“A simple yet extremely powerful psychological trigger that has consistently tripled my conversion rates in multiple markets…”
The real secret to making money with Affiliate Marketing is all about increasing the number of people that see your Affiliate offers, and maximizing the amount of money you make from every visitor to your website.
This video shows you exactly how to do both.
Here’s what you’ll learn in this Affiliate Marketing tutorial:
- A simple yet extremely powerful psychological trigger that has consistently tripled my conversion rates in multiple markets…
- My A.B.T. strategy for tripling your affiliate commissions WITHOUT spending a single penny on traffic or on advertising…
- The single most important change that I made to my Affiliate business that transformed it from a 5-figure-a-month passive income stream… into a massive multi-million dollar profit machine… and why you should be doing the same, right now… because if you don’t, you could be leaving some serious money on the table.
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Video Transcripts
Hey guys, it’s Jeff Johnson with JeffJohnsonMarketing.com [now UndergroundTrainingLab.com], and today’s presentation is called 3 Simple Ways for You To Make Three Times As Much Money As An Affiliate Without Spending A Single Penny on Traffic or on Advertising.
Which means today you will learn a simple, yet extremely powerful psychological trigger that has consistently tripled my conversion rates in multiple markets.
You will also learn my A.B.T. strategy for tripling your affiliate commissions, without spending a single penny on traffic or on advertising.
And the single most important change that I made to my affiliate business that transformed it from a five figure a month passive income stream into a massive multi-million-dollar profit machine, and why you should be doing the same thing right now. Because if you don’t, you could be leaving some serious money on the table.
I also have a special bonus for you that’s only available for a very limited time, and I’ll tell you more about your special bonus in just a minute, but first, let me tell you why you need to learn the stuff that I’m about to teach you in today’s presentation.
Making Money With Affiliate Marketing
The key to making money with affiliate marketing is all about increasing the number of people that see your offers. And it’s also about maximizing the amount of money that you make from every person that sees your offers.
So today you will learn how to get more people to see your offers, and you’ll learn how to maximize the amount of money that you make from those people.
Extremely Powerful Psychological Trigger
Which is why the first thing that I’m going to teach you today is a simple yet extremely powerful psychological trigger that has consistently tripled the response rate for the offers on my affiliate websites. And it probably works so well because YouTube tells us that everyday people watch over a billion hours of videos and generate billions of views for those videos.
They also tell us that there are local YouTube versions in more than 91 countries and 80 different languages covering 95% of the internet population, which means that when someone sees a video play button on your website, they click it because that’s what they do over 5 billion times a day.
They have been psychologically conditioned to click the play button just like Pavlov’s dog. They see a play button and they click it.
So, if you want someone to click a display ad in your website, make the ad look like a video.
A Simple Little Change That Tripled My Click-Through Rates
Here’s what I’m talking about.
This is the original version of one of the most successful ads on one of my survival affiliate websites. It has made hundreds and hundreds of sales.
However, when I started split testing new versions of this ad, I came up with a new version that crushed the old one, and all I did was I simply added a video play button to the image. That’s it. It’s still just a display ad. It’s not a video, but it looks like a video.
So, when they see this crappy little play button that I copy and pasted onto this ad, they are compelled to click it. They click it, they go over to the affiliate website, and hopefully I earn my commission.
This little change tripled my click-through rate, and I’ve been able to repeat the success over and over again with different ads in different markets.
Dummy-Video Ad Tips
So, here’s some video play button tips that you can use for your own ads.
First, start by adding video play buttons to your best performing display ads. And if you don’t have your own ads, then ask the vendor for their best performing ads and start those for your split testing.
You also want to use a color for the video play button that stands out on the page. Don’t try to hide it. You want it to stand out, so use bold colors like reds, orange, greens, whatever stands out that’s the color that you want to use, because you want people to click the ad.
And you want to send them to a video-based landing page after they click the ad, because remember, it’s not a video, but when they click it, they think it’s a video. So, if you want to increase conversions, make sure that you send them to a landing page that has a video on it. That helps increase your sales conversions.
Always Be Testing (A.B.T.)
Now, the next strategy that I’m going to share with you is my A.B.T. strategy, and it stands for always be testing. Always be split testing.
You need to be testing the different products that you promote on your website. You want to look for new winners, and you want to get rid of your losers as quickly as possible.
You also want to test variations of your most popular ads and your most popular offers. Now the simple video play button technique can triple your conversion rates. That means three times the results from the same level of traffic. You don’t have to buy traffic; you just have to triple the conversion rates for the existing traffic that you already have.
And the different ways that you promote those products on your website should be things like display ads, review articles, text links and videos, because not everyone responds to the same offer. And if all they see is the same offer over and over again, and the same ad over and over again, well, it’s going to lose its effectiveness. So, you need to be testing all of these things.
You also need to test the different places that you promote those products on your website, because you can easily triple your sales with the same ad by simply showing it in a different spot.
And the best way for me to teach this stuff is to show you a few real-life examples, so that’s exactly what I’m going to do starting with this ad.
I know it looks familiar. It looks almost identical to the one where I taught you that little video play button trick. However, there is one important change.
I blew this ad up to over twice the size of that last one. That last ad appeared in the sidebar and had a significantly lower click-through rates because that’s typically what happens with sidebar ads.
But this particular ad appears inside the middle of a blog post promoting this particular product, and I want people to think it’s a video, so I blew it up to twice the size. It is approximately the size of an embedded video, so when see it, they really think this one is a video, but it’s not. It’s a display ad.
They click it, they’re taken over to a landing page, or hopefully they buy the product and I earn my affiliate commission. But I was able to increase my CTR conversion to 7.58% given the location and the size of the same ad.
Now, the next ad promotes the exact same product inside the exact same blog post. However, we go from a 7.58% click-through rate and we drop down to below 1%. Now, this is the exact same product being promoted inside the exact same blog post, but the conversion rate is terrible, and I think I made several mistakes when I designed this ad. I failed to make a direct connection between the benefits of being waterproof and how a waterproof survival lighter could really come in handy when you’re out in the wilderness and your life is at stake.
The Selling Power Of Free
I also forgot to incorporate one very important feature, or one very important word, and that word is free. Because after testing millions and millions of impressions of hundreds, if not thousands of different ad variations, the one thing I’ve learned in all my split testing is that the word free can help you significantly increase your conversion rates, and this particular ad is giving away a free lighter. So, I definitely need to scrap this ad and go back to the drawing board.
However, this next ad appears in the same exact blog post on the same website promoting the same product, and it looks very similar to that first ad that had a 7.58% conversion rate. However, this one increases my click-through rates by over 50% it’s 10.82% click-through rate. That’s almost 10 almost 11 times a click-through rate of the fish bowl ad. The reason this ad works so well is that I tell them in the ad itself that they can claim your free Everstryke Pro, good while supplies last, click here. So I’m telling them it’s free. I’m telling them that there’s limited supply available, so they better move quickly, and I’m telling them to take the action that I want them to take. I’m telling them to click here.
Location, Location, Location
Now, something else that you want to test is placements of the ads in different areas of the page, more specifically the most viewed areas on the page. Now, my target markets are almost always English speaking audiences, and they have been taught how to read starting at the top left part of the page and reading from left to right, so one of the most viewed areas on any of my pages is the upper left hand corner of the page, which is why I always test out some of my bestselling products and my best performing ads in that particular spot.
Now, in this particular situation, I just created a new series of ads last week so I can’t give you exact stats yet, but I did incorporate a little video button play trick that stands out because it’s green, and I used the phrase free in my ads. Now, on the right-hand side of the page, there’s another area, another sidebar where I like to show ads. And sidebar ads don’t convert nearly as well as ads that are placed in the blog post itself, but they can still make you money. They’re a great source of income. You can monetize them by either selling ad space to advertisers, either directly or through ad networks, which is a fantastic place to earn more money for your affiliate blocks, or you can show more of your own ads for affiliate products.
Now, in this particular situation, the text just above the block of ads in the upper right-hand corner says, “Our most popular gear.” I’m letting them know that, “Hey, people prefer these products. Here’s our most popular gear,” and then what did I do? I took the results from millions of page impressions and click-throughs for my ads on this particular website, and I’m only showing my top four or five performing ads. So don’t discount sidebar ads. There are still multiple ways to make money with them, and they can be additional streams of revenue for your affiliate block.
My Highest Converting Ad Format
Now, the single greatest performing type of ad that I have on my websites is what I call a standalone text links ad. And it’s not a display ad, it’s actually just a line of text with links in it, but they have benefits, they have clear calls to actions, and I segment them out on the page. I don’t bury them inside of the text necessarily. I do that sometimes, but I also make sure that I let them standalone as paragraphs. And I use contrasting colors, so when someone’s scanning a page, the color really stands out.
So, in this example, the page is all black text and then there’s a paragraph that starts, it’s only two sentences, and that is my standalone just only two sentences. And that is my standalone text link ad, and it says, “Free, Everstryke Pro. Grab yours now while you still can. Good while supplies last.” So it really speaks to them at, shouts out and says, “Hey, here’s a bright red color on the page. Supplies are limited, you can get it for free, so you better grab yours right now.”
And then a couple paragraphs later, I have another one. It’s different, it’s still red so it stands out of the page. It says, “Free Everstryke Match, get yours now.” Those are the best performing types of ads I typically have my websites.
Now, click through rate we’ve talked about a lot, but that isn’t everything. Money is what talks. What matters is how much money you make. Now, obviously you can make money by selling ad space on your website, but if they don’t eventually turn into sales for your advertisers, they’ll stop advertising with you. And as an affiliate marketer, what you really want is to make money, right? So these three ads all appear inside of my blog posts, they are leaderboard types ads. People say that they don’t work well, they’re wrong, they do work. It’s the placement inside the posts that matters the most.
Amazon Affiliate Shopping Ads
They get significantly higher click-through rates than similar ads in the sidebar. Now, the first ad has my lowest click-through rate of any of the three that you’re looking at, but it also makes the greatest number of sales, and earns me the most commissions, so I love it. Now, the next ad gets six times the click-through rates of that first ad but doesn’t make nearly as many sales. However, you still have to show more than one ad and one product on a website and it still makes me money, so it’s in rotation. That’s also why this particular ad format from Amazon, called their Amazon Native Shopping Ad format, is still in rotation as well. It consistently gets one of the highest click-through rates of any of the ad formats on this particular website.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t make me nearly as much money as the other programs do. Now, in the past 16 years, I’ve been making money with the Amazon affiliate program and it’s a fantastic program. However, the secret to making money with Amazon affiliate program is to promote higher-priced products, but in this particular situation I had special circumstances surrounding the reasons why I chose to promote a single low-priced product [I was using it as a case study for my students]. But if you want to make more money with Amazon affiliate marketing, then you need to choose higher-priced products. The moral of the story is that you always need to be testing. You need to test different ads for the same products, test different designs, different layouts, different calls to action, and different types of ads. You need to test different products in the same website as well as different placements of those ads for those products on the very same websites.
Clickbank Affiliate Marketing
But most importantly, you need to test different affiliate programs because you never know which one’s going to make you the most money. For example, one of my survival blogs makes up to 10 times more money from ClickBank offers than it does from AdSense or Amazon ads for one very simple reason. It’s more difficult to make money with AdSense or Amazon if you’re targeting low-priced products. But, on the other hand, lower priced products work well with ClickBank offers, because ClickBank offers not only pay a significantly higher commission rate right up front, between 50 to 75% for some of them, but they also have sophisticated selling funnels. They have upsells, downsells, cross-sells, and backend offers. They do whatever they can to help you as an affiliate make more money.
Seasonal Markets
However, I have other websites that have made significantly more money from the AdSense and the Amazon programs, and seasonal selling factors should also be considered. Because during the big holiday selling seasons like Mother’s Day, Halloween, Christmas, even big screen TVs for the Superbowl, during those selling seasons, Amazon sales can spike five, even 10 times as high as they were before, and they could easily become one of your best-performing offers. That is one of the secrets to making more money as an affiliate, and it’s a secret that I learned when I first started my online marketing business back in 2003.
5k A Day With Adsense
Back then I was exclusively promoting products as an affiliate, and one of the first things I did was I built a couple of affiliate blogs promoting several different info products on ClickBank. I also slapped on a few Google AdSense ads in the hopes of making some extra money. Well, I quickly discovered that I was making significantly more money per visitor with AdSense than I was with ClickBank. So, I quickly switched gears, and I started building blogs that targeted some of the highest-paying keywords for AdSense. Within a couple of months, I was earning between $3000 and $5000 a day in pure AdSense profits. At that same time, I also ramped up building out my portfolio of niche blogs to the point where I was earning approximately $23,000 a month as a ClickBank affiliate promoting cheap little E-books in multiple niches, including Ebay, dog training, dating advice, and many, many others.
$454,096.78 In Amazon Affiliate Sales
I also started playing around with building out an entire network of websites promoting the Amazon affiliate program and consumer products. Well, I did $454,096.78 in Amazon affiliate sales in my first 96 days. That’s almost a half a million dollars in three months. However, I made one huge mistake when I was making all that money with my affiliate websites. The mistake that I made was that I was promoting lower priced products, and I quickly realized that it takes as much time, energy and effort to promote a low-priced product as it does to promote a higher-priced product.
High Ticket Affiliate Products
Higher priced products typically pay up to 100%, even 200% commissions right up front, versus the five or 10% commissions that lower priced products typically pay. So would you rather go through the trouble of writing a blog post to earn 50 cents promoting a book on Amazon? Or would you rather earn $500 promoting a piece of software or a training program that also offers you the chance to earn even more money on the backend?
Well, once I switched my business over to promoting higher-priced affiliate products, I more than tripled the amount of money I was making. And to say triple, that is a huge understatement. I’ve earned six figures in as little as a week more times than I can possibly remember. Plus, I have earned hundreds of thousands of dollars in bonus checks, gifts and prizes, including this $100,000 bonus check, and I’ve also won something like five or six cars for being a top affiliate. However, I’ve only kept two of them.
One of them was the brand new $167,000 Mercedes Benz AMG that Brendon Burchard sent me as a gift. I also kept the 1965 Lincoln Continental convertible with suicide doors that Ryan Deiss sent me for being his top affiliate. Now, those bonus prizes and gifts were in addition to the hundreds of thousands of dollars in commissions that I earned promoting the products to earn those prizes in the first place.
What it all comes down to is this, promoting higher priced/high ticket affiliate products transformed my business from a steady five-figure month passive income stream into a multimillion-dollar business that was able to run, and still runs, hands-free for months on end. And I want you to be able to do the same thing for yourself, your family and your business, so I have a special bonus for you that will help you learn how to promote higher-priced affiliate products and it’s free.
Now, I’ll tell you more about how to access your bonus training and just a few seconds, but first, please do me a favor. Give this video a thumbs up, share it with your friends on social media and subscribe to my YouTube channel. And then, after you’ve done that, all you have to do to access your additional bonus training is head on over to my blog at JeffJohnsonMarketing.com (not: content moved to UndergroundTrainingLab.com) and look for the blog post with the title, The Secret to Selling High Ticket Affiliate Products to Your List.
Inside that blog post, you will have immediate access to well over an hour of additional training that’s based on a presentation that I gave to a live seminar audience, most of whom paid several thousand dollars to be there.
So that is why this part of the training may not be available for free for that much longer. So please check it out right now at JeffJohnsonMarketing.com (note: moved to UndergroundTrainingLab.com), my name is Jeff Johnson. I appreciate your time and we’ll talk again very, very soon.
If you enjoyed this Affiliate Marketing tutorial, then you should check out my Amazon Affiliate Ads and The Secret To Selling High Ticket Affiliate Products To Your List tutorials as well.
steven says
Great video thanks!
Jeff Johnson says
Hey Steve, you’re welcome. Thanks for letting me know you enjoyed it!
Chris Busa says
Hey Jeff,
Awesome post! I got a lot of value out of it thanks.
Do you have a plugin or ad server you recommend to split test banners or call to action links that shows you CTR stats etc…?
Thanks again,
-Chris
Jeff Johnson says
Hey Chris, thanks for letting me know you enjoyed the video! The ad server plugin I use for the site in the video is ad rotate. It’s a free wp plugin. It’s also the one we install for the affiliate blogs we build for our clients. For our newtwork-wide deployments we use openx. We also use VWO for split testing calls to action, landing pages, etc. However, openx isn’t the easiest to use and VWO can be expensive on higher volume sites, so I recommend the free version of adrotate for most people.
chris busa says
Hey Jeff,
Thanks for the reply. Yeah should have read your other post about amazon affiliate ads before I commented because I realized you already answered my question on that post.
Just installed this plugin on my site and go to upload a ton of creatives to start testing. I have been looking for something like this for a while. Did you upgrade to the pro version or does the free version offer everything you need?
Thanks again Jeff Love your content.
Jeff Johnson says
Hey Chris, we use the free version of adrotate for both our personal affiliate blogs and our clients.