Already done

Starting an online business in affiliate marketing is much less complicated these days, thanks in large part to the new ‘done-for-you’ style of affiliate marketing resources available. One of the first innovations was brandable e-books, viral tools that let affiliates add their links to e-books written to promote a merchant’s product. And while that still required specific skills both to brand them and then market them, the innovative Viral E-Book Explosion site from Jeff Dedrick automated most of the process and started offering free brandable e-books to any affiliate that wants to use them.

The concept behind free brandable e-books is simple yet powerful – after branding the e-books with your affiliate links you give away as many copies as possible to targeted prospects with the hope that a reasonable percentage of them will then click through to the merchant’s site. If they then purchase the product in question you’ll make an affiliate commission, thanks in large part to that free e-book download you offered.

It didn’t take affiliates long to realize these free e-books were perfect enticements to use in the list-building giveaways. The concept behind these events is simple – a number of marketers all promote a page that links to a free download from each of the event’s partners. Visitors to the site choose the gifts they want to download and click through to each site in turn. After opting in to that marketer’s e-mail list they get to download the information for free – and by providing that information via a branded e-book, the partner is now able to earn commissions from his or her list-building activities.

These systems became known as ‘Squeeze pages’ – now a generic online marketing term for any group of pages designed to offer a free download to prospects who offer up their e-mail address in exchange for said free enticement. But still, you needed to know enough HTML to build those pages, usually consisting of a signup page, a confirmation page where the prospect is informed they must click a link in a confirmation e-mail to ensure the e-mail address given is legitimate, and then ultimately the download page itself.

Again, it didn’t take long for merchants to start supplying this whole system to their affiliates, once again automating the process and making it even more newbie-friendly. Then the next major step in the affiliate marketing evolution came fromCindy Battye & Soren Jordansen when they released their ClickBank Pirateservice.

ClickBank Pirate took this system to a much higher level by offering their members squeeze page systems complete with hosting and followup e-courses. The service chooses a product from ClickBank and writes a free report based on the same area of interest, creates a video squeeze page to offer it from and then follows up with an automated e-course designed to sell those prospects the ClickBank product via the member’s affiliate link. The free report, squeeze pages and autoresponders are all set up and hosted by CB Pirate, leaving the member affiliate to just drive targeted traffic to each month’s new squeeze page.

And then just this week Cindy & Soren released a new service that takes this all one step further up the affiliate marketing ladder with their new Affiliate Silver Bullets. The ASB system is very similar to CB Pirate except that it allows more advanced affiliate marketers to download and host the entire squeeze/autoresponder system on their own sites at Hosting4Marketers.com or any other online hosting company that also includes autoresponders in their user accounts.

As a result, the affiliate has control of the opt-in list each Affiliate Silver Bullet generates, being thereby in a position to follow up with those prospects with additional affiliate offers over time. And since the number of prospects on the affiliate’s opt-in lists should grow with each additional gift offered, their is a much better likelihood of building a sustainable affiliate marketing business that grows with time and effort.

Now that these ‘done-for-you’ affiliate marketing resources are available and can not only automate your affiliate commissions but even your affiliate list-building, just about all that’s left for you to do is become accomplished at driving targeted traffic to your affiliate offers, squeeze pages and blogs. Fortunately there are a number of free traffic sources you can learn to tap into, as discussed in the 3-hour Top Traffic Tips audio recorded by super-affiliates Willie Crawford and Doug Champigny to detail 15 free ways to drive targeted traffic.

There you have it – three powerful done-for-you affiliate marketing resources you should be suing already, along with tips as to where best to host your sites and lists and how to get traffic to them once you do. Or to really boost your affiliate marketing commissions quickly while building a true online business, enroll in ourAffiliate Marketing PowerStart coaching classes and learn to build automated affiliate marketing systems of your own to help you secure a truly profitable future!