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In today’s Q&A, we are talking about how an affiliate program can help Kyle sell more of his digital product.
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Resources Mentioned in this Episode
- Today’s question from Kyle Nelson at Cornerstone Coaching Academy
- Ejunkie
- Clickbank
Let’s dive into this week’s question
JOCELYN: Hey ya’ll, you’re listening to Q&A with S&J.
SHANE: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast where life always comes before work. We are your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us each week as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside-down by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let’s get started.
SHANE: What’s going on ya’ll? Welcome back to Q&A with S&J, good to be with you to answer your questions about online business today. Our question today comes from Kyle Nelson at Cornerstonecoachingacademy.com. Kyle writes, “I run a membership site for baseball coaches. My members love my content and the feedback I get from them is outstanding. I am struggling with getting my membership in front of enough people to make more money. I’m not in a position to run paid advertising and I’m relatively new in a competitive area. So I don’t get much traffic from Google searches yet. Have you guys ever used an affiliate sales site like ClickBank or have you used any affiliate plug-ins for WordPress to find your own affiliates? Thanks, keep up the great work.”
JOCELYN: Hey Kyle, thanks for your question. Let’s talk first of all about what affiliate programs are. There might be some people out there who don’t really understand the question. What Kyle is asking is if he could possibly get his product in the hands of other people who do similar things or similar coaching sites and have them sell his product for a commission. A lot of people do this and make a lot of money doing it. It’s not something that I have a ton of experience with personally but Shane has used it several times. He has a list of products on ClickBank. ClickBank is just a site that has numerous products on it that you can sell for an affiliate commission. You don’t necessarily have to know the person that you are trying to sell the product and that’s certainly a viable option. It would not hurt anything for you to put your product on ClickBank but we’re not really sure that that is the best option for you at this point.
SHANE: What you really want to do with an affiliate program is you want to build relationships with people who are in your space. So, you need to find affiliates. You can throw things up randomly on ClickBank but it’s going to take people randomly looking for certain products in your area, randomly finding you, randomly liking that product and randomly selling it. While that’s good, you can put things out there and you could even manage your affiliate program through that but you want to go out and find affiliates. You want to go build relationships with people and maybe you can have them go through ClickBank to be able to pay their commissions and things like that but you’re going to have a lot more success with affiliate marketing if you actually know the people. I know people in the football space that I sell affiliate products for; there’s a youth football coach named Dave Cisar and I actually sell his youth products on my CoachXO site because I’m not a youth football coach. I don’t want to take the time to go out and create youth football products but I have a lot of youth coaches that use Coachxo.com to talk about football. So I want to be able to provide them a product so I have approached Coach Cisar and he made something for me and I gave it to my audience for them to buy. I get 75 bucks off the commission; it’s like a $200 product. So basically that’s the way I can have a product off of my audience and make money and he gets more sales because my audience might be bigger or different than his. I have another buddy of mine that sells my playbooks and I sell his too and so we swap our money every month on our affiliate sales. But those relationships that I have actually reached out, talked to people and built those, those are a lot better for affiliate marketing because I know they want to promote my product, they felt comfortable promoting it and they are going to do a lot better job for me than some random person that just found it and sticks a link on their website. So if you want to do an affiliate type model for your business to help grow your audience and make more sales, get on Google, search for people in your space that are selling and doing the same or similar things as you and reach out to them and try and build those relationships where people – you’re going to actually have some mutually beneficial kind of thing going where you make each other money.
JOCELYN: Another thing that you could possibly consider Kyle, is using your audience as affiliates for you. You talked about how you have people who have used your products and they really liked them; well maybe you could offer them an opportunity. If you give this product or if you will tell someone about this product and use this link, then I will give you X amount of Dollars or X percent or whatever the case may be. An easy way to track this is by using E-junkie. Shane’s going to tell you a little bit about that.
SHANE: You can totally use ClickBank to manage your affiliate product, that’s a great way to do it too. I just do it through E-junkie. I upload my digital products or whatever I have or say I sell something like a membership site, I can do that through E-junkie too just to take the payment. But I can set up affiliate links in E-junkie and I give those links to my affiliates; they can use those and put them on their site and if people click on them, all that does is simply tracks it and it says, ‘Okay, so-and-so sold 14 of this product, you owe them this much money’ and then I just upload that into – there’s a little document you download called Mass Pay. You upload that into PayPal and it knows all of your affiliates in your spreadsheet and basically it just pays them. So there’s a real easy way to do that with E-junkie; ClickBank is a great thing for managing your affiliate program. If you want to actually sign your affiliates up through ClickBank, I totally recommend that you use that, that’s an awesome way to do it too. But you can also – just like what Jocelyn said, get your own affiliate link to track and send that – give that link to people in your audience and say, ‘Go email this to ten coaches’. If any of them buy it, I’ll give you a part of the commission and you’ve all of a sudden got an affiliate product ready to go. Hope that answered your question; affiliate marketing is a great way to grow your audience and sell more products and there are great tools out there like E-junkie and ClickBank that make it super-easy to set up people with affiliate links.
SHANE: All right, guys, that’s all the time we have for our Q&A today, thanks for listening. We will be back with you in a couple of days with another Q&A and until next time, we’ll catch you all on the flip side.
JOCELYN: Bye.
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