Want to make money online by selling someone else’s products?
Then you need to understand that the real money is in building your email list – once you have it, you can monetize it by promoting affiliate products.
That’s why today we are going to discuss the five keys to succeeding with email marketing.
#1 Build a Value Ladder Sales Funnel
Email marketing doesn’t exist in isolation – it’s an integral part of any well-designed sales funnel.
That’s why you need to build your sales funnel first if you want to succeed with email marketing.
What Is the Value Ladder Sales Funnel?
We believe that the most effective way to sell anything online is the Value Ladder sales funnel.
It was created by our co-founder Russel Brunson who then used it to take ClickFunnels from zero to $10M+ in annual revenue in just one year (it’s at $100M+ now!).
This sales funnel has four stages:
- Bait. You offer the potential customer your lead magnet in exchange for their email address.
- Frontend. You offer the potential customer your least expensive and least valuable product or service.
- Middle. You offer the customer a more expensive and valuable product or service.
- Backend. You offer the customer your most expensive and most valuable product or service.
Ideally, you also offer a continuity program of some sort, meaning, a subscription product that generates recurring revenue.
We also recommend adding downsells, upsells, and cross-sells to these core offers in order to maximize your revenue.
The reason why this sales funnel works so well is that it allows you to:
- Start the relationship with that person by offering free value.
- Nurture that relationship by continuing to provide free value via email.
- Build trust by providing progressively more paid value at each stage.
Here’s how Russel explains it:
Building a Value Ladder sales funnel for your affiliate marketing business is the best way to maximize your sales, revenue, and profits.
How To Build a Value Ladder Sales Funnel for Affiliate Marketing
Fortunately, you don’t need to build the entire Value Ladder in one go – you can start with a lead magnet and a frontend offer, then add more offers over time.
Step #1: Create a Super Valuable Lead Magnet
A lead magnet is a freebie that you offer to potential customers in exchange for their email address.
It can be anything that they can either access online or download to their device:
- An ebook.
- A webinar.
- A video course.
- An email course.
- A video masterclass.
…etc.
What matters here is that:
- Your lead magnet provides a solution to a problem that the potential customer is struggling with.
- That problem is either the same one or related to the one that your frontend offer addresses.
With your own products, this is pretty straightforward because you can simply give away a piece of the product as a sample.
Say, authors often use a free chapter as a lead magnet, then follow it up with a sales pitch for the book.
However, when it comes to affiliate marketing, it’s typically more complicated because you can’t just give away a piece of someone else’s product unless they provide it to you for the specific purpose of generating leads.
Meanwhile, creating your own educational lead magnet might mess up the continuity of your sales funnel because people who liked your lead magnet may not like the affiliate product due to differences in branding, presentation, personality, etc.
We recommend writing up a case study on how you got results with the affiliate product, turning that case study into a PDF, and then using that PDF as a lead magnet.
That way, your lead magnet will not only set the stage for the upcoming affiliate product pitch but it will also serve as social proof for it.
Step #2: Create a Squeeze Page For Your Lead Magnet
Once you have your lead magnet, it’s time to create a landing page for it.
We recommend going with a squeeze page which is the most basic type of landing page and should have these three key elements:
- A headline that conveys what your free offer is all about.
- An opt-in form where the potential customer can type in their email address. It can be either shown immediately or displayed after they click the call-to-action button.
- A call-to-action button that encourages the potential customer to get the lead magnet.
You might also want to experiment with adding a subheadline, more copy, social proof, etc. Just make sure to A/B test everything!
If you have never created a squeeze page before, we recommend going with a squeeze page template instead of designing one from scratch.
ClickFunnels comes with a library of proven, high-converting templates – all you need to do is choose the one that you like the most and then customize it according to your needs with our visual page editor.
Why waste time reinventing the wheel when you could use templates that have been proven to work?
By the way, we use our software to create squeeze pages for our own lead magnets.
Say, here’s our “The Funnel Hacker’s Cookbook” squeeze page:
Step #3: Create a Bridge Page For Your Frontend Offer
You don’t need to create a sales page for the affiliate product that you are selling because it should be provided by the company that created it.
However, we don’t recommend sending your email subscribers directly to the sales page, as that can disrupt the continuity of your sales funnel.
Instead, you want to send them to a bridge page which will serve as a bridge between your email list and the affiliate offer.
Ideally, the bridge page should feature a video where you share your experiences with the product.
However, if you are using a case study as your lead magnet, it’s important to make sure that the case study and the bridge page video don’t overlap too much in terms of content.
In fact, you can use the case study to set up the stage for the bridge page video, then use the bridge page video to set up the stage for the sales pitch.
You can do that by mentioning something in the case study, then sharing the whole story in the bridge page video and encouraging the potential customer to get the affiliate product.
How To Drive Traffic to Your Value Ladder Sales Funnel
Okay, now you have your sales funnel all set up, but how can you drive traffic to it?
We believe that the best way to do that is paid advertising because paid traffic is predictable, measurable, and scalable.
All major social media platforms allow you to run paid advertising campaigns:
- Instagram.
- LinkedIn.
- Twitter.
- YouTube.
- TikTok.
Choose the platform that makes the most sense for your niche, set a small daily budget, and start running ads.
Keep in mind that your ad campaign might require some tweaking – it probably won’t be profitable immediately. Only start scaling it once you figure out how to run ads profitably.
Paid advertising can also help you optimize your sales funnel for conversions:
- Look at the conversion rates of all pages in your sales funnel.
- Identify the weakest link. Which page converts the worst?
- Figure out what the problem is and fix it.
…then move to the next weakest link.
Keep cycling through the pages in your sales funnel like that until you hit the point of diminishing returns with conversion rate optimization.
This can help you 2x, 5x, or even 10x your sales funnel profits!
Also, you don’t want to remain completely reliant on paid advertising forever, which is why you should also invest in building traffic-generating assets such as:
- A social media following.
- A YouTube channel.
- A niche blog.
This will take a while but once you gain momentum you will be able to drive traffic from these online assets to your lead magnet landing page.
#2 Add Exclusive Bonuses to Your Affiliate Offer
The problem with affiliate marketing is that you have a bunch of competition – not only other affiliates but also the company that created the product!
That’s why it’s so important to find a way to stand out – you need to give potential customers a reason to buy from you. And the best way to do that is to offer exclusive bonuses.
These bonuses should provide additional value that is somehow related to the problem that the product addresses.
Here are some ideas that you might want to consider:
- Case studies on how people got results with this product.
- Interviews with people who got results with this product.
- Guides, plans, and worksheets can help people get the most out of this product.
- Software that can help people get the most out of this product.
- Consultation with you that can help people get the most out of this product.
We recommend creating at least three exclusive bonuses to incentivize potential customers to buy this product from you.
You will also need to work out how to verify purchases and send verified customers their bonuses.
It doesn’t have to be a complex technological solution, though – you can simply ask people to email you the receipt or the order number and then email them their bonuses manually.
It’s simple but it can work well!
#3 Continue Providing Free Value to Your Email Subscribers
A common mistake that affiliate marketers make is that they get the potential customer’s email address, pitch the affiliate product to them, either get rejected or make a sale… And then just leave it at that.
But the real value of the email list isn’t in making one sale, it’s in building trust with your email subscribers.
The goal here isn’t to just make a quick buck, it’s to gradually build trust over an extended period of time so that you could then convert your subscribers into customers and then into repeat customers. Ideally, into customers for life!
You can build that trust by continuously providing free value. The best way to do that is to create an email newsletter because it gives you an excuse to email your subscribers every week. But what should you include in it?
Here are some ideas:
- Links to interesting content relevant to your niche. Articles, podcasts, YouTube videos, TikTok videos, Twitter threads, etc.
- Exclusive original content such as articles, how-to guides, and interviews with people in your niche.
- Customer case studies showcase how previous customers got the results they wanted with the affiliate products that you are selling.
This might seem like a lot of work…
But the reality is that building a sustainable business inevitably takes a lot of work – there’s just no way around it!
That being said, you can start small with a weekly link roundup newsletter, then expand to publishing original content.
#4 Build Out the Rest of Your Value Ladder
You should add more affiliate products to your Value Ladder over time but you need to be strategic about this.
Another common mistake that affiliate marketers make is bombarding their email subscribers with a bunch of different products that address the exact same problem.
They will promote this weight loss product one week, another weight loss product next week, a third weight loss product the week after that…
But this doesn’t make any sense when you think about it!
If someone has already bought a weight loss product from you, why would you then go and pitch them more weight loss products?
They already have a weight loss product, they don’t need another one!
What you want to do instead is to pitch them products that are complementary to the one they just bought.
Okay, now they know how to lose weight, what else might they want to learn?
Here are some ideas:
- Weight lifting products.
- Personal grooming products.
- Fashion and style products.
After all, if someone decided to lose weight, they then might be interested in other ways to improve their looks.
You want your sales funnel to follow a logical progression where your offers address different but related problems in a sequence that makes sense.
#5 Play the Long Game!
Affiliate marketing is a legitimate business model that you can use to build a sustainable business that will provide a better future for you and your family.
However, we have noticed that people often treat affiliate marketing as a way to make a quick buck, not as a serious business endeavor.
This is a self-defeating approach because chasing quick money inevitably leads to sacrificing long-term business potential.
The most common way this manifests is by selling dodgy products.
You can trick someone into buying useless junk once but that means that they will never buy from you again. Needless to say, this is not sustainable.
Another common way this manifests is by spamming your list with different products that address the exact same problem. We have already explained why this approach is nonsensical.
It’s easy to burn a good email list that way – the more you spam your subscribers with offers that aren’t relevant to them, the faster they will unsubscribe. Or, worse, mark your emails as “Spam” (and rightfully so!).
The reality is that you need to treat your email list with the respect it deserves if you want to build a sustainable business.
Imagine where you could be five years from now if you focused on growing your email list, building trust, and guarding your reputation.
Want Russel To Show You How To Build Your First Sales Funnel?
Let’s keep it real:
Building a sales funnel from scratch can seem like a daunting task.
That’s why we created our 5 Day Challenge where Russel walks you through it step-by-step.
You will learn how to:
- Generate unlimited leads.
- Create your first lead magnet.
- Build your first sales funnel.
- Create a simple 6-email follow-up sequence.
- And launch your funnel!
…in just five days.
So don’t hesitate.
