Online marketing when it comes to the Affiliate Marketer is all about generating valid leads and then creating long term relationships with their consumers. For the majority of affiliate marketers, gathering these leads also means maintaining contact with their list which they’re advertising to, rather than just referring them directly to the end merchants just once and then losing them.
One of the biggest and extremely expensive problem which the majority of affiliate marketers face is they sending quality qualified traffic to the merchants for too small a fee or lead payout, and it’s usually one and done.
These affiliate’s never bother to gather all of the pertinent information such as their names or email addresses which can potentially be used to establish a long term relationship.
The actual process of generating these leads doesn’t really take that much extra work on behalf of the marketer, while it can provide for significant opportunities in the future for moving traffic as well as generating revenue from other sources.
All it takes is collecting and then validating the end user information, and there are a variety of excellent platforms which are available to assist you in doing so.
Generating And Collecting Valid Leads
Gathering information from respondents can prove to be a huge profitable advantage to the affiliate marketer. While getting paid for generating, driving and then funneling traffic is required to get paid, that shouldn’t be the end of the road.
Also in some cases, the conversions aren’t generally made immediately after the customer decides to click on the affiliate’s link which is redirected to a merchant’s site. The actual action of a purchase or opt-in usually occurs later, so there’s a very good chance that the affiliates are driving valid conversions to the end merchants, but not even getting paid for it.
The proper collection of lead generation however allows the affiliate to be able to “claim” these customers for themselves, this before they’re sent to the end merchants for the payout conversion.
What these “leads” exactly are, along with what makes them important, is based primarily on what your exact needs are along with the best possible way that you can maintain a working relationship with these consumers.
Usually, this will manifest itself into list-building where you’ll be collecting pertinent information regarding the consumers who happen to opt-in, and then can be used to effectively contact them in the future.
The most common method of lead generation, as well as perhaps the easiest route for affiliate marketers is by building an email list by collecting their names along with their email addresses.
This will give you the marketer an easy way to keep in touch with your consumers on your list, by sharing relevant and timely information with them which builds up your credibility while proving yourself as an authority in the field or niche market.
Some of the best proven ways to do this is by sharing or writing unbiased reviews on products or services, providing industry newsletters which you’ve compiled yourself, or helpful links to free information such as a whitepaper.
This helps in building up your trust and worthiness with your lead generated customers, which should result in they willing to more than likely acknowledge as well as take further action when you recommend a product, service or merchant to them in the future. This obviously will increase your conversion rates overall.
Best Lead Collecting Methods
One of the best and proven ways of collecting leads is by driving your qualified online visitors to a content or video “Squeeze Page.” You can send potential customers to this page by including links on your web pages, including them on forum signatures, YouTube videos or anywhere else online and offline where you happen to be distributing content or any type of information.
The savviest of affiliate marketers are collecting qualified customer leads from their squeeze pages, before or at the same time they click on the merchant’s product page. What you’re required to do however is somehow convince the consumer to sign up and then submitting their information with you. The best method to do so is by offering an incentive for their participation using your link.
You can do this by offering consumers free content, products or information for submitting their info. This can be videos, PDF reports, or free “bonus” products.
This is done to entice them so they’ll sign up with you and agree to be included on your email list. The key is to make these incentives worthwhile by offering quality information or products, making it worth the customers’ time.
Validating The Leads
If you do go down this path and offer incentives to generate leads, it’s obviously possible that some will sign up using fake information just to receive the “free” goods. It happens all the time.
Sending out emails to invalid email addresses is annoying as well as time consuming, while it also negatively damages your “senders reputation” with all of the major email providers such as Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo and others.
If you send out these mass emails to “dud” email addresses which don’t exist, it makes you appear like a spammer, and your reputation as an email marketer goes downhill. All your subsequent emails will then get “marked” and filtered out of the users inbox as well.
Since the majority of the properly formatted emails which has domains configured to receive emails will usually be accepted by the vendor, it’s then important to have a system to ensure that the information which you receive from the users are valid. Possibly the best way to do this is by using some type of a link-validation platform.
These link validation platforms are able to verify email addresses, assuring you that they’re valid and deliverable, which helps you in keeping up as well as improving your reputation with the variety of the email providers while optimizing your email marketing campaign.
The best of these link validation platforms which are currently available for this type of lead validation are Cake and LeadSpend, these among a few others.
Begin Lead Generation Now
So there should be nothing holding you back. Now is an excellent time to begin increasing and profiting from your affiliate marketing strategies and efforts by generating valid buyer hungry leads for yourself.
This can also result in a mutual long-term customer relationship as well. There’s no need for you to be content with just getting paid for just a portion of the traffic which you’re able to generate for other merchants.
This since you’re now able to drive these same customers towards other related products which you market, while increasing your productivity and profits in the process.