Start Affiliate Marketing Free

How To Start Affiliate Marketing Free

I was chatting with Paul Okeefe the other day about the state of Internet Marketing. Paul has been involved in this industry for a very long time and is one of the few stalwarts who is still around – in my Inbox too. He said that the current Covid-19 world had put a lot of people under serious pressure.  No longer is it easy to sell stuff. Everyone wants FREE. He was working out ways to help people to start affiliate marketing free – some of the ideas are his.

I sent out an email to my list after that with the subject line Being Free. My open rate jumped from 1% to a staggering 25% – he was right. That really got me to thinking about how to start a work from home business for free. The obvious starting point is to look at selling other people’s products for a commission – i.e., affiliate marketing. The challenge is: Can you start affiliate marketing free?

Strategic Approach: Start Affiliate Marketing Free

Now I like to take a strategic approach – 25 years working as a management consultant makes me that way. Generally, I do not see a lot of strategy in this whole arena – people just do stuff and make it up as they go. My thinking is the only way to navigate this path for free is to know where you are going so that you only do things when you need to AND more importantly you only buy stuff when you have to. I will start with a framework

The 3 circles on the left are what you bring to the party. It is some combination of skill, knowledge and passion that gets you started. Now we can borrow a lot of this from other people – because we are going to use their knowledge and ideas and promote their products. The next essential step is to bring a strategic and product focus (the right hand circle) to decide what to promote. We are now ready for Setting up the Promise focused on a product idea.

The real work begins for affiliate marketing in the boxes on the right which contain all the techniques and activity that go into Delivering the Promise. We are going to need some technical Internet things and we will need some Marketing things. This post focuses on starting the Internet things and talks a little about the Marketing things.

Getting Started

Enough strategy then – what do we do?

A powerful way to start is to find an Internet Marketing Checklist specifically for Affiliate Marketing – you can get one free right here – just pop in your email address and I will send you one. Members on my lists already have one as it was in the “Being Free” email  and the one telling you about this blog post. The checklists come from Kevin Fahey who has made his mark in Internet Marketing checklists. I reviewed his Affiliate Marketing Mastery course a while back – the checklist came from there

I will summarise the 18 steps in the checklist into a shorter list:

• Choose a niche
• Find products including the affiliate network
• Check vendor reputation
• Use product and make a review
• Find a bonus to add value to the product
• Set up a email list
• Offer a bribe to get people to opt-in
• Write stuff about the product to create traffic

I will tie these back to the strategic framework

Choosing a niche is the result of strategic focus – say “make money online”. Choosing a product is more challenging as there is a circle one needs to go through – niche -> product -> affiliate network -> vendor -> vendor quality -> product quality. The smartest way to cut through this is to focus on an evergreen product – i.e., something that has stood the test of time and for which you can find solid reviews online (not scammy keyword driven reviews). That way you do not have to buy a  product to start off. I will write about this topic in a later post – this post is really about the tools one needs to get started and what can be done free.

Watch the video now – it is about 25 minutes long and it covers a lot of ground.

I will summarise the main threads that came out in the video. Let’s start with the strategic framework filled in with the things you are going to need – they are colour coded in the stages the video walked through

Red: Starting out – niche, product, email list, opt-in bribe, bonus offer.

Pink: Professional email address, domain/mail forwarding, some website capability

Green: Blog, Social Media, Video.

I will now set out the main elements for each section

Build An Email List

Item 18 of the affiliate marketing checklist said

do not make this mistake of sending leads directly to your vendor’s page. It takes time to warm prospects up – most of the customers won’t even buy the product. Let them see the product detail from your mails and pages and then let them decide on buying the product.

So you must build an email list. For this you need an autoresponder. The bad news is the free autoresponders (like Mailchimp and Mailerlite) do not like affiliate links. Now you can work around this by setting up your own bridge pages to stand in front of the affiliate links – but that is a complication we do not want right now. The good news is the leading autoresponder services offer free 30 day trials. Better news is they also offer a bunch of the other things you might need along the way.

Getreponse has 30 day free trial for up to 1,000 subscribers and includes unlimited landing pages. Price then goes to $15 a month for 1,000 subscribers.

Aweber has 30 day free trial but for  only 500 subscribers and includes landing pages. Price then goes to $19 a month. BREAKING NEWS from July 14 is Aweber has launched Aweber FREE. It has all the features and works for up to 500 subscribers and 3,000 mails a month. So you can email 100 subscribers every day for a month – that feels like a fab way to start with a GOLD class service. Try it here

Now there is an art to doing free trials. Get really well organised in advance – e.g., product chosen, free giveaway chosen, bonus offers chosen, email address set up. Then smash the trial and get as much value as you can in the trial period. The target is to sell enough product in the trail month to cover at least one month’s fee.

A different idea is to look for a lifetime access plan like SendFox currently available through AppSumo. The current offer is a $49 one time fee for 5,000 subscribers. Now you can get a $10 fee credit by signing up through my link (see below) – that brings price down to $39 = just less than 3 months of GetResponse fee for bigger list (but no landing pages). Share your $10 off link from AppSumo to just 3 friends and you get SendFox free (you both get $10 credit).

Find Free Giveways for Bribe or Bonus

To get people onto your list you need a bribe – something valuable to give away for free. AppSumo is a place to start – access one of their freebies and give it away for free. Or find something you can buy for your free $10 and give that away for free.  Be sure to check the licence you are given from AppSumo – you must be allowed to give it away and not just offer it as a bonus to a paid product. But you can always refer them to AppSumo as a way to get their free gift – i.e., you give them the link and they sign up to get the freebie. Alternatively search for Private Label Rights in your niche and buy something for which you will have the rights to give away or offer as a bonus. Of course, you could just make a video of your experiences and expertise and offer that as a bribe or a bonus.

Set Up Professional Email Address

Email deliverability is very important. The autoresponder services will insist on a professional email address – like mine –  mark@markcarrington.com. For this you will need to register a domain – sadly these are not free. Find a .com domain related to your niche or your name or your brand or something like that. As all you will be using the domain for at this stage is an email address, find a domain registrar that includes an email address as part of registration for free. Set up an email address at the registrar and forward it to your own email service for now.

I use 1and1 by Ionos for domains. Base prices are competitive and they include an email address with registration.  Everybody likes Namecheap as they are more price competitive on domains but they only offer free email address for the first 2 months. Price for email goes to $9.50 per year which negates the price advantage on the registration fee.

Choose Website and Blogging Platform

You are going to need some way to present your opt-in page as a website. Getresponse and Aweber do offer landing pages as part of their autoresponder service. They are not really designed to run as bridge pages once someone has opted in or bought a vendor product and you want to give them access to your bonus. You can work around that by using email and using the affiliate network site. The networks mostly will give you a way to deliver bonuses with a vendor product.

Later on you  might want to start blogging as one way to share writings about the stuff you want to promote. You could kill two birds with one stone and choose one of the free website builders like Wix or Weebly for landing pages, bridge pages and blogging. Set that up so that it can run as a blog site as well as to present your opt-in and bonus delivery pages.
Now there are smart ways to work with free builders like this – just work within the boundaries of what they offer. Put away your creative juices and just live with the free stuff. This is where they make their money – getting you to pay for stuff you fancy. There will be a time for that stuff later.

Read the blogging platform article here

Build Traffic

My video did not talk about traffic. Obviously you have to get people to look at your opt-in page and the offers you are promoting. This requires content – write it up in a blog, write it on social media and use video. All of those platforms are free to use – they just need energy and time.

Video is a powerful tool. Videos are easy to make – just use your phone and talk about the things you are promoting. Then upload them to your YouTube channel. Be sure to add tags to the uploads that are relevant to the topic and the product you are promoting. YouTube uses those tags to decide where to present your videos.

If you want to do screen sharing type videos there are free services and software to do that. TechSmith has a new tool to replace Jing – it is called Capture. it offers a free way to capture short videos – again just work inside its limits. I used its predecessor Jing a lot before I got Camatasia. Camtasia is also available on a free 30 day trial – hold off doing that until you are ready to do 30 days of steady video work. Tools on Apple Mac are a little different with Screenflow the standout at a much lower price than Camtasia.

For the other screen recording tools read the article I used in the  video – be very aware of the pros and cons for each. Do not get caught out downloading software that might carry malware – I once did with CamStudio. They may have fixed it but I am not taking chances. Also be aware that support for Adobe Flash stops in December 2020. Whatever too you choose make sure it outputs files in MP4 format (not SWF).

Summary and Budgeting

So it looks like we need

• Autoresponder service – say Getresponse 30 day trial and $15 a month = $165 for year one. Or go SendFox for $39 after $10 off voucher.
• One .com domain registered and a professional email address = $10 one time and then $15 annually.
• Free website builder for blogging and landing pages (if needed)
• Free tools for video capture

The Mindset of Free

Now I do want to add in a cautionary tale. Free is fine but do not allow it to become a mindset that holds you back. You do ultimately get what you pay for.

The idea of starting for free is to get started and to keep moving ahead until you are generating an income. You want to generate enough income to cover the monthly fees from the autoresponder service and the annual renewal of your domain. Keep staying free until you are ready to step up to the next level. Do your research at each step up to be sure you are not missing out on important stuff by staying free. An example is email automation – segmenting your list will become important. It does not come free (unless you choose to do it manually). Moving to a blog platform where you are in control does not come free – you will need hosting. It will become important at some stage if the builder platform you are using changes the rules on you. Running a blog on your own domain does not come free – Wix or Weebly will charge for that.

One other cautionary tale. All these services are subject to change. They can pull the plug on you at any time. Make sure you have backups offline of your email lists (download them every now and then) and of your web pages and your uploaded videos.

Resources

Affiliate Marketing Mastery checklist is available by opt-in here.

Getreponse has 30 day free trial for up to 1,000 subscribers and includes unlimited landing pages. Price then goes to $15 a month for 1,000 subscribers. Start your trial here.

Aweber has 30 day free trial is for  only 500 subscribers and includes landing pages. Price then goes to $19 a month. Aweber has now launched Aweber FREE – for 500 subscribers and 3,000 emails a month. Start your trial here.

1and1 by IONOS Register domains and get free email address with each domain. Search for domains here

Namecheap Offers competitive domain pricing and free email for 2 months – paid after that. Search for domains here

AppSumo is an important hub for free and discounted stuff. Get your $10 voucher free – do this first.  Then explore the freebies to give away. Also check out the SendFox offer. Be sure to use the Refer a Friend link and get $10 opportunity for each referral.

Weebly  Get access to customisable webpage designs and useful tools to build your website and grow your ideal business. Easily build a free website to help you get discovered and grow your customer base in style. Start today with powerful free website builder.

Wix Discover the platform that gives you the freedom to create, design, manage and develop your web presence exactly the way you want.  Get started with the Wix website builder

TechSmith Capture Whether for work, home, or play, TechSmith Capture provides a simple, free way to create basic screenshots and screen recordings and share them with others. Download it here