Affiliate Marketing Lead Generation Strategies That Actually Work
New leads daily are the foundation to building a successful affiliate marketing business. If you aren’t getting new leads it could be a major reason you aren’t making money with affiliate marketing. In this post, you’ll learn some affiliate marketing lead generation strategies that actually work, so you won’t have to worry about how to get leads for affiliate marketing ever again.
Define your niche and target market before you try and get leads for affiliate marketing
One common problem many affiliate marketers running to when they’re just getting started is they don’t have a specific target market or niche they are trying to market to. When you market to everyone you really market to no one. So as a foundation you want to pick a niche you’re going to market to.
If you don’t already have specific affiliate products you are marketing, you want to decide what niche you want to help and serve. If you do already have an affiliate marketing business, take some time to study your target market and niche. Do this before you jump into promoting and selling.
Some key areas that you want to focus on to sell affiliate products effectively are things like knowing your target markets pain points, goals, as well as needs and wants. When you know these things about your target market, you will target the right people with your content and offers.
Congruence is one thing you need to have throughout your business when it comes to selling affiliate marketing products. All of your lead generation strategies for affiliate marketing will be based on your specific target market and niche.
So make sure you spend some time learning about your target market. Learn what they want, what they want to avoid, and where they hang out. Get yourself in the mindset of your ideal customer, before you try and generate leads or make sales in affiliate marketing.
Foundations for all success in affiliate marketing
Now that you have decided on a niche and target market to focus on, there are 3 areas you are going to base your affiliate marketing lead generation strategy on. The three foundation areas you want to focus on for building a successful affiliate marketing business are building your audience, engaging your audience, and finally selling to your audience.
If you aren’t generating leads for affiliate marketing a big reason is probably that you are in pitch mode. Certainly focusing on selling is a part of building a successful affiliate marketing business, however when you only focus on selling you push away many potential customers.
Step one is to build an audience in your target market. Since you’ve taken the time to fully understand your target market and niche, you should know where they hang out online.
At this point, you want to start building a following on various social media platforms consisting of your target market. Continue to build this list of connections with your ideal niche. Doing this will give you a large pool of people to talk to you about your affiliate marketing business.
One reason why a lot of home business owners struggle is because they feel like they’ve run out of people to talk to. By making building your audience a priority as part of your affiliate marketing strategy, you will never run into the problem I’m having people you share your business with.
Engage your audience to generate affiliate marketing leads
As your audience continues to grow, you want to start creating content that will engage the audience and develop a relationship with them. The key to this is leading with value first.
The content you create should focus on solving your target markets pain points, answering their questions, and helping them achieve results faster. When your content is based around these things it will start to build trust, rapport, and credibility with your audience.
All things being equal, people tend to do business with those that they know like and trust. As you create this kind of engaging content it will help build that kind of relationship with your audience.
I’ll go more in-depth on what kind of content you should create and what platforms have effective lead generation strategies later. Understand engaging your audience an essential step to making money with affiliate marketing.
Sell to your audience
The third foundation step for how to generate leads and sales with affiliate marketing is to focus on selling. Ideally you want to follow the 80/20 rule. Where 80% of your content is value-based answering your target markets questions and serving your audience, and 20% is focused on selling.
People love to buy they hate to be sold. This is why you need to focus more on value with offers scattered throughout your content vs. only selling. When you lead with education and value, people feel like they are buying on their own decisions versus being sold.
Following this affiliate marketing strategy is one of the best ways to increase sales and sell to your audience.
Develop a lead magnet
Now that you understand the foundations of success for online marketing and affiliate marketing, your first step is going to be to develop a lead magnet. Having a quality lead magnet is the foundation for how to get leads for affiliate marketing.
If you aren’t familiar with what a lead magnet is, it’s basically something of value you give away for free in exchange for your target market’s, name, email, and phone number. The phone number part is optional, but if you do request it, the leads you generate will be much higher quality.
It also gives you the opportunity to follow up over the phone with people. When it comes to selling affiliate marketing products especially higher ticket items, being able to talk with someone on the phone will greatly increase your closing ratio.
You’ll need some tools to promote your lead magnet as well, but I’ll cover that further on in this post. You may also want to check out this post all about lead magnets click here to see it.
What should your lead magnet be
Another common question new affiliate marketers have is what should your lead magnet actually be. Well, you should have a good sense of this based on your earlier research on your target market and niche.
When you know your target markets pain points, common questions, and goals, you have a strong foundation of what your lead magnet should be.
For example, if your niche was in health, wellness, and weight loss, your lead magnet should be focused on common problems of that niche. In this case, you could create a lead magnet that would help people lose weight faster.
This could be something like an eating guide, fitness journal, or video workout series. There are a lot of ways to make quality lead magnets.
If you’re just getting started I recommend something like an ebook, audio training, or video series. All of these options can be created for free, and in most cases, you’re able to do this with just a smartphone or computer access.
Overall though, understand that to have a lead magnet be an effective affiliate marketing lead generation strategy, it needs to be something your target market actually wants.
How to create a lead magnet
So you may be wondering how do you actually create a lead magnet. This process is rather simple, depending on what kind of lead magnet you want to create.
Let’s start off with an ebook or PDF guide. This option isn’t terribly difficult as you can simply write Word document or Google doc, and save it as a PDF. You can now store this PDF in a Google Drive and set it up to be shareable.
You want to set this link to be viewable by anyone who has access to the link. Now when someone opts into your lead magnet and enters their name and email, you can have that link delivered to them through an email autoresponder.
I’ll cover more in depth later in the post on what an email autoresponder is, and how you can use it effectively. As you’ll use it in conjunction with your affiliate marketing lead generation strategies.
Other simple types of lead magnets you can deliver through Google Drive to your new leads are video and audio training. If you have a smartphone you should have the capability to create these lead magnets.
Simply choose a topic that serves your target market in the audience. Then create a few recordings either video or audio. You can now give these away in exchange for your target market’s email address, name, and phone number.
Then you simply deliver them through your email autoresponder with a link from Google Drive.
How to position your lead magnet as something people actually want
A lot of times I see people trying to generate leads for affiliate marketing on their sites and content, but they focus on just what it is. No one really cares what it is but rather how it helps them.
For example, a lot of people just tell people to join their newsletter list. Certainly, that’s better than nothing, but a newsletter list doesn’t really focus on the audience’s problems and desires.
When you talk about your lead magnets, you always want to frame them in a way that focuses on your target market. You always want to be thinking about what’s in it for them.
Speak to the benefits your target market will receive by accessing your lead magnet. Don’t just tell them what it is, tell them why and how it’s going to help them.
When you position your lead magnet in this fashion, it is one of the most effective ways how to generate leads for affiliate marketing.
Set up a sales funnel system
Now that you have a quality lead magnet to generate leads for affiliate marketing, you want to set up a sales funnel system. Doing this will help automate the process. A sales funnel system is a series of web pages that can help you get leads for affiliate marketing and even make sales on autopilot.
Typically a sales funnel system is what many affiliate marketers use as you don’t need an extensive background in website design or coding. With a sales funnel system such as Clickfunnels, you will have done-for-you templates.
This way you can simply adjust them to your business an affiliate products you sell. This can be much easier to use and get results with versus trying to make everything from scratch on your own. If you’d like to check out a free trial Clickfunnels to start setting up your sales funnel system click here.
You may also want to check out my free lead generation boot camp. It goes more in-depth lead generation strategies to use with a sales funnel system. Click here to access my free lead generation boot camp.
Set up an email autoresponder
The final tool you’ll want to have in place as a part of your lead generation strategy for affiliate marketing is an email autoresponder. This is where your leads go after you generate them. It will allow you to use one of the best marketing strategies to sell affiliate products as well. The strategy of email marketing.
Email marketing is a very powerful strategy to sell affiliate products and even generate new affiliate marketing leads. Typically as you sell products most people are not going to buy the first time they are exposed to your business.
This means you need to find a marketing strategy that allows you to continue to provide value to your audience and develop a relationship with them. Email marketing is one such strategy.
However, to do this effectively, you will need to set up an email autoresponder. This allows you to send a broadcast to your entire list at once. It can save you massive amounts of time in addition to helping you automate your business.
If you’re just getting started with email marketing I’d recommend setting up Aweber as your email autoresponder. It’s low-cost and simple-to-use with affiliate marketing and email marketing.
If you’d like to access a free 30-day trial of Aweber click here.
Video marketing as a means of lead generation for affiliate marketing
Now that you have the foundation tools and system setup, it’s time to start promoting your affiliate offers to get leads for your affiliate marketing business. One effective affiliate marketing lead generation strategy is video marketing.
Video marketing is so powerful because it is one of the best ways to build trust, rapport, and credibility with your audience. When someone sees you on video, they see you are a real person. They also get a sense of your personality and who you are.
People like doing business with people, not just faceless companies. This is why video marketing is one of the most effective lead generation strategies for affiliate marketing.
You’ll want to use video marketing in all aspects of promotion for your affiliate marketing business. On your lead magnets, capture pages, as well as in your content.
The more you can put you in the mix, the better. It may sound strange, but two people can be promoting the exact same product, but some people will resonate more with one person over another.
This is why you want to be you and your marketing. Do this in combination with video marketing as a way to generate leads for affiliate marketing.
How to structure your videos to get leads for affiliate marketing
Now you may be wondering what you should talk about in your videos. Or how you should structure your videos as a way to get leads for affiliate marketing. This is a common area people struggle with when they start with video marketing. Thankfully there is a simple 4 step structure you should follow.
I first heard about this format from a video marketer Mark Harbert. When you follow this video marketing format, you will start to get leads for affiliate marketing in no time.
The first part of your video should just be an intro. This is simply telling your audience who you are. In my case, for example, I usually say something like, “Hey guys this is Mike from CoachMikeMacDonald.com.”
It’s simple and to the point and tells your audience who you are. Most people seeing your content for the first time don’t know who you are and you shouldn’t assume they do either.
The next step of this video marketing formula is to draw your audience in with an effective question or hook. Since you understand your niche and target market, you want to speak to their pain points, common questions, and desires.
It might sound something like this, “Are you sick of spending hours in the gym and seeing little to no results? Well in today’s video I’m going to give you four simple steps to lose 10 lbs in the next 30 days.”
This opening hook will draw your audience in and leave them wanting to watch the rest of your content.
The 3rd and 4th steps for how to get leads for affiliate marketing with video marketing
The third step is pretty simple, and it is just to answer the question or hook you used in step two. You want to do a thorough job of answering the question and sharing value to your audience.
Video length isn’t as important as the fact that you answer the question you posed in your hook. I’d suggest your video be at least 3 minutes, but beyond that simply do what it takes to answer the question.
The fourth step of this video marketing strategy to get leads for affiliate marketing is to use a call to action. A call to action is simply telling your audience to do something.
You can tell them to go to your sales page directly or point them to a resource like a lead magnet you create. This will help you build your email list, and start to get leads for your affiliate marketing business.
If you’d like to learn more about using video marketing to build an affiliate marketing business check out this free training.
Use blogging as a strategy for how to get leads for affiliate marketing
Blogging is another effective affiliate marketing lead generation strategy that actually works. One big advantage of blogging over other social media platforms is that you own it.
Your blog and website should be your hub where you put all of your content. Other social media platforms are great, and you’ll learn how to use them are there in this post, but I understand you don’t control those platforms.
This means that the platform could get shut down, change their policies, or just simply become unpopular. If your primary focus is on the strategies and they go away, you’re out of business.
This is why you should have blogging as one of your essential marketing strategies. Use it for lead generation and promoting your affiliate marketing business. You might also want to check out my free download of how to write the perfect blog post below!
Utilize SEO marketing with blogging to generate leads for affiliate marketing
Another great benefit to blogging is that you can utilize SEO marketing for how to get leads for affiliate marketing. When you write a blog post it becomes searchable content on Google and other search engine platforms.
This becomes very powerful because your blog posts are evergreen content. Evergreen content is basically content you can create once, but it will continue to work for you over and over again forever.
Also since blog posts can be found through SEO, that means you can eventually generate a lot of free traffic with them. The more eyeballs you have on your offers and lead magnets, the more leads and sales you’ll generate with affiliate marketing.
When you base your content around SEO, another advantage you get is you know that people are actually looking for content like yours. This means that when someone reaches your blog they are going to be a highly targeted visitor your site.
Generating leads for affiliate marketing isn’t always about quantity, quality matters as well. When you generate leads through your blog that comes from SEO, it is typically a very high-quality lead.
Use a P.S. line to get leads for affiliate marketing
Another affiliate marketing lead generation strategy that actually works in conjunction with blogging is using a P.S. line at the bottom of your posts.
The P.S. line is basically the written version of a call to action from video marketing I covered above. With a P.S. line, you can direct people to both sales pages and lead magnets that promote your affiliate marketing products.
You can use P.S. lines in conjunction with the 80/20 rule I covered earlier as well. The content you create should be value-based, which is 80%, and your P.S. line is the sales pitch or call the action as the 20%.
You can also use the P.S. line in email marketing to generate quality leads for your affiliate marketing business. If you’d like to learn more about how to make money with blogging check out this post.
How to use Instagram for affiliate marketing
Instagram marketing is another effective strategy to generate leads for affiliate marketing. The foundation to all social media marketing for lead generation is having a quality profile.
Check out the picture below to see my Instagram profile as an example. The basis is to tell a little bit about yourself, and how you serve your audience.
In my case, I say that I am a nerd, gamer, and business coach and that I teach people how to build a profitable business from home.
Another option could be something like fun-loving Mom, entrepreneur, and world traveler. I help people save on travel and live the life of their dreams.
The idea is to talk a little bit about yourself and how you help people. From there, your profile should consist of mainly lifestyle posts and value.
Instagram marketing, like with other platforms should still follow the 80/20 rule. 80% of your content should be value-based, and only 20% should be selling.
The way to generate leads through Instagram for affiliate marketing is to put in an affiliate link or capture page link in your bio. Moving forward as you create content, or get new followers, you want to direct them to your free offer or sales page in your bio.
This is just scratching the surface of how to get leads for affiliate marketing with Instagram. If you’d like to access a more in-depth free training on Instagram marketing Click Here.
How to use Twitter marketing to generate leads for affiliate marketing
Using Twitter marketing for lead generation is very similar to Instagram marketing. You want to set up a quality profile as the foundation.
When you connect with your target market and in people in your niche, your profile is the first thing they will look at. If you don’t have a quality profile, it’s going to be hard to build an audience on Twitter.
One effective lead generation strategy for affiliate marketing on Twitter is utilizing a pinned post. The pinned post is a tweet you write that stays permanently at the top of your profile.
Ideally, you want this pinned post to be directing someone to your lead magnet. Every time you get a new follower, someone likes, or retweets a post, is very likely they will visit your profile.
If your pinned tweet is going to a lead magnet, this means you’ll get a lot of exposure for that lead magnet. The more people that see it, the more likely someone is too opt in and become a lead.
This is one of the most effective ways to get leads for affiliate marketing through Twitter. Certainly, there’s more to it than this, so if you’d like to check out a course on Twitter marketing click here.
This course is actually helped me to generate thousands of leads and get sales and sign us on autopilot through Twitter. I highly recommend it. Get instant access to the course here.
Email marketing to get leads for affiliate marketing
As a final marketing strategy on this post that works in conjunction with all of the strategies listed above, you should do email marketing. As you build your email list it will give you plenty of opportunities to re-market your affiliate offers.
You can even generate new leads for affiliate marketing with new products you promote.
As I talked about earlier many people will not buy your affiliate offer the first time you see it. Many people will visit your website once and never return.
However, if you do have a way to capture their information and get an email lead, it gives you an opportunity to re-market and develops a relationship with that visitor.
Using your quality lead magnet in conjunction with email marketing, you can generate significant income with email marketing. It is one of the best ways to sell affiliate products. It is one area you should focus on to get leads for affiliate marketing.
Similar to many of the other affiliate marketing strategies, email marketing should follow the 80/20 rule as well. A majority of your email blasts should be centered around value-based content.
Then around 20% should be promoting your affiliate products and offers. As with a blog post a P.S. line is an effective way to drive traffic to your affiliate offers and sales pages. Implement email marketing in conjunction with other lead generation strategies and you’ll be earning affiliate marketing commissions in no time.
If you enjoyed this post on how to get leads for affiliate marketing, you may also enjoy my 20 online marketing hacks that actually work. Check out the free PDF download below.
Did This Blog Help You? If so, I would greatly appreciate if you could comment below and share on Facebook
Facebook: facebook.com/coachmikemacdonald
Email: [email protected]
Considering Starting a Home Business? Apply For A Free Coaching Call Here
“I help coachable and teachable professionals become Financially Free and Live Full Time! Helping you create a better tomorrow through a better you!”
P.S. If you don’t yet have an affiliate marketing business, but would like to learn how to start one and make money from home, CLICK HERE
If you enjoyed this post on Affiliate Marketing Lead Generation Strategies That Actually Work, please retweet and comment below
