Affiliates: Don't Destroy Your Internet Business By Building Someone Elses

It is very common nowadays to see people setting up affiliate review pages with outgoing links to affiliate products, then paying for visitors from Google Adwords. Even some people just send the visitor directly to the merchant's homepage. And some (though few) have actually gotten a positive ROI (Return-on-Investment).

Let me tell you a secret, vendors (Clickbank, Paydotcom, etc.) LOVE when you do this. You are sending them FREE targetted traffic that they don't have to do anything for. How do I know? Because I am a Clickbank vendor myself! It is like getting something for nothing, who the hell wouldn't love free targetted PPC (Pay-Per-Click) traffic to their sales page anyway?

This traffic in turn either converts to a sale (giving you a lousy ONE-TIME commission), doesn't make a sale (losing you money), or converts as a LEAD (email signup) to the vendor. The email signup builds the vendor's business, not yours. Sure, the cookie MAY stay in effect that was set when the visitor clicked from your affiliate link and you may get a sale a week or two later after the vendors autoresponder kicks in. However, this is not building your own internet business.

Your internet business depends on YOUR list, not the vendors. You are giving the vendor FREE leads to sell to now, and in the future. Imagine the amount of money you make the vendor in a 5 year period. All of their new products/affiliate products that they promote - they get the money for, not you. This is why you need to build your own mailing list and not send traffic directly to a merchant page.

Sure, it seems like it is hard to get people to give you their name and email, and you may have to test and tweak your squeeze page, but in the long run this is what will keep your internet business alive. Imagine the money that you can make by sending out your own/affiliate offers by having your own list. You can have a 7-day autoresponder series going out that is promoting an affiliate product. You don't even have to have your own product, this is just like affiliate marketing sending the visitors straight to the merchant's sales page, except it is the SMART way to do it.

The way I am currently operating now is using Aweber (best in my opinion), when the visitor opts in to my list, the redirect URL goes to my affiliate URL to the merchant's page that I am promoting. Now, what I have done is collected my own lead, AND sent the visitor to the merchant page, perhaps getting a sale. Now I will be able to follow-up with this new lead in the future by an autoresponder, or by sending out broadcast emails whenever I want.

The possibilities are endless when you have your own mailing list. So right now, go into your Adwords/Yahoo/MSN accounts and pause your PPC campaigns that you have running. Get your squeeze pages built. Stop building the vendors business for him and build your own internet empire.