How To Buy a Click Once and Resell it 1000 Times- Part 2 Long Term Money Secrets (9)
How To Buy a Click Once and Resell it 1000 Times- Part 2 Long Term Money Secrets
(Links to all parts: Part 1: INTRO | Part 2: Long Term Money Secrets | Part 3: List Segmentation | Part 4: Bridging the Gap | Part 5: Overcoming Duplication | Part 6: Surveying and Splintering)
Believe it or not, we are all in the “mail order” business. Sure it’s called “affiliate marketing” now, but it’s just an electronic version of the good old fashioned “mail order” business I fell in love with back in 1995.
The allure of “mail order” has been around forever. The promise is simple: mail a few letters (buy a few clicks), take the profits (commissions), mail a few more letters (buy a few more clicks), then use the profits to “roll out” (scale) and make a fortune (make a fortune). It’s enough to get your greed glands going, and the first time I “got it” all the way back in 1995, I was hooked.
The magic is in the leverage—it takes the same amount of time to mail 1,000 letters as it does a million letters, but clearly there’s a difference in the actual amount of money you make, IF you can get there. Same thing with clicks in our brave new electronic world—it takes about the same amount of time to buy 1000 clicks as it does a million, but if you can profitably convert those million clicks, then do it over and over, well, then you aren’t drinking Yellow Tail on wine night anymore.
Affiliate marketing has been around way before Al Gore invented the internet. Sharp mail order operators like Dean F Duvall would sell a “program” that gave you an id, the rights to use the sales letter provided to sell Dean’s products, “camera ready art,” the contact information of a printer/mailing house (owned by Dean’s brother, of course), and the name of a list broker (who kicked back to Dean). All the affiliate had to do was mail the letter to the lists, orders would be sent to Dean, he would take them, ship them out, and Dean would send you an 80% commission (as well as dubbing you a “Dax Doer.”)
The flaw for the affiliate was the cost per sale was far more than the 80% Dean would send you. Dean would get the name of a recent mail order buyer for free, and the affiliate would lose money. Dean’s goal was to build a list of 1 million mail order buyers at no cost to him, then make his profits renting the list, which he did. Great for Dean, not so much for the affiliate. Dean was big in the late 1970’s and 80’s, so affiliate marketing has been around a long, long time.
The internet has, however, changed the game. There are many smart affiliate marketers out there making money by sending clicks to offers, collecting a commission, and making a net profit. And yet many of these sharp operators are leaving money on the table.
The money in “mail order” has always been in the “back end,” i.e. follow up sales to those who bought your existing offer, and list rental of those names to other marketers. It’s funny, the more things change, the more they remain the same—the money is still in the back end, the follow up marketing to names you acquire (email addresses, push, remarketing, etc.) from your initial ad spend. And it is definitely still in renting your list (cpc email blasts, banner space on internal pages, push notification subscribers, for example).
Never forget a “click” is actually a person. Now, I don’t mean this in the warm, fuzzy woo-woo sense of singing kumbaya, posting about how amazing each person is on Facebook (I know them, they’re not amazing, they fart and they drink Yellow Tail late at night) or pining for warm hugs on their lunch break. I mean this in the strict business sense that each click is interested in buying more than one thing so you might as well be the one to sell it to them.
Here’s an example of short term vs long term thinking. Let’s say one affiliate is running an Asian dating offer. That affiliate buys a click, sends it to a lander, the lander sends it to an offer, and the affiliate makes a profit or loses money (the dating site gets a lead at a fixed cost to sell more stuff to, Dean would be proud).
A second affiliate, who thinks longer term sets up a landing page that first collects email addresses AND push notification subscribers for HIS/HER list, then uses the offer as a thank you page after email opt in to offset the initial cost of the click. The affiliate then promotes every Asian dating offer he/she can via push and email to the clicks who opted in- they have demonstrated their interest in Asian dating. He/She also has remarketing code on the initial landing page, and “chases” that prospect around the web with banners promoting Asian dating sites with the purpose of getting that initial click to opt in to his/her email list, and join his/her push list. With remarketing code, he/she can present the original click who did not opt in with different banners and different landers, scooping up email addresses and push subscribers he/she otherwise would have missed out on.
(As an aside, on my new internal landing pages I will be unveiling when the contest starts, I can pass email addresses on ALL my placements and banners. If a visitor clicks on, say, an Asian banner, I know they are interested in Asians, and I can then start an email marketing sequence offering EVERY Asian dating offer I’m signed up for, making a lot more money before sending that prospect other dating offers. Or a smart network running their own internal offers with higher commissions can buy the “click with email” from me at a wholesale rate, building their own internal email list of older US males interested in Asian dating, and foreign dating in general. You, as a smart affiliate marketer, can do the same thing, selling YOUR clicks with email on a wholesale basis. But more on that in the segmentation article.)
The second, longer term affiliate, understanding the original click has more than one interest (and therefore a much great long term value), also pushes foreign dating sites, mature dating sites, even casual dating sites to that visitor via email and push. He/She offers them ED, enlargement, stamina and maybe even sweepstakes offers. He/She sells cpc email blasts to his/her list (analogous to Dean F. DuVall renting his list), and keeps profiting from that original click months, even years, after he/she bought it. He/She essentially creates an annuity that keeps paying off long after he/she bought the original click.
This is, of course, much more complex than the simple “buy a click once, sell a click once” way of thinking. But, on the whole, it does lead to much longer term profits, and the building of an asset—hell, a responsive email list is actually a salable asset.
When starting out in affiliate marketing, I do believe it is best to start with the simpler model, just to wrap your brain around this industry. But as you become more familiar with it, the more complex model usually leads to longer term profits, as well as the building of an asset, and is often the difference between longevity in this business, and getting out as fast as you got in. I’ve been in direct marketing since 1995, and haven’t been run out (yet).
Those who think long term tend to stay long term, and how you “think” about this business is very important. Yes, we all love money in the moment, but we love more money in future moments too. So don’t just think about the immediate value of a click, think about the value of that click days, months, weeks, even years down the road. If you keep asking them for money, they will give it to you, but you have to have a mechanism to do so. That’s why I love email (and to an extent, push) so much- it lets me keep asking over weeks, months, and years.
Of course you have to know what to ask them to buy, and that’s what we are going to talk about in my next article, list segmentation. If you “ask” them correctly, they will tell you, and I will reveal how to do just that in my next article, tomorrow…
...How To Buy a Click Once and Resell it 1000 Times- Part 3 List Segmentation
Great writeup John!
I've been telling this to people for years, online marketing, actually the whole online world is just a modified copy of what we've been doing/seeing in "real" life for ages.
eShops are just classic brick&mortar shop transformed online... websites are simply magazines/newspapers evolved etc ... The core principles remain the same and whoever understands this can use so many tricks from the offline world to conquer the digital one too.
Love your posts, keep em coming 
Great post, this concept is something I've recently been trying to implement more in everything I do and really making a difference. Looking forward to the next post.
Nothing new, but your posts are friggen awesome. And it's interesting that most don't build lists, even though the saying "the money is in the list" has existed for a very long time.
I'm working towards this - and your posts are very helpful. Thank you!
Originally Posted by hungrymaven
Affiliate marketing is notoriously unstable. It always has been, it always will be. Offers come and go, and media is taken away. Some of you may remember the “Underachiever Days” of 2004 (popularized by Frank Kern, a friend of mine) where you could select a Clickbank offer, go to Google PPC, run traffic directly to it and make a lot of money. Those days quickly came to a screeching halt when Google made PPC far more difficult (quality score), then deep pockets companies started bidding on PPC, driving the prices sky high.
In the early days of Facebook, a lot of sharp affiliates made a lot of money with right hand side ads driving traffic to fan pages. That fun ended when Facebook introduced the Newsfeed, and cracked down on affiliate marketers.
I remember in 2006 when “Adsense Cowboys” were riding the range, making all kinds of money manipulating the Google Content Network. Google quickly Smart Priced them out of existence.
There are still interesting threads on STM about POF (Plenty of Fish), but Match.com bought it out, and POF is stone cold dead for affiliates.
Broadcast fax was big in the late 90’s, early 2000’s until lawyers killed it dead.
However, when you build a list, no matter what happens to media, you can still communicate with that list. And no matter what happens to different offers, there are always more to fill their place, especially in the Horny Guy business.
So, building a list gives you stability and the ability to communicate with your prospects. I have guys who joined my list a decade ago from sources that no longer exist who still give me money on occasion, a “trail income,” so to speak, long after I paid off the cost of acquisition. Yes, the money is in the list and always will be, but stability in this business comes from the ability to communicate with your prospects regardless of what happens with media and offers, and building an email list can provide you that stability.
"“the stability is in the list.”"
I've legit never heard that one, but it makes a lot of sense. And you're 100% right.
Especially since at the moment so many legit businesses are losing their Facebook Ad accounts and BM's for no apparent reason *from what I've been hearing*.
Some of these guys are *probably* losing 50-80% of their revenue simply because of that high ROAS they might be getting, and haven't
focused on building an actual asset.
You mention e-mail. But have you tested/built out lists in the following?
- SMS
- Chatbot
- Push (EDIT: saw you mention this in article #4 ).
- Direct Mail
E-mail has been going strong forever, and it's not going anywhere soon, but these as an addition?
Thanks for the great content.
I assume that you're using your own stand alone SMTP and e-mail&push delivery system, but for beginners in that "long money" journey what services to make e-mail and push autoresponders would you recommend? Most of autoresponders forbid ED, crypto, and a lot of other verticals. That's why I'm asking this question.
Sorry for my English level and thanks for your attention.
Originally Posted by hungrymaven
I've never done SMS, but have some friends who've done very well with it in the biz opp space, so definitely worth testing. Chatbot would probably work well, but Facebook hates me. I have a really good feel for email and push, and there are enormous opportunities in both so for personal preference reasons I stay with those. But no doubt there are huge opportunities in SMS, and always will be in direct mail, particularly for Nutra (I still collect magalogs for my print swipe file, my all time favorite headline for a prostrate offer is Pee Like a Firehose. Now that's good direct mail copy).
Originally Posted by am-newbie
I have a friend who runs his own email using Green Arrow email software (drh.net, they also have a hosted version you can start with), with Power MTA and he runs a lot of ED offers. But that's complex stuff, best to start with something like ConvertKit, then once you know you can scale, migrate to the fun of your own. I personally use a version of Lyris, but that's an older, complex system that I would not recommend starting with.
Home > General > Affiliate Marketing Forum