action… I will never be a great copywriter.  Gary Halbert can’t hold my attention for longer than a few minutes, I’ve never read Scientific Advertising, so how do I scrape by writing average sales copy?

The answer is: practice and resources. I’ve written enough sales letters that I know what my audience wants and how I can present it to them to maximize sales.  I rarely spend more than a couple of hours writing even 5 or 10 page sales letters, and some have converted as high as 19 percent for me.

Even if you don’t have the skill or the practice, you can still hit the following sites to produce an average sales letter, enough for a copywriter to rewrite it or critique it.

Site #1: Digg.com
As far as I’m concerned, Digg is THE best place to find niche headlines from popular, specific and benefit-oriented, but funny news items.  Go to Digg.com, type in your niche keyword and click Search.  Then refine the search to search by the title only (so your keyword is in the title), show all stories (not just front page stories), and sort by most diggs (so the news items “the people” like float right to the top).  Using the Digg technique, I helped a copywriter come up with this headline: “Man Wins Divorce Without a Lawyer In Sight!”  Makes you want to find out more, right?

Site #2: HardToFindAds.com
Michael Senoff’s Hard to Find Ads is like an instant swipe file.  He shows you random ads, most of them decades old, written by the most famous and best converting copywriters that ever lived.  You can take clever headlines, ideas and bullet points from these ads and rewrite them as your own.

For example, the first ad I found reads like this: “Top Medical Doctor Speaks Out!  An Open Letter to Anyone Who Wants to Lose Up to 20 Pounds in Two Weeks the Easy Way.”  If you were writing copy for growing organic tomatoes, you might say: “Top Organic Gardener Speaks Out!  An Open Letter to Anyone Who Wants to Grow 15 Pounds of Tomatoes in 8 Weeks the Easy Way.”  Obviously you’d change the numbers to whatever you can prove, but that headline is better than anything I could come up with from scratch.

Site #3: Amazon.com
Amazon.com isn’t just for buying books. You can use Amazon to find out several things: what KINDS of books in your niche are hot sellers right now.  You can also choose the top selling books and most of the time take a peek at the table of contents.  Bingo, instant list of bullet points you can hit on with the sales letter.  Amazon also gives you a list of keywords related to that book, to give you even more ideas for bonus reports, videos, and emotional hot buttons.  If all that wasn’t enough, you can read through reviews of the book and make a note of the terminology people in that niche tend to use.

Site #4: Archive.org
Look at one of your competitors’ sites in your niche.  Then look their site up on the Internet Wayback Machine to see how their page has changed over time.  The other day I was watching the TV show “Mad Men” about advertisers in the 1960′s.  In one episode, the men in the ad agency are talking about a magazine ad by Volkswagen.  The ad was ugly, and the car was ugly, and the guys were baffled because Volkswagen kept placing the same ad… so it must be pulling in money!

This is the internet equivalent of that.  If you know a site pulls in lots of sales, and it was written by a copywriter who tests the headline, phrasing, bullet points, call-to-action, offer, and so on… you can open up the web page as it looks now, and the web page as it looked 6 months or a year ago, and see what changes have been made.  If a copywriter kept tweaking the headline over time but kept switching back to one in particular, you know it’s a money-maker and you can look at what makes it such a great headline.

Site #5: Google Answers, Google Alerts, and (Your Niche) Forums
These sites “should” be a no-brainer for any copywriter, but so few people pay attention to them and as a result write very “flat” copy.  When you’re selling something, you’re selling a solution, which means you’ve fixing a problem.  People are in pain whether that pain means not having enough money, growing tiny tomatoes or not being able to play the piano.  Look at what questions people are asking in question-and-answer sites like Google Answers and in the forums in your niche by searching for your niche keyword plus the word “forum.”

Site #6: Google Insights, Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, Quantcast

Can you tell I’m a fan of Google?  The fact is, simply searching for your keyword in a search engine and seeing what ads appear on the right side is the perfect way to see what headlines pull the best.  That’s the most logical place to go and works wonders compared to pulling out a headline or a hook from thin air.

With those six free resources at your disposal, you have finally run out of excuses.  You can write halfway decent copy for your next promo e-mail, blog post, or sales letter just by seeing what great copy is out there, and “copying” it!

Whether you are creating blog content, a sales pitch, or a product, the fastest way to create content is with video — no writing required!

If you want to create a fancy-shmancy video like Michel and Sylvie, create a PowerPoint slide and record your screen as you talk. This is my preferred way of recording video, but if I’m in a hurry, I can whip up a mindmap presentation in one-third of the time as a PowerPoint.

The easiest kind of video to create is screen capture video. This is where a program records your desktop and you talk into a microphone. Use Camtasia if you’re working in Windows, or ScreenFlow if you’re on a Mac.

Both come with 30-day trials and there is a free version called Jing which is limited to five-minute recordings, so nothing is standing in the way of you creating screen capture videos.

Size your resolution down to the smallest possible (I reduce to 640×480), start a PowerPoint slide show, record the screen, and start talking. (If you can’t afford $79 for Microsoft Office, use OpenOffice.) That’s all there is to it.

Pretend you’re recording live at a seminar in front of a crowd and explain what you have to say in one take. No one says it has to be anything near perfect.

The only problem with recording those presentations is it sometimes takes a while to make them. For a 20-minute presentation, I have to make about 15 slides with a headline on each slide and three bullet points. That can take a while! So when I want to whip up an interview quickly, I create what’s called a “mindmap.”

What’s a mindmap? It’s basically a brainstorm with thought bubbles, like you use to draw in grade school when you took notes or outlined essays. You have the root “node”… or thought bubble, which is the title of your presentation, and other children “nodes” (thought bubbles) under them, thought bubbles under those, and so on.

Because it’s on a computer, you can expand or contract mindmaps to only show the one subject you’re talking about. It’s a perfect way to quickly organize your thoughts, and makes it perfect for audio interviews, webinars, or standalone videos.

Unlike a PowerPoint presentation, you can present items in any order and skip over items if you run out of time. You can also export your mindmaps into PDF or HTML form so your attendees get the exact notes you used to present.

Here’s how to get started:

1. Grab a mindmapping tool. I prefer FreeMind because it’s free and works on both Windows and Mac. (Go to that link and find the “Download” area.)
2. Get an idea for your 10 to 90 minute presentation, rename the root node to the title of your presentation.
3. Right click and choose “New child” to create a child node under the root node. Use this as your subpoint and create other children under the root node for additional subpoints.
4. For each subpoint, create a child node under that to provide details… usually a couple of keywords or some VERY concise sentences.

It’s not rocket science. Once you’ve created your nodes, you can drag them above or below other nodes to rearrange them in the map. You can drag nodes into other nodes, and so on.

I recommend you move all nodes to the RIGHT side of the root so they all appear as a “list”… and limit yourself to 2 to 5 children per node to keep the map from getting messy. Never go more than three levels deep.

I can whip up a mindmap presentation in just a couple of minutes this way. Using mindmaps, I use several keyboard shortcuts like the Insert key to add new child nodes, the Enter key to add a bunch of “sibling” nodes at once, the F2 key to rename nodes and the arrow keys and spacebar to navigate between nodes.

For a well thought out but easy to create presentation for videos, webinars and interviews… create a mindmap and expand on each point you’re trying to make one at a time as you present. Combine this with desktop recording software or built-in webinar screen capture software… and you’ve got yourself an instant product, blog post, or interview.