The Affiliate Marketing Backend

Posted at February 6, 2010

One of my favorite sessions at NAMS was by Nicole Dean. She went over several different ways to increase profit, including testing, repurposing and more. I’ve been doing some of that (and of course there are always ways to do more), but the one thing I hadn’t really worked on much was getting my backend in place.

What’s Your Backend?

And no, I’m not talking body parts here. The backend mainly comes into play when you are selling your own products. The idea is that you have one or more lower priced products and then offer more related and advanced products, coaching etc. to your existing customers.

Since I am mostly an affiliate marketer, I never really thought this whole “backend thing” would apply to me. But Nicole’s talk showed me just how profitable this could be and got me thinking about how I could work some backend products and service into my affiliate marketing. Here are a few things I am implementing right now:

Offer A Bonus

The secret to working some back end products into your affiliate marketing is to create a list of buyers. When you start to think about it, it really doesn’t matter if they are buying your product or one that you are promoting as an affiliate – provided you can capture their name and email address in some way.

An easy way to do this is to offer a bonus to complement the product you are promoting as an affiliate. Let’s say you are promoting a fat-burning workout program designed to help people lose weight. An easy bonus would be to offer a 4 week meal plan that complements the program, or a short report with 50 easy snack recipes that will satisfy you and keep your metabolism running high.

You could then have people forward you their order receipt and you can add them to a list and email them their bonus. Of, if that sounds like too much work, you can use a tool like CB List Automator which will allow you to capture people’s emails automatically and set up a follow up email that will send out the bonus.

I’m playing with this software right now and will let you know how it’s working out shortly. Expect to see some affiliate offers with some great bonuses down the road on this blog as well :)

Once you have the email addresses of those buyers, you can then offer them more complimentary products down the road. If you are building a list of fatloss workout folks, you could send affiliate offers for workout equipment or motivational CDs and DVDs, or even different workout programs to add variety. Can you see how easy it would be to work in a variety of backend products that are all affiliate offers?

Write A Report

I already mentioned that you don’t have to have a full fledged series of products of your own to benefit from backend marketing, but you may want to offer your own product. You can start with something as simple as a 10 page report and sell it for around $10. Within that report you can offer affiliate products, and you can also follow up with your customer list and recommend other peoples products.

One benefit of having your own product is that you get other affiliates to promote it for you. Since your main goal is to build a list of buyers that you can then offer other related affiliate products to, you can be generous and offer a 100% commission to your own affiliates which can quickly get your report to spread all over the internet.

Let’s go back to our fat-burning workout example. I could easily put together a short 10 to 15 page report on various ways to increase your metabolism. One of the points in that report would be that each pound of muscle makes you burn an extra 50 calories per day without having to move at all. Then within the report I could suggest that they try the fatloss quickie workouts to burn fat and increase muscle mass.

I could also put a little note in the report that would allow anyone to promote it for a 100% commission. You can do this through pretty much any shopping cart, but I really like Rapid Action Profits because it makes these 100% commissions easy to set up and your affiliates will be paid via paypal as soon as they make the sale.

I hope these ideas will get you thinking about integrating an affiliate marketing backend and skyrocket your profits. I’m going to work on these using the two scripts I mentioned and will let you know how they are working out for me.

In the meantime I’d love to hear your ideas on implementing this in your own marketing efforts.

Susanne Myers

P.S. I mentioned testing at the beginning of this post. I’ll go into a few easy ways to start testing in the next couple of posts. If you’re not already subscribed to the email updates for this blog, you may want to do that now so you don’t miss out.

You may also like to read:

  1. Affiliate Marketing Beginnings – Don’t Get Overwhelmed
  2. Sub Niche Marketing – Why It May Just Be Your Ticket To Affiliate Success
  3. Using PLR Articles In Affiliate Marketing – An Interview With Nicole Dean
  4. How To Find Affiliate Products For Your Niche
  5. Twitter As A Marketing Tool For Affiliates – Does It Work?

Affiliate Marketing

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