Affiliate Marketing Profit Tools

I’ve been really busy with multiple new projects lately, but I wanted to take some time out and write a bit to you this morning. One of my projects of late, has been getting my email list processes in place.

Now, for years I’ve avoided building, maintaining, or emailing a prospect list. Despite all the hype and urging surrounding the issue, I stubbornly refused. I’ve had email lists in the past, and they did work quite well, but they were more work than I personally wanted. Of course, I was doing things completely wrong I was also mildly sickened by some of the self professed “expert” practices I’ve seen with online email marketing in the past 5-10 years.

Not a lot of people know this, but I use to be a professional copywriter. I primarily created direct mail pieces for offline clients, but some of my work was writing online sales letters too. My very first exposure to the idea of starting my own business though, was probably through mail order.

I was one of those people who sent money off to find out about envelope stuffing jobs, making jewelry, buying cars at government auctions, and any number of other “opportunities” that said I could easily make money from home

After I wised up a bit, I actually started studying the mail order business itself. And between that and my direct mail copywriting experiences, I actually know how powerful a mailing list can be. I just stubbornly refused to accept it fully until now.

One of the email lists I maintained in the past was for a niche market: Palm Pilot Software. That was a very successful list which had an extremely high trafficked website attached to it. And as I said… I did things badly. My first mistake of course, was building a list of people who were only interested in downloading free software. When I made attempts to monetize my 300,000+ monthly website visitors or the accompanying email list I’d built, it was a huge uphill struggle.

This was back in 2001, and my idea at that time was to start a paid subscription service. The concept was simple: I wrote software reviews, and subscribers paid a small annual fee. As is my way unfortunately though, I created way too much work for myself for very little return. I think I was trying to write something like 5-10 software reviews every week, and charging just $24.95 a year for it. BAD idea!

As an affiliate marketing manager for various clients over the years, I also created and maintained affiliate newsletters which are still unrivaled in quality even today. So I know how to do it - and do it quite well - I’ve just not wanted to do it till now.

Part of my resistance is my own doing. I don’t believe in just “collecting” email addresses of anybody who might be mildly interested in something. I believe in customer experience. So much so, that the one thing I have maintained over the years is a customer database. I rarely sent email to that “list” until recently, but I diligently maintained it.

My customer database is a system which keeps track of buying customers. Each time someone new buys something from me, I create a contact record for them and I log the sale. Then in the future, whenever a customer contacts me - whether they’re asking questions about another product, making suggestions or requests for products, or they need customer support of some kind - each contact is logged into their record.

Now, I’m not perfect of course, and this has been an evolving system over the years. Generally though, even if I haven’t heard a peep from a customer for 3 years, if they contact me I can see at a glance what they’ve bought from me in years gone by, and what questions, suggestions, or problems they may have had.

At times unfortunately, I have been lax about updating my customer records, but for the most part I’m able to see a much larger picture of any customer I need to, at any time.

The real joy of this in case you haven’t realized it: I can see at a glance how much money a given person spends with me. Looking at the contact history I’ve maintained tells me who buys every single product I ever release, or who buys just specific types of products, or who only buys once in awhile. And half the time I have detailed information about the person’s business goals, hopes, dreams, desires, and more. Do you have any idea how valuable that information is?!

This seems to be a major step to the left from what most online “gurus” teach though. From what I can see, most “list building” courses, books, or tutorials tell you to set things up in an automated system, track which ads were clicked on, how many times the email was opened, and so on. They don’t seem to be focused on which customers bring in the most money or are the most loyal. Instead they seem to focus on which ad campaign works the best. And to me, that’s just backwards.

I’m the kind of person who tries to keep an open mind about everything though, so I’m more than willing to try various tactics and techniques as I come across them. So last week I finally got off the fence and made a decision. I’d decided that I was going to try it “their way”, and give an honest effort to building a true email list. It can take me awhile to make a firm decision sometimes, but once that decision is made a flurry of focused action takes place. And there’s no turning me back until I feel like I’ve explored or exhausted that decision to the fullest.

So I signed up for Aweber. This wasn’t a first for me because I tested it briefly in a non-marketing niche about a year ago. Things had changed since then so I spent a few days studying everything about the system, reading their knowledge base, and figuring out how to set things up my way. I didn’t even know about their price change till after the fact actually: Price wasn’t important to me, getting things done was. So away I went.

One of my goals in setting up Aweber, was to try to automate as much stuff as possible. I was thinking seriously about giving up my “old school” database tracking system. So in that light, I learned how to set up the automated email parsing of sales notices.

Aweber has an advanced feature that allows you to send your sales notices to your list, so that anyone who buys a product from you will automatically be added as a subscriber. I figured out how to set that up and I even customized it so that each buyer would be tagged with an “ad code”. For me, that ad code was the product ID they had purchased.

I figured by using an ad code, I’d easily be able to segregate my list into buyers and subscribers, thus I’d still be able to send special offers and announcements to buyers as needed.

It worked beautifully. But I quickly found that it also sucked.

When a sale was made, Aweber did exactly what it was supposed to do. But I didn’t get any sales notices in my email. Why? Because Aweber requires a subscriber to confirm their opt in. And apparently, the sales notice emails are not forwarded on until that buyer confirms their subscription.

To make matters worse: If someone is already subscribed to your Aweber list, the system just discards the new subscribe messages.

This effectively threw my customer tracking completely out the window. There was no way for me to easily update existing customers in my database to show they had purchased something new. And as far as I can tell, Aweber will not track the buying history of one person. I quickly realized this was not a tolerable option for me.

As “old fashioned” as my system might seem, I can’t bring myself to give it up for simple campaign tracking.

Yesterday I remembered that my server has some built in email tools that I could use to do things my way. So I set up a special email address which is designed to distribute my sales notices when they come in. One copy goes to me, and one goes to Aweber. This way I can track new or existing customer sales, keep my private list that I send special offers and announcements to, and still offer a general subscription for updates to this site through Aweber.

Now, once you make a decision about something or even just start focusing on it or studying it more, you find yourself coming across all kinds of information related to it. Maybe you buy a few products or books on the topic, or maybe you search high and low across the web absorbing everything you can. At least that’s how it works with me

So as luck would have it, this weekend I came across a name I know and respect: Jim Straw. Jim has been doing mail order marketing for something like 30-40 years, and I discovered he’d started dabbling in Internet and Affiliate marketing recently too. In fact, one of his books was about Affiliate Marketing so I of course went to check it out.

I could tell from the sales letter that the book was going to talk about building email lists. I felt myself resisting as I normally do when I come across list marketing books, but then I reminded myself that I’d decided to do this, so I needed to absorb everything I could. And I respect this man to no end, so I couldn’t pass it by.

There was also a quote on his sales letter that caught my full attention:

“If I didn’t already have the line of information products I’ve developed over the past 30 years … if I had to do it all over again … I would never create my own products. — I would simply sell other people’s products and eliminate the hassles of production, fulfillment, inventory control, and other costs that eat away at profits.”

In other words, I would only become an affiliate for other people’s products and services. (My life would have been a lot simpler.) - Jim Straw

As many of you already know: This has been my driving force for years. As nice (and addictive) as it is to get direct sales of your own product daily - aka “money in your hands” - it’s so much easier and less stressful to make money from affiliate products instead.

So of course I bought the book

And then I started reading it…

And I immediately found myself wondering “How old is this book?!”

I was actually surprised at myself and irritated with myself too. As I mentioned earlier, I generally keep an open mind about most things, yet while reading this book I found myself with the strong urge to dismiss a lot of it because it seemed WAY outdated.

Here’s a man talking about his dial up modem and teaching his very complicated, manual email list management as if it’s 1999.

Then it finally dawned on me. Jim is what many people would call an “old school marketer”. And a lot of what he does is really no different from what I do with my customer database! Sure we use different tools and technology, but the goals and results are the same.

Jim doesn’t just do an “email list” like so many Internet Marketers of today. He does a “customer list”. Just like I do. And for the same reasons. He’s interested in buyers. He’s interested in cultivating customers. Not just putting names on a list and seeing how many clicks an ad gets.

In fact, his day-to-day work routine is centered around building, maintaining, and cultivating those lists.

So once it finally sank in that I was reading detailed information and advice from someone I consider to be one of the “greats” in marketing - yes Marketing - not “internet marketing” but real marketing - I settled in to devour the book. And I have it in my list of things to read again.

I had to chuckle at my initial reaction to his book too. Here I am… probably doing things too old school for most people… and I turn around and have the same pre-conceived barriers to Jim’s stuff

In any case, check it out for yourself here. New Internet and Affiliate marketers will find a goldmine of information, and “seasoned” marketers can learn a heck of a lot about better ways to profit from email lists.

- Kathy

This entry was posted on Monday, May 26th, 2008 at 8:50 am and is filed under Tips & Techniques, Tools & Resources. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.