If you’re an affiliate, your job is to pre-sell and drive traffic.
And it takes the same amount of money, time and effort to run any affiliate campaign to achieve this.
So it only makes sense that you would select a product to promote that has a high payout on the front end right?
WRONG!
Many marketers make the mistake of focusing on the front end offer and initial sale.
But here’s a major insider secret:
The money is in the backend.
What is the backend?
Everything that comes after that initial sale. I’m talking upsells.
Let’s take a look at Product A and Product B.
Product A sells at $100 with a 100% commission. Awesomeballs. Drive traffic to that offer and make $100 per sale.
Product B, on the other hand, only sells at $50 with a 50% commission. Damn. That means you only get $25 per sale.
However, Product A offers only that initial sale with no upsells whatsoever attached to it.
Meanwhile, Product B offers an upsell priced at a $100 monthly rebill with a 50% commission.
So, as an affiliate you have a choice between these two offers with a potential to earn…
Product A: $100 per sale
Product B: $25 + $50 monthly rebill
Which one would you choose?
If you said Product A, you’re not wrong… But I’m guessing you’re not rich either.
With any business, online or offline, you have to look at the bigger picture and think long-term.
Although you’d be earning less with Product B after that initial sale, if your customer purchased the upsell you’d continue making money from that one sale for months to come. In fact, I personally paid for recurring billing products years after making that initial purchase without even knowing it.
Would You Like Fries With That?
Back in the 1970s marketers found that French fries were not being ordered by 200 customers per day, per store. Despite the fact that fries were one of the most popular menu items. Their solution was to have cashiers ask “Would you like fries with that?” at the end of a customer’s order.
Half the customers said yes.
Fries in those days cost 60 cents a bag. So 100 add-on orders per day equaled $60 more per day for every franchse.
That totaled $21,840 extra per year for every restaurant that implemented the upsell strategy.
It sounds small to us now. So just exchange the numbers with the current price of McD’s French fries…
Gaddamn.
If you wanna up your game and boost your income as an affiliate, always pick a product with a killer backend.
That starts with looking at the sales funnel. If it’s been proven to convert. You gotta jump on it.
Look at pricing. Check the commission payout. And, my personal favorite, recurring billing.
To get started just check out the Clickbank marketplace and compare numbers.
Check out this screenshot I took of two similar products in the fitness niche.
The Muscle Maximizer is priced at $47 and the Cellulite Whatever is priced at $49.95.
Both give out 75% commissions to affiliates.
Short-term thinkers would promote the Cellulite Thing because it’s priced higher therefore you’d get paid more right?
But…
Give it a closer look and you’ll see one massive difference.
The Muscle Maximizer offers a rebilled upsell in the backend, while the Cellulite BlahBlah does not.
So which one would you promote?
No-brainer right?
And if you’ve created your own product. Make sure you add upsells that make sense and actually add value to the customer’s initial purchase. There’s a lot more to it than that of course. But I’ll save that for another post!
Be a smart marketer. Go deeper to find riches in the backend 😉
