ClickBank Affiliate Marketing – List Building (Part 1)

If you are one of my online students from the Udemy course ” ClickBank Success – Affiliate Marketing Without A Website“, you will know that beside using direct linking method, I also strongly suggest everyone to create squeeze page for list building eventually.

Since creating the Udemy course, I have received countless questions on how to build a list properly. To answer this question and to provide further guidance, I have decided to write a blog post series to educate you on list building for affiliate marketing purpose. Do bookmark this page if you are keen to find out more and stay updated for future posts on this topic.

Why build a list?
First thing first, there are three reasons why I always suggest building a list for affiliate marketing rather than depending on direct linking if you want to achieve a long term sustainable income.

1. Promoting more than 1 time – If you are using direct linking, the visitor you get for every click only see the sales page once. If the visitor didn’t buy the product (which happens most of the time), then there is no way for you to get in touch with them again. But if you have their emails (through list building), then the visitor will receive an email (drafted and scheduled by you) to take a look at the product again. This greatly increase the conversion rate! In addition, you also get to promote other products to the same person in future!
2. More cost efficient – Building a list is also more cost efficient because you do not need to pay for traffic any more! Anytime you want to promote something, you can just email your subscribers. Assuming you have a list of 1000 subscribers, your only cost is the monthly auto-responder subscription (which is $15/mth for GetResponse), where you can send unlimited emails to these subscribers. But if you want to get 1000 visitors through direct linking, it can cost you $200 (assuming per-click 20 cents) every-time.
3. You own your mailing list – This is one of the strongest reason why I prefer list building is because no one can take away your subscribers list. Once you have their emails, you can email them tips, articles and recommendations (until they decide to unsubscribe) without per-click cost like Google / Microsoft Ads. Even if one day the auto-responder you use no longer works, you can simply shift your mailing list to another provider. At the end of the day, I want you to know that an mailing list is the asset for your affiliate marketing business!

After knowing why it is important to build a list, now let me share with you what are the three main steps to get started!

Step 1 – Focus on a niche (not too niche!)
One of the mistakes many people make is that when choosing a niche to build their list, they tend to choose a very specific niche or choose in terms of products.

Please do not build a list around a product because you do not know when will that product be removed from the market and most importantly, you will not have the flexibility to promote other products if you based your list around a product!

Now let’s look at choosing a specific niche, take for example, if you create a squeeze page around some free tips to relief eczema, and you intend to promote eczema product (from clickbank) to these subscribers, then in future, it will be difficult to promote other products to this list unless you know very well what are the other products that are also good to eczema patients.

Thus, I suggest you should pick a niche that is not too niche, so that you will have a greater flexibility later to promote other products to your list. For example, you can choose around the niche ‘Natural Remedies’ (instead of just Eczema product) to build your list. In future, it is easier for you to choose other remedies in clickbank to promote to your list because there are many natural remedies listed there.

In the next step, we will take a closer look at selecting a lead magnet.

Step 2 – Find a lead magnet (or create one!)
Once you have decided on a niche, the next step is to find something that you can give away to people in exchange of their emails. This is commonly known as the lead magnet, which means you are using it as a welcome gift for people who sign up as your subscribers. Of course, the thing that you are giving away should be closely related to the niche that you have chosen!

One favorite place I like to go and find lead magnet is IDPLR.com. Let’s say I am focusing on the natural remedy niche, then I can choose this PLR product to give away – Natural Cures.

If you can’t find a suitable PLR (Private Label Rights) product, then what you can do is to compile some useful resources and send it as a gift to your subscribers! For example, you can find some useful blog posts and youtube videos on the niche and consolidate them into a list. And this will be the lead magnet for your subscribers!

The most important thing in this step is that you must give away something information related to the niche so that visitors to your squeeze page will give you their email to receive these information.

Once you have your lead magnet ready, let’s move on to the next step – creating squeeze page!

Step 3 – Create a squeeze page!
You may want to know does a suqeeze page looks like and what is the purpose of a squeeze page? You can take a look at one of my squeeze pages here – this is a page that I have created to get emails from people who are keen to receive one of my online courses for free.

As you can see from the page, it is a very short page that tells a visitor to enter his/her name and email to receive access to one of my online courses. The purpose of a squeeze page is to get a subscriber to your list by giving away something free.

There are a few ways how you can create a squeeze page.

The first way (which is the quickest) is to use GetResponse, which is a auto-responder software that also helps you manage emails to your subscribers. I have been using GetResponse for many years and it is one of the top software I would recommend to most people. To begin with, it costs just $15/mth. Here is a video that I have created to show you how to create squeeze page using getresponse.

The second way is to design a squeeze page using wordpress. This method is slightly more complicated but it is cheaper in long run because you need to have a web hosting package and then install wordpress. If you are keen to learn the wordpress way, you can sign up this course – ‘ WordPress Landing Page Design ‘. But bear in mind, you still need to find another auto-responder to help you send emails.

The important aspect of a squeeze page

Actually creating the squeeze page is the easier part, the harder part is actually making sure that your squeeze page converts.

The following are five important aspects for a well converting squeeze page that you must always remember:

1) Traffic source
First thing is to decide what is the main traffic source that you want to use to market your squeeze page. For example, if you want to use Microsoft Ads to promote your squeeze page, then you must make sure that the title of your ad must be the same as your squeeze page. If a visitor click on an ad that says ‘Free ebook’ but when they landed on your squeeze page and there’s no mention of free ebook, the visitor willmost probablyleave your page.

If you want to use YouTube as the main source of traffic, then a good strategy is to create some informative video and ask them to download something for even more tips at your website at the end of the video. Personally I like to use youtube as a source of marketing squeeze page because it is free and I don’t need to pay anything to youtube.

2) Very targeted message
One mistake many people make is that they tend to include a lot of information on the squeeze page and end up confusing the visitors. In an effective squeeze page, there is only one message you want to tell the visitor – which is to enter their email to get something, that’s all. The rest of the information you should keep them in the email series then send to your subscribers.

3) The lesser the fields, the better
Most effective squeeze pages just need the visitors to enter their email. So remember this, if there’s no strong reason for you to get their names, then just have one single field in your squeeze page, which is the Email field.

4) Delivery method
There are generally two types of delivery method how you can let your subscribers download your lead magnet.

The first method is to send them via email after they enter their email into your squeeze page.

The second method is to redirect them to a thank you page containing the download link after they enter their email.

Personally I prefer the first method (via email) because this will prevent people from entering a fake email upfront. Whenever possible, just use the email delivery method.

5) Mobile friendly!
Nowadays as more and more people are using their mobile phones to view websites, it is important for our squeeze pages to fit nicely on mobile device too. This is another reason why I like GetResponse because their landing page editor allows me to design how the mobile view for my squeeze page looks like.

Make sure you check how your squeeze page looks like on your mobile phones before you promote it!

So that’s all for this part one post. You can click here to read the part 2.

For now, just go and start creating your squeeze page and leave your questions below this blog post if you have any.