Price And The Affiliate

There are quite a few numbers underneath the sales links and promotional tags. Price seems to be a driving factor for many an affiliate. But it shouldn’t be. Sure, price of the product is important to a point, but that shouldn’t sway your decision. In some ways you will get a better profit and a better conversion with a high priced product than for a lower price- if you are using the same time to promote the items. Jeff Johnson (a great affiliate) only promoted “expensive” products only because he will spend the same time promoting cheap products. I would rather have 10 people buying a product that nets me $500 commission per item rather than 20 people buying a $27 commission ebook ($5000 or $540). What is the point?

Also that vendor will upsell at a later time if they are any good. So why give them your visitors that you really researched and put your good time into and get $19 in return?

I bought an affiliate guide once and the well known affiliate was promoting golf items. He was proud in the fact that he bought an Aweber account and spent time and money on 5 articles, time on building the sales page and a video page. He also bought a $97 premium poll software package (which was good, but not at that price). He also spent $100/ day on Adwords.

On a daily basis he was making around $65/ day from one promotion. He was ecstatic. He truly loved his work. He was stating that the customers were yours to promote to even with the small outlay of cost. However you need to buy articles on a regular basis, 4/ month ($10/ article for good ones (and easy maths), so $40/ month additional cost).

The amount of effort this guy was putting into his marketing was great. Trying his best to get the best words, the best text, the best keywords and the hourly rate (you do calculate your hourly rate don’t you?).

So just with one website what is he making overall?

His outgoing is: $100/ day $3100/month Adwords. $40/ month additional articles. $19/ month autoresponder, $8.33/month website name and domain hosting. So in total: $3167.33/ 31 day month expenditure (not including the poll software, business taxes or the initial 5 articles).

An affiliate working hard to bring in?

What is he bringing in assuming that he averages $65/day?

$2015/ 31 day month.

Even if you increased the amount of websites you still going to be in the red by $1152 each time. His Adwords spending is too much, it is not a right fit for the product selection (poor commission price for effort). On top of this he never states what his post sales generate. Because once people are entered into the “funnel” they should buy additional products, but those stats are never shown.

Sure he has an Internet business. Sure he is making “passive” income. And respect to the guy for trying. I am not trying to diminish what they are doing, but what I am trying to say is this.

Should his efforts be put somewhere else?

His systems are working, he gets sales…so why settle?

If you know that your systems have been set up, they have been tested and they work without your help, then why not increase the stakes and try bigger products?

Instead of an ebook with minimal compensation…why not something bigger? If he can do this with an ebook, his profits would explode for a higher commission from a higher priced product. But because he didn’t know the subject matter he couldn’t go higher in price. He could not justify the product…or so he believes.

Why saddle yourself with something that everyone else is trying to promote? Did you know where there is competition?

Price/ competition follows a bell curve. Not too many competitors at the lower or high prices but a huge amount in the average section- the middle.

Why compete with affiliates who are promoting the same products at the same price? Cheap products have very little competition (but your time might be better spent elsewhere, but they are easy with little effort) and higher priced products have little competition…because people are scared to promote those products.

Now this wasn’t supposed to be a maths class, but it shows to the affiliate that you really have to choose your product well. If you do put a heck of a load of time into your product and get $50/ day, then get a job, it pays better. Do this on the side. Or better still, promote products that are more expensive. If you promote:

10 x $25 commission ebook = $250/ day

5 x $97 commission electronic product = $485/ day

If people cared about price, Ferrari would have been out of business years ago. If you want a car why don’t people go for a new Ford? They don’t because of something better…something that could get them noticed, could make their career better or even could make them more knowledgeable.

Price is also a mathematical issue. If you are throwing everything at an affiliate product then you need to make that money back- we have demonstrated that, to make it worth your while. People will always forget the side monies that they need to pay before they bring in a profit.

So you could flip this and actually sell a low priced ebook if you are not relying on its affiliate revenue to make you huge dollars. Also- you are not spending out tons of cash to generate a profit. People have done the following:

figured out what pages/ articles do not pay their way and have added either Adsense of a low priced ebook. With the trust worthiness of Amazon the sale is not that hard to make. You get something which might offset some of the cost of other campaigns.
tried to sell multiple small ebooks to try and offload cost (some might have cool upsells)

Price actually doesn’t matter, it never has. People will buy what they want regardless of price.

They won’t buy your higher priced item because:

they are not the right, targeted customer…or...
you haven’t pitched it to them properly. If you have someone shopping and they say that something is “too expensive”. It really means that they need convincing. They are on your website, they are in your store. They came willing…

Jeff Johnson sells limited $1k products…and gets them filled. The affiliates who promote that just run with it and get great commissions in return. If you knew something was exclusive and will tell you “everything that you need to know” wouldn’t you think about it?

Yanik Silver sold a $14k yearly apprenticeship to a limited number of people. It was great…you would be working with Yanik with one of his guaranteed ideas. You would have access to him and his key online weapons. It was oversold in days of release and netted him $160k in just 1 week.

Unfortunately now these "secret", "limited quantity", "underground" etc terms are being thrown around with huge price tags attached to them. Which incidentally increases returns, poor good will and bad reviews. It is the Jasonera Rule. But it constantly happens unfortunately.

Remember that products that get picked upon price are not going to make you anything.

Then you have click through rate- CTR.

This series is taken from the ebook Superstar Affiliate Product Finder which can be found on Amazon here