Affiliate Marketing is great because you don’t have to have a product, a sales process, customer support – you don’t even have to have a website.  You can place your ads and send your prospects directly to the website of the company you’re promoting for.

This is a HUGE mistake.
When your marketing efforts put your message in front of prospective buyers, it is your responsibility to take care of those prospects.  What does that mean?  Add them to your mailing list!

A potential customer often needs to see an offer several times before making a purchase.  If you are not able to follow up with that prospect, you leave money on the table.

Additionally, in most markets people will purchase more than one item over time.  If you send visitors directly to a sales offer from a company you’re affiliated with, those visitors become clients and prospects of that company, not of you, and you will not be able to promote offers to them in the future.

Let’s look at this more closely.

Let’s say you have decided to promote a $100 video series that teaches people how to dance the tango, and you earn $50 for each sale.  You place your ads, and send 100 people to your affiliate link.  Your ads are highly targeted and the sales letter is outstanding so you are credited with 10 sales.  Not bad, $500 in commissions.

Now what?

Now you have to place another ad and try to find more people interested in your offer.

But what happens if you place your ads and send those 100 people to your own page to sign up for your mailing list and then send them on to the sales page via your affiliate link?

You still make 10 sales, you still earn $500 in commissions.  But now you’re able to follow up with the 90 people who didn’t buy.  If you have a powerful follow-up campaign, statistics show you WILL convert more of those prospects into buyers after multiple promotions.

Not only that, but you will also be able to send other offers to all 100 of the people who signed up for you mailing list.  Maybe you’ve found a great affiliate program for a company that sells tango shoes.  Ideal promotion for this list.  Or perhaps you’ve fallen in love with Latin dance and decide to develop your own videos – you can promote them to this list.  You already know they’re interested!

Setting up an opt-in page is very easy to do.  In fact, if you’re not confident in doing it yourself, you can use tools that will generate the page for you.  All you need to have is an autoresponder service and a place to load your web pages.