How to Build a Sales Funnel For Affiliate Marketing
A reliable affiliate marketing sales funnel is what you need to succeed as an affiliate marketer. The good news is that creating one is easy if you know the steps you need to follow. Once you do that, you can earn a lucrative and recurring commission from your target audience. In this guide, you’ll learn more about how affiliate marketing works and the steps you need to follow to be successful. Read on to find out how to build an effective sales funnel to generate passive income while marketing someone else’s products or services.
Affiliate Marketing at a Glance
Before we talk about building an affiliate sales funnel, it’s important to have a clear understanding of what affiliate marketing means. An affiliate marketer’s work is to promote a company’s products or services to earn money online. Note that an affiliate marketer can be an individual or another company. Affiliate marketers receive a commission or referral fee based on the sales generated through their referrals.
Affiliate marketing can be a profitable online business if you know what to do. You have to identify a company to promote its products or services, agree on the commission and market via an affiliate link. Your responsibility is to share the link with potential customers. You can do this via social media marketing, blog post, email marketing, search engine optimisation (SEO), or your own landing pages. The goal here is to entice leads for your marketing campaign to drive traffic. That’s where an affiliate marketing funnel comes into play.
What is an Affiliate Marketing Sales Funnel
The simplest definition of an affiliate marketing funnel is the buyer’s journey, from discovering to purchasing a product or service. It’s a defined path that a potential customer follows to eventually pay for an affiliate product you are promoting. A successful sales funnel will help you reach your target audience and earn a commission on sales. You want prospective buyers to become repeat customers in the long run. Keep reading to find out how to build an effective affiliate marketing funnel and increase conversions.
Common Types of Affiliate Marketing Funnels
You can use different sales funnels to promote affiliate products to your target market. But the choice is yours to make depending on what you think works best for you. Try as many options as you can to attract more people. The following are the three common types of affiliate sales funnel you can count on as a marketer.
Book Funnels
A book funnel is one of the best options you can use to run a fruitful affiliate marketing campaign. The first choice is to offer free eBooks covering the topics your visitors would be interested in. If they have to pay for the books, you may decide to offer free book shipping services to motivate them. You’ll be surprised to see how many people are willing to surrender their emails if you do this.
Webinar Funnel
A free webinar conducted over the internet is another easy way to promote affiliate products to potential buyers. You can also take advantage of these seminars to provide valuable training to your target audience. Then, you may mention the products or services you want them to try out and direct visitors to your landing page.
Course Funnel
A course funnel is a popular conversion-boosting hack you can utilise to drive traffic to your affiliate product. It entails providing prospective buyers with affordable courses that are easy to complete. The course content must be well-crafted to encourage your audience to buy your affiliate product to practise what they have learnt.
Building an effective affiliate marketing funnel takes a few simple steps. But before creating one, choosing a niche and a reputable affiliate program is important. Once you pick one, you can start building your affiliate funnel, keeping the following steps in mind.
Step 1: Determine Your Niche
Before you start your next affiliate marketing campaign, you must choose your niche. The term ‘niche’ means that you must be specific when selecting the affiliate product or service you want to market. Pick an industry and narrow your selection down to the items you love the most. You want to choose products or services you enjoy using or marketing. Your best option would be a niche that affiliate marketers have not exploited. You must understand and bank on your target market’s needs, hopes and fantasies.
Step 2: Choose a Good Affiliate Program
Your success as an affiliate marketer will partly depend on the selected affiliate program. Look for reputable affiliate networks and choose a program that’s known to work well. Some of the most popular options include Clickbank, ShareASale and Commission Junction. These offer free online marketing solutions for affiliates to make money promoting other people’s products or services.
Brand recognition is one of the key factors to consider when choosing an affiliate program. The more the company is known, the more you will likely see a product using affiliate marketing sales funnels. A reliable program will also solve the problems of your target audience and offer recurring commissions. Find one and join to get started.
Step 3: Identify Traffic Source and Create High-Quality Content
Once you join an affiliate program, the next step is to establish the best traffic source. This is a very important process because you want to create awareness using your sales funnel. An effective sales funnel is powered by organic traffic or paid ads, as explained below.
Organic Traffic through Search Engine Optimization
You can use search engine optimisation to create compelling content. This strategy involves using the relevant keywords to write posts or create videos that rank high in organic search engine results. If you do a perfect job, your articles, videos or blogs will appear on top of the list when someone uses search engines to find your affiliate product or related items.
Paid Traffic through Facebook and YouTube Ads
When it comes to lead generation with paid traffic, you can choose push traffic as well as pull traffic. Push traffic comes from ads that target people based on how they behave on the internet. A good example would be Facebook ads that relate to what you often search online. On the other hand, pull traffic is when prospective buyers already know what they want. Such traffic may come from Google and Youtube ads.
Share Your Content with Potential Customers
You must always create high-quality content that will attract the attention of a potential customer. This includes writing a blog post or creating videos that you can share on various platforms. You could posit them on leading social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest. Sales emails are also a great choice if you have a landing page that allows visitors to provide their email addresses.
Whether you are using YourTube videos or social media posts, make sure they are engaging, relevant and readable. Then you need to include your affiliate link in your posts or video descriptions. Moreover, you must use a call to action (CTA) phrases such as get, grab and claim to encourage your readers to click on your referral link.
Step 4: Build Your Opt-in Page or Landing Page
Now you have created appealing content that will drive traffic down the affiliate marketing funnel and increase conversions. What next? Well, you’ve arrived at the most important stage where you need to create the actual affiliate sales funnel or the buyer’s journey. You need to design the path the consumer takes to purchase an affiliate product eventually.
This is the time to create a landing page or sales page for your lead magnet. The latter refers to a free offer that you can use to entice your target audience to sign up. If you are a beginner, we recommend creating a squeeze page. This is the simplest landing page featuring a catchy headline, an opt-in form and a call-to-action button.
Before you can get people to purchase an affiliate product, you want them to be excited about it. It would help if you looked for a suitable free offer that will lure people in and make them trust your business. Who doesn’t like free offers anyway? If possible, try to create various landing pages for the same product to get the best conversion rates.
Find out what freebies your targeted group might be interested in and encourage them to claim the offer on the landing page. We’ve already talked about affiliate marketing funnels like books, webinars and free courses. Try one of these or all of them on different sales pages to see what works best for your online business.
Landing Page Features
Perhaps you are wondering what landing pages for the best affiliate sales funnels look like. Well, an effective sales page includes an attention-grabbing title and description. For example, you may tell your audience how your free video or eBook will reveal something they don’t know. This will cause curiosity and make them want to find out what you are talking about. But they need to input an email address and click on the submit button.
Thank You Page
A thank you page is another crucial element you need to include when designing an affiliate marketing sales funnel. Once your visitors enter their email addresses and click the submit button, they should be redirected to a thank you page. This is where you write your message to show your appreciation for choosing your freebie. At this point, you also need to tell them to click on the relevant button to collect their free offer.
Affiliate Offer
The last and most important step of the buyer’s journey is to get people to check your affiliate offer. As we stated before, there are many ways to share your referral link. You can write content marketing materials such as blog posts or videos and post them online. As you create your content, remember to use SEO to rank high in search engine results pages (SERPs). And don’t forget to include your affiliate link in your posts and descriptions.
You want to use action words to entice your visitor to click and see your affiliate product. For example, the button they need to click may include words like collect, order now, claim your offer, or try it today. Also, tell your prospective customer how scarce the product is, so they need to act immediately. If someone has reached this stage, chances are they will click and follow your affiliate link to see what’s on offer.
Follow Up
The best affiliate marketers often reach out to customers who have successfully bought a product or service. If someone in your mailing list follows your affiliate marketing sales funnel and purchases a product, try to follow up. You can get in touch with them through regular emails so they can always remember your offer. Hopefully, they will come back, use your affiliate sales funnel once again and probably turn into repeat customers.
Building Credibility with Affiliate Funnels
Whatever you do as an affiliate marketer, you must always provide reasonable offers and reliable information. You can do this by showcasing authority. This means partnering with top-rated companies known to offer quality goods and services. Such companies appear in organic search results most of the time when people search for products.
Another critical factor is to provide honest opinions besides using words that will attract customers. For the best outcome, try to counteract the negatives with positive features to gain your audience’s attention. Do your research to ensure that everything you say about the product or service is truthful. And you must keep in touch with the company to find out if there are any updates you need to consider.
We also recommend providing social proof to increase your credibility as a marketer. You can make your customers trust you more if you use legitimate testimonials and reviews. These include reviews posted by your own customers or other people on the product page.
Final Words
Building an effective sales funnel is not as complicated as some people think. Simply follow our step-by-step guide on this page and you might start generating affiliate sales soon. With the best affiliate marketing funnel in place, you can run a successful online marketing business, increase customer satisfaction and earn passive income regularly.
Find out the right affiliate marketing funnel from our recommendations in this guide. Look for your favourite niche, pick an affiliate program trusted by many users, and sign up. After that, you only need to create top-quality content and use your affiliate sales funnel to attract prospective customers.
Asking for an email address is one of the most effective ways of collecting contact details from consumers. This will allow you to create your email marketing list. You can then send offers with affiliate links to those who have submitted their email addresses.
All you need is a well-designed sales page or landing page with a powerful lead magnet. Get started now and see how it goes. All the best!
