Creating a successful sales funnel for affiliate products requires product knowledge and marketing skills to encourage sales. You start by bringing in people to your landing page, warming up the leads, developing more interest, and finally closing with your sales offer.
Bloggers, YouTube creators, and content creators can make money through affiliate programs. As a result, many people worldwide make full-time and more than full-time incomes through affiliate commissions.
It requires very little investment; the best part is that the income is passive; you just set it up and forget it.
However, to get the real benefits of this source of income, you need to know how to do it right. Here is a detailed guide to what you need, how to set it up, and how to optimize a sales funnel for the best results.
What To Consider
The most important consideration is the product/service you will earn commissions for.
There are two things to note:
- Different products/services have drastically different commission rates. So even if you are sticking to a single platform—for instance, selling products on Amazon, affiliate commissions can be as low as 0.5% or as high as 5%.
You can expect much higher commission rates if you sell products or services directly from their providers (20%-75%).
- It would help if you also looked at the product’s value. Cheaper items (under $5) will sell in high quantities, but you won’t earn that much even with a good commission since the product is lower priced. However, selling hundreds of products daily can add up to a considerable amount.
On the other hand, higher priced items, for example, jet skis, might have a lower commission rate, but that will still work out to a decent amount based on the price of the items.
Remember that some affiliate programs require you to do some work, and they aren’t completely hands-off solutions like Amazon FBA. So this is an important consideration regarding how much you earn and how much work you have to do.
What You’ll Need To Do
A good sales funnel consists of a few key ingredients. These include the following:
Marketing Strategy
A marketing strategy is finding an audience that you will convert into paying customers. There are a lot of ways to do your early marketing.
The aim is to get your name/brand out to the masses. More specifically, you want to position yourself in front of people that will naturally be inclined to buy.
For example, if you sell basketball shoes, you obviously would not want to target people who don’t even go to the gym or play sports. Ideally, you will target people who currently play basketball or want to get into the sport. Here, some market research and common sense will come in handy.
You also want to look at what your technical abilities for marketing are. For instance, if you don’t have much of a marketing budget, then paid forms of marketing (paid ads, influencer marketing) won’t be good options. It would help if you had something you could do or could afford to outsource.
Filtration Strategy
Through your funnel, you will get many people who are the digital versions of ‘window shoppers.’ They are interested in your offering but aren’t ready to buy your product yet.
Rather than taking these people through your entire funnel, you need to set these aside as potential leads. This is an asset that you can make use of later on. Similarly, you want to separate your warm leads. These people are ready and willing to buy—the perfect people to move through the rest of the funnel.
Bridge Page
To develop rapport and trust, you need to have bridge pages. This adds a personal touch to the process (not that you need to do this personally) and will improve conversions.
It will also make the process smoother for those going through the sales funnel and help your customers make better purchase decisions, making overall management much easier for you.
Sales Page
This is the hard-selling part. This could be an online store, a social media store, a dedicated website, or an email with an affiliate link.
You can structure this however you want, but it needs to be secure for yourself and the buyer. There will be sensitive information processed through the sales page.
Offers
You can add special offers to make the deal a bit sweeter and help the customers think they are getting more value. Coupons, discounts, extra items, free shipping, and fast delivery are all options you can consider.
How To Structure the Sales Funnel
Start by getting your affiliate products sorted. Then build landing pages, content, and bridge pages according to the different products/services you have.
Similarly, you can start to build free content that you will use to filter your audience and warm raw leads. This could include email sequences, webinars, eBooks, or any other low-effort and high-output asset.
Lastly, you want to start working on your landing pages and marketing strategy. Having everything ready before you start with these last two steps is crucial because you want to design something that has a consistent look and offers a smooth experience.
When it comes to implementation, you will do the opposite. You will start with marketing efforts to bring people to the landing page, from where you can use your bridge and filter pages to lead the customer to the sales page.
Conclusion
Earning through an affiliate commissions program continues to be a popular way of making money for many people worldwide but don’t be surprised if you don’t get it the first time.
Each funnel stage will take time to perfect, so you must play around with it a bit to see what works best for your product and audience.
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