This week on the Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast, we're diving into the world of affiliate marketing and exploring the two most popular methods. Discover how you can use these strategies to grow your online business in 2023. Join us as we delve into the topic on the Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast.
Today on the show, we're discussing affiliate marketing and its potential for business growth in the new year. As a long-time fan of affiliate marketing, I believe it's the perfect starting point for anyone looking to launch an online business. However, I understand that many people may have confusion about the different types of affiliate marketing.
In this episode, we'll be breaking down the two major categories of affiliate marketing and how they differ. We'll also be discussing how you can use a combination of both methods to start a new revenue stream in 2020. Additionally, I'll be bringing back an old segment of the show, the Late Night Internet Marketing Fortune Cookie.
This week on the Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast, we're diving into the world of affiliate marketing and exploring the two most popular methods. Discover how you can use these strategies to grow your online business in 2023. Join us as we delve into the topic on the Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast.
Today on the show, we're discussing affiliate marketing and its potential for business growth in the new year. As a long-time fan of affiliate marketing, I believe it's the perfect starting point for anyone looking to launch an online business. However, I understand that many people may have confusion about the different types of affiliate marketing.
In this episode, we'll be breaking down the two major categories of affiliate marketing and how they differ. We'll also be discussing how you can use a combination of both methods to start a new revenue stream in 2020. Additionally, I'll be bringing back an old segment of the show, the Late Night Internet Marketing Fortune Cookie.
This week, on the Late NIght Internet Marketing Podcast, we're going to talk about the two most common kinds of affiliate marketing, and how you can use them both to grow your internet business in 2023. All this and more on the Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast. Hey, hey, hey. I am your host, Mark Mason, coming to you live. Well, it's a podcast, so maybe not live from the little studio in Dallas, Texas, and I hope you're having an amazing day. It's about to get really cold here in Texas and by really cold. I mean like eight degrees. For those of you that are in places in the world that have legitimate winters, I get it. It's not that cold. But for us here in Texas, it's pretty darn cold. Hey, today on the podcast I want to talk a little bit about affiliate marketing because I know the first of the year is a time. It should be a time when you might be planning on growing your business, starting your business, doing something new, creating a new revenue stream, maybe your first revenue. As you know from listening to the podcast for a long time, that I'm a huge fan of affiliate marketing. I think it is the best way to start a business online, but sometimes people talk to me about confusion that they have around what they perceive to be as different kinds of affiliate marketing. We're gonna talk about the what I. View as the two major kinds of affiliate marketing. Two major categories, or a way to think about affiliate marketing in two distinct ways. And even at the end of this, we'll talk a little bit about how you might combine the two, and I think that'll help you clear up a confusion and maybe help you understand how you might start a new revenue stream in 2020. But before we get to that, I, I want to turn back to a segment that I used to do long, long ago, the Late NIght Internet Marketing Fortune Cookie. Now, for those of you that aren't familiar with the Late NIght Internet Marketing Fortune cookie long ago, I realized in a moment of clarity that everything that you need to know about internet marketing can be. From Fortune cookies and that all fortune cookies are actually about internet marketing. And I'll give you an example, but first I wanna make a note that your lucky numbers are 11, 18, 23, 28, 35, and 40, because I got this fortune cookie today. And those are the lucky numbers. Now, we'll tell you, I had enough mathematics in graduate school that I don't play the lottery, but if you. I bet those numbers are awesome. Let's hear from the Fortune cookie. It says, be both a speaker of words and a doer. Of deeds. And of course that's obviously about internet marketing and online business because how many times do we see people in the online marketing space that are saying they want to create an online business? They want financial freedom. They want to leave their day job. They want, they want, they want their speaking. The words they're talking about, what it's gonna be like when they get it done, and yet, They don't do the deeds, they don't do the work. They don't put in the effort, they don't execute, they don't take massive action. And so they never get it done. And it's just words. It's not deeds. And, and they're stuck. And had they only been reading fortune cookies, they would've known that they need to take the action to do the thing. I'm gonna tell you, if you want to have one New Year's resolution in 2023, After you set your plan, make your New Year's resolution to be, to take massive action, do a little something every day on your online business, and I promise you, after a year of doing that, after doing something every day on your online business for a year, you're going to love. Those results. Are you gonna make mistakes? Yes. Are you gonna do the wrong thing? Yes. Are you gonna go off in the wrong direction? Have problems, overcome issues, all of that, yes. But if you take constant action and take, even if it's two steps forward and one step back all year long at the end of the year, you're gonna love those. Okay, so let's get into this thing about affiliate marketing. So for those of you that are a little bit new to affiliate marketing, let me remind you that affiliate marketing is simply this thing where you as the marketer take people that are interested in a thing and you introduce them to that thing and you get paid for that. And usually the way you get paid is if they. The thing that you recommend or make them aware of, you get a commission, and typically this is done by sending them a link and if they use your link to buy the product, then through the magic of the internet and cookies and all of these other things that are out there, you get what's usually referred to as an affiliate commission. That's how affiliate marketing works, and you see That on this channel. All the time. Let me give you a great example. The some of you are aware of the fact that I'm currently. Experimenting with, and I think I've made the decision to completely switch to script as the way that I record my podcast. And in fact, I'm recording into script right now because not only do I want to produce the audio podcast that you're probably listening to right now, I also make a video. Version of that podcast over at LateNightIM.com im.com/youtube. So if you want to see my smiling face, you can see me doing the podcast over on YouTube on that channel. And in order to make that easy, I'm using this pretty amazing software called Descript, and I've used that software to make all kinds of video content. It's really crazy. How cool this software is. I just recently used it earlier today to make a sales page video for promotion that I'm doing, and I would estimate that generally speaking, Script cuts My work time in half when it comes to dealing with videos for the kind of videos that I make, which are basically talking head videos with Be Real Script is just perfect for that. And it's amazing because it allows you to edit the text instead of the video stream. Or edit the video stream by working with the text, I guess is the best way to describe it. And so I really like it. And if you think you might like that or have some use for that, I'd like to encourage you to go check out the script using my affiliate link at LateNightIM.com im.com/descript. That's LateNightIM.com im.com/descript. D E S C R I. That's my affiliate link. And what will happen if you click that link is that. Descript, the company Descript will take note of that. They'll know that I sent you and because I sent you, if you actually end up buying the DES product, which I think is fantastic, then I will get a commission. Whenever you pay for descript. Now it doesn't cost you anything. What it, it costs the DES company. They are essentially paying for the equivalent of advertising, which is basically what I just did for them. I advertised their product to my audience, and if that results in some real sales for them, usually sales that they might not have had anyway, they will pay me. And that doesn't cost you the user of Descript anymore than it would've originally. And so that's a win-win situation. And when it's done well, That's really the best kind of affiliate marketing, and usually when I talk about affiliate marketing, the first kind of affiliate marketing that I'm going to talk about today. That's the kind of affiliate marketing that I'm talking about, affiliate marketing, where you're talking about something and you're trying to help people, educate people, teach people, inform people about a thing, and if they, as a result buy that thing or take some action around that thing, then you get a commission for that work that. And to do that well, there's some really important aspects of that. First of all, you need to develop a kind of a know, like, and trust situation. For example, if we go back to the example of script. it needs to be the case that you care what? I have to say that you're interested enough to listen to my podcast in the first place. That you are the kind of audience that might be creating video content in the first place, and that you at least think enough about me based on that description that you're willing to go give script a look after all. If you don't know, like, and trust me enough, at least to. Listen to the pitch and hear what I have to say about script. you're not going to go check it out at all. And what's implied in there. And what's super important about this kind of affiliate marketing is if I choose to promote crappy products that aren't very good, and I. Tell you to go try out some stuff that you find out, man, that's junk. And so the next time Mark recommends something, I'm not going to check it out. That's a real problem. And so this no like and trust factor in what I'd call traditional relationship. Affiliate marketing is super important. So if you're starting a new business online and you hear me say, I think you should go look at affiliate marketing as a way to start that business online, what I'm going to recommend to you. Is that you start talking about something that you care about that you can help people with, and you create content around that topic, whether it's on TikTok or Instagram or YouTube or on a blog or in a podcast, wherever it is, you start creating content that helps people. And in the course of helping people, you recommend products that you like. This is no different than what you've been doing. Your entire life at the coffee shop or the barber shop or out at the bar when you're with your friends. If your friend needs an oil change and you love the place that you get your oil change, you recommend that to them. If your friend needs a plumber and you love the plumber that you use, you recommend the plumber. And if that plumber is a savvy market, That plumber will actually ask that customer where they heard about them, and they will maybe come by and drop off a$10 gift card for you as a thank you for the referral. It's a really, really good business practice that people use, and that's really a derivative of affiliate marketing. The difference in affiliate marketing on the computer is that all that bring me the gift card stuff is automated and we have the scale and power of the internet where we can reach. Thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people just like we are right now. So that's really cool. And, that's traditional affiliate marketing. I call that, this kind of relationship based affiliate marketing where you're trying to help people. And incidentally, as a result of that, you recommend products that will help those people and those products result in you earning a commission when people buy those. That's type. There's a second type of affiliate marketing that was super popular when I started on the internet, and I guess this would've been when I started messing around with internet business. This was in 2007, maybe 2009, when I got really serious about it, and that is often referred to as C P A. Marketing, cost per action, affiliate marketing, you'll see it under those terms. And this is a, a less personal, more technical in in some sense, form of affiliate marketing. And it's also, in many ways, considerably more simple. And the idea of this kind of affiliate marketing is this. The first thing you need to understand is that companies everywhere. They need people to buy their stuff. And so the way they do that is with marketing. And one of the tools that marketing people use is advertising, okay? You know this, right? If Toyota wants to sell more cars, they buy an ad for the Super Bowl. Well, there's all kinds of ads that you can buy, and you see them on the internet. They're banner ads on the websites that you visit. There are pop-up ads on YouTube. There's all kinds of ads all over the place. Well, one of. ADD network channels that you can buy is the, the so-called cost per action type channel. And there are companies out there, advertising companies, if you will, called affiliate networks that make a marriage between all the people like me who have internet marketing businesses and are in the business of getting and sending traffic to an offer and all the companies out there, like the weight loss companies and the insurance companies, and you name it, companies that are out there that have an offer where they just need lots of traffic. And so these affiliate networks, they sit in the middle of these two groups. The the publishers like me who have traffic to send somewhere and the companies that. People to see their product and these affiliate networks have these libraries of affiliate offers. And typically in this CPA business model, what's unique about these offers is they pay per action. Now in advertising, there's all kinds of ways that you might get paid for or, might have to pay for. If you're a company advertising the. Way is the way we talked about before. If I get a sale, I get a commission. That's just like if I'm a used car salesman and I sell the car, I get a few hundred dollars for selling that car. Okay. That's a commission based sale. If I work in a dress shop and I sell a dress and I'm working on commission, I get a commission for selling that dress. If you're a company on the other hand and you're buying advertis, The most common, traditional way that you buy advertising is you pay in terms of a cost for every thousand people that see your ad. So if you're buying an ad on the Super Bowl and you pay 5 million for a 62nd spot, or whatever, a Super Bowl ad costs, you expect so many tens of millions of people to see that ad. And you're paying based loosely on the number of people that are. Expected to see the ad you're paying per impression. Okay. You, you people are going to see it. We don't know what they're gonna do. We don't know if they're gonna pick up the phone. We don't know if they're gonna go to the car dealership the next day. We don't know what they're gonna do, but we expect them to see your ad. We actually don't even know if they saw it in the case of a Super Bowl ad. They might be up going to the restroom or getting another beer or filling the dip bowl. We don't know what they're doing, but we're paying for those eyeballs. The impressions that are in the Super Bowl ad. In the middle between cost per sale and cost per impression is this idea in the middle of cost per action. And that means we want to pay as a company that's advertising. We want to pay. in the event that we can get people to take a small action and that action might be leaving their email address, leaving their zip code, filling out some kind of form that gives me demographic information that I can use to pre-qualify the lead, that sort of thing. Filling out a small survey, for example, would be another example, and I might pay 50 cents, 30 cents, a dollar,$2, or maybe a lot more. For example, if I'm an attorney. That's doing a class action lawsuit. Like right now, there's this class action lawsuit around Camp La June where they're trying to find people that lived around Camp La June and got cancer due to some groundwater contamination or something like that. They're looking for people that were involved in that and they need to get the word out, and so you might be able to buy a cost per action offer where people fill out a survey. let's say that your audience is military types and there's this offer that's looking for people that were stationed at Camp La June. And for every military person or for every person that you send, that fills out a form where they say, were you in the military or not? Yes or no. If so, were you ever stationed at Camp Laun? Yes. Bingo. That company has found a prospect that they need to interrogate about this Camp Laun class action lawsuit. You can get paid for just finding that person, And having that person just accept the form. Here's another example. Let's say you've got a weight loss program like noom. You've probably seen Noom in your Facebook feed. Noom is a program where you can just send people and ask, Hey, do you want more information about losing weight? Sometimes it asks. What's your current weight or how many pounds do you need to lose? That's a better question. And basically, you're pre-qualifying these leads as people that Noom can market to that need to lose weight. And so that's very valuable to a company like Noom and they're willing, or Weight Watchers would be another really good example, and they're willing to pay for the lead. In that case, they're just paying for the lead. There's no sale. They pay you for the lead, and they're doing that because the sales are worth a lot more. The lifetime value of a Weight Watcher's customer that's paying$25 a month. The lifetime value of that customer might be a thousand dollars. They might stay for years. And so they're willing to pay a couple bucks a lot of times for these kind of leads, and that's what CPA Marketing is now usually. When we do cost per action marketing as a form of affiliate marketing, we buy paid traffic and we send that paid traffic to the offer and we fine tune it until we get a conversion rate where we can spend a dollar on paid traffic and maybe make a dollar 10 or a dollar 20 or a dollar. on the back end, right? So for every dollar we spend, we're making a dollar 30 and our net profit is 20 or 30 cents, right? That's the, that's the game with CPA marketing. In this case. There's no, no like, or trust. You're just an invisible person placing ads and driving that ad traffic to someone else's offer and getting. It's a mechanical kind of thing. There's no presence for you online, none of that. You're just driving traffics to ads. You don't get to know anyone. Your face is not on YouTube, and that's really attractive for people. Who don't want to be known. They're maybe they're more technical and they're good with numbers and spreadsheets, and they love the idea of figuring out these kind of technical puzzles and running split tests and deciding whether the green webpage converts better than the red webpage, all that kind of stuff. If that's, Then CPA marketing, cost per action Marketing is a second kind of affiliate marketing that could be really interesting for you. So those are the two kinds of affiliate marketing, this kind of relationship based. Helping people, affiliate marketing where you're recommending products. And then there's this kind of just anonymous ad-based affiliate marketing where you're just driving traffic to offers. And those are usually c p A offers and you're usually making, uh, you know, a 10, 20, 30% profit on that sort of business. And that's really interest. Now, one thing to talk about here is that there's an interesting situation where you can have a hybrid of these two. And I really like this and when I, when I'm coaching people on how to set up an affiliate marketing business, I always. Tell them to look for in their niche, the kind of offer that would lend itself to a CPA type of play, a paid traffic kind of play. So for example, let's say you're going to create a Type one affiliate business around. People who play guitar, you're gonna help them learn how to play guitar. You're gonna create YouTube videos about playing guitar. You're going to teach them how to play different songs. You're going to review guitars online, do all this kind of stuff, and occasionally you're going to make a recommendation about, uh, guitar course that you think they should take or a type of guitar that you think they should buy. That's great. And that's a, that by itself is a fine. Affiliate marketing niche for you to go get in. There are lots of things to sell in the guitar niche. Okay, so that's a good one. The question is, are there also CPA things in that niche? And you can look in the affiliate networks and be, and here's the reason why. It might be interesting to know that if you could find a cost per action offer in your niche that was interesting, you could buy cold traffic. and you could drive it to that offer, but you could make a small adjustment. You could set up a landing page where you actually captured that leads email before you sent them onto the offer. And if you could do that, if you could collect emails and just break even with people that were looking for information or some kind of product in the guitar. all of a sudden you would have a situation where a company, some guitar company, maybe it was a, a guitar lesson company with a CPA offer, was paying you money to send cold traffic to their offer that you were intercepting their, that email address. Let's say you had a landing page and you and your landing page said, Hey, my name is Mark. I just found this amazing guitar course. If you want to hear about it, put in your email address and I'll send you the information. They put in their email address. You send them to the CPA offer. You get paid a dollar 50 cents,$2, whatever it is. If you could work that out where. It paid for your traffic and you were breaking even, or maybe even losing a little bit of money. Let's say leads were costing you a dime, and then you were adding those people to your email list in a way that was helpful to them and allowed them to know, like, and trust you. all of a sudden you're able to create this large and growing stream of. Into your affiliate marketing business where you can develop a relationship with people, get them to know, like, and trust you, but they're coming from this traffic that got paid for by this other company, and that's a really, really interesting way that you can combine these two business models. The no like and trust affiliate marketing business model with the completely anonymous paid traffic business model by capturing that email address in the middle and then building a relationship with those people over email. And that part, that building a relationship part, getting started on, that's pretty. You just write five or 10 emails that you send at first once every couple of days, and then maybe once a week where people get to know you and you, you send'em a lot of free, fantastic information and they either stay subscribed or they unsubscribed and in the end
you
Mark 2:end up with subscribers that someone else paid for. And that's a magical thing. So that's what I wanted to do today is distinguish these two kinds of affiliate marketing for you. I hope that's helpful for you. Now, next week I want to give you some more information about cost per action affiliate marketing, because for those of you that aren't interested in building a personal relationship online with people like I'm building with you right now, I mean, I'm in your. Right now we're talking, we're having a conversation. It's the magic of podcasting. I love it. And you know, if you send email to feedback at LateNightInternetMarketing.com LateNightIM.com, im.com, either one, they both work. If you send email to me, I'll answer it. We have a relationship, right by virtue of the fact that you are listening to my podcast. But if that's not for you, If you're a, an extreme introvert, and the last thing in the world you could possibly imagine wanting to do is having a relationship with people that you don't know, then this other CPA thing might be for you. And we're gonna talk a little bit about that in the next episode. So, until then, I hope you're having an amazing holiday season wherever you are in the world. and I can't wait to talk to you next week.
C.