If you listened into yesterdays radio show, or you saw yesterdays blog post (Half Penny Facebook ‘LIKES’ and Episode 6 Wrap Up), then you obviously came back today to find out how I actually took this page I grew in 4-days and turned a (small) profit. I’ll be honest about it, the profit from the Pug experiment is nothing more than a happy result and proof of concept. Now that we have the proof of concept, all I need to do (and you) is simply “turn the dial” and scale it up. Which we’ll do over the next few weeks, and of course I’ll share everything I learn.
Let’s imagine you’re a super hip early 20’s woman who is, by all definitions, extremely popular. Now let’s imagine a new local clothing boutique opens in your city. This boutique is going to reach out to you and say, “Hey Ms. Popular, if you tell your friends to come shop at our new store, we will write you a commission check for 50% of every item they purchase with us.”
Customer X spends $75 with Vendor and indicates to the vendor that you referred them. Vendor turns around and pays the affiliate $37.50 (50% commission).
That is affiliate marketing.
No upfront cost for the Vendor. No upfront cost for the Affiliate. It is all performance based. If the Affiliate doesn’t make any sales – oh well. If the Affiliate goes crazy and triples the Vendors revenue – everyone is happy.
Now think of this in a digital realm.
Johnny Vendor in Miami, FL sells handmade Christmas tree ornaments made out of coconuts. Johnny Vendor is really creative but couldn’t sell his way out of a paper bag. Johnny Vendor also makes all of his coconut ornaments in his basement when he has spare time and has no store front to sell them out of. But Johnny really wants to spend this Christmas in Tahiti, so he’d really like to sell 500 coconut ornaments.
If Johnny is serious about getting to Tahiti, he’s going to set up a vendor account on any number of affiliate marketing web sites. For example, ClickBank.com, JVZoo.com, or ProductPay.com. Johnny is willing to give up a 75% commission to anyone who can sell his coconuts. On Johnny’s end, he sets up a simple landing page and sets up his own process for handling the orders.
Now, Amanda Banana’s in Bozeman, MT sees his post and happens to know of a niche of people located in Nassau, Bahamas who would love these coconuts. Amy reaches out to her list (a “list” being personal contacts, e-mail list, Facebook page, Twitter, anything really), she sends her own personal affiliate URL (which is trackable) to Johnny’s Coconut site.
Any order that is placed with Johnny’s Coconuts that contains Amanda’s referral link will instantly send her 75% commission into her virtual bank account, and Johnny his 25% (less the 3rd parties cut). Johnny ships out the coconuts and everyone is happy!
Armed with this information I took to ClickBank.com. I ran a simple search for “Dogs” which returned all dog related items that vendors had uploaded to the site. Knowing (because of my demographic research through QuantCast.com) that my demographic was largely Hispanic, and generally lower income, I chose a few items that I felt really fit. A Homemade dog treat cookbook, a few different dog training eBooks, a couple cheap dog toys, etc.
As you can see in the image above, I also used a Google Translator to translate my sales pitch into Spanish.
Admittedly, and you’ll know if you listened to the radio show, I did not promote this post. If I was going to go “hard in the paint” and really monetize this, I would have made this post exactly as I did, then I would have gone through Facebook’s Power Editor and paid another $5-$10 to promote this post onto the News Feeds of those that ‘like’ the Pug page.
I haven’t made a blog post about it yet, but to understand how the News Feed works, you have to understand how Facebook’s hidden Edge Rank algorithm works. Just because the Pug page has nearly 6,000 ‘likes’, doesn’t mean 6,000 people will see the post. A very small percentage of that actually. But we’ll save those messy details for another day.
To tie together yesterday and today’s post, I’ll wrap up with a quick outline of the whole process.
- Choose a “sexy” Facebook niche
- Create your Facebook page
- Do your keyword research
- Research your target demographics
- Create an eye catching ad image
- Write simple, straight to the point ad copy
- Define an audience of 1.5 to 7 million and daily budget accordingly
- Schedule 4-6 daily posts to grow your Edge Rank
- Once your page grows to 5,000-10,000 ‘LIKES’ – monetize.
- Set up an account with an affiliate program and identify products to sell
- Post your external affiliate link
- Promote that post through Facebook’s Power Editor (NOT the “Boost Post” option)
I had to gloss over a few points for the sake of brevity. But if you have any questions at all, please ask in the comments! For the shy, feel free to send me an e-mail, or shoot me a Facebook message. I’m giving everyone the tools to do exactly what I am currently doing and I would love to give you the opportunity to share your results right here.
Feel free to brag if you’re executing any of these strategies!
Dallas McLaughlin
The Business Owner's Guide To
As a business owner you are inherently a decision maker and it’s a function of your job to make consistently good decisions in critical moments. But no two decisions are exactly same. Having a deep understanding of how decisions are made and having the tools to create consistent decision making frameworks are necessary to make more rapid and impactful decisions on a daily basis.
