The Aweber Guide for Affiliate Marketers

It’s time to share a really cool way in which you can either squeeze a lot of money out of your current campaigns, or launch your own solo campaigns that do great. At the least, I think this guide can really get your affiliate wheels turning and really get you thinking about new monitization strategies. This is going to be an affiliate’s guide to monetizing their landing pages with Aweber. Aweber is an email subscription (newsletter) service, where you have the ability to place a form on your landing page that grabs an email and/or name, and you get that opt-in email saved into a list. You can then set up that list to do one of two things :

1) Act as a newsletter. You have the list and can create newsletters and send them out whenever you wish.

2) Act as an autoresponder. This means that once the user opts-in to your list, they are automatically sent one or a series of emails. You just create the email list, and once they opt-in Aweber does all the sending automatically for you.

For the bulk of this guide, we’re going to be looking at setting up the autoresponder side of things. Before we actually take a look into the Aweber interface and how we build our pages using this tool, we’ll discuss why and how we’re going to make money from it.

For my example we’re going to use the insurance niche. It’s a saturated financial offer that everybody knows about, so it’ll be easy to understand. If we have our regular old insurance landing page, it’s probably got some text and images, and then the call to action would be a button that says “Continue” or something of that nature. Now instead of designing it like that, we can design it almost like an email submit page. Instead of just the button, we’re going to say “Enter your name and email to get your free rate quote”. The person will enter their name and email, and when they click continue they’ll be taken to the offer where they can convert and make you leads like normal. The special thing here though is that we now have their name an email, and with Aweber we can set up some nice goodies with it…

Now I mentioned before that you can set up Aweber to automatically send out a list of emails to whomever opts-in. So for insurance (we’ll say it’s auto insurance), we’re going to set up a nice email list and hit them up with a series of emails. We’re going to assume they convert on the offer right after they click through. Now you’ll set up the autoresponder to email them that next day with the first email. It could look something like this :

Email title: Robert, About Your Auto Insurance Quote

Robert,

We saw that you inquired about a free auto insurance quote through our website. While we hope that this quote looks attractive for you, we’ve found another great company that also offers free quotes. It’s always best to see as many options as possible, and since this is a free quote you have nothing to lose! Click here to get a different free auto insurance quote.

Sincerely,
Auto Insurance Company

With that first email, we’re able to offer our extremely targeted user a second opinion. You can just pick a different auto insurance offer and pop it in there. Chances are if they were interested in an auto insurance quote the first time, they wouldn’t mind getting another free quote. It’s also a potential way to recover lost leads that didn’t convert on your first landing page offer. It doesn’t end here though, like I said we’re going to set up a series of offers. We already know exactly what our customer is looking for (auto insurance), so we can take that knowledge and present them with similar offers. Our second email may look like this :

Email title : Robert, Save 15% On Your Current Health Insurance Plan

Robert,

We’re here to yet again present you with another great free offer out there. We hope you saw a cheaper car insurance quote using our services, and we can almost guarantee that you’ll see cheaper health insurance as well. Customers have reported an average of 15% savings off of their current plan. Once again the quote is completely free and the more money we save you, the happier we are. Click here to check out the company, have a look around if you’d like and then apply for your free quote.

Hope this helps,
Don

You can get the picture of where I’m going with this. You can set up as many follow-up emails as you’d like, they opted-in and can cancel their email subscription whenever they want. You can pop in with all sorts of insurance offers; health, home, more auto insurance. Branch out to different but connected verticals like credit reports and auto loans. Anything you think your user would be interested in is worth a shot. Test out different email patterns and offers to find out which ones work best.

Your landing page click-through rate might drop because you’re asking for more information, but it may be worth it if you’re cashing in off of the email offers.

Landing Pages Built for Opt-Ins

Aside from using Aweber to add some potential extra income to your campaigns, you can also create campaigns dedicated purely to capturing emails and then hitting them with the offer. Such a page would be designed to just get them to enter their name and email (you want the name too because it has less of a chance of getting marked as spam with the name in the email title), and then they’d be sent to a thank-you.html page. Your page would pretty much look the same, saying “Enter your name and email to get your free auto insurance quote:”, and then after they clicked Continue, they’d be sent to a thank you page which could look something like this :

Thank you!

Your email has been received and you will find instructions in your inbox on getting your free auto insurance quote in under 2 minutes. Under no circumstances do we spam, but sometimes emails are automatically sent to your spam folder, so please check that if you don’t find the message in your inbox.

Have a great day and we hope you save some money on your auto insurance!

This let’s them know that the email will be hitting their inbox soon, but also makes sure they check their spam folder just incase the email is spammed (which a lot of times it is).

Now this way of monetization can take a long time and a lot of testing to learn, but I think there’s huge potential in it. Honestly I’ve just started building opt-in lists and testing this stuff out myself, so as I’m learning it, I’m sharing it with you guys. Mailing is SO much different from PPC, it’s a totally new game. Although this isn’t the mailing that everybody thinks of (getting a 20 million email list and sending out crazy amounts of mail), it’s sort of a PPC/mailing hybrid. We’re sending a series of emails like in mailing, but we’re using much more targeted lists and we’re paying more to acquire each user. Let’s take a look at how to personally log into Aweber and set up our autoresponder.


Step 1

Sign up for an Aweber account. Really?

 

Step 2

Start by clicking on the “List Settings” tab at the top, and then clicking on “add new”.
 


 


Step 3

Click on “Create List”. You’ll then be directed to a page that tells you your list has been created, and you now need to save the settings for it. Fill out your information like so :
 

Make sure to scroll down and fill in a reply address. I just used admin@myaffilaitedomain.com.
 

Step 4

Under the List Settings tab, we’re going to select the Verified Opt-In link. This brings up a page where you can control whether or not you want to verify. If you have this turned on, what it’ll do before it sends your affiliate emails, it’ll send an email saying “Confirm that you want to subscribe to this Aweber newsletter” or something like that (you can customize what the page says). This is to prevent spam allegations, but our users are definitely opting-in and we’re not spamming them, we’re following up with offers related to what they’re interested in. So I turn this option OFF, as the confirmation email will probably kill your volume quite a bit. An Aweber expert can feel free to correct me if I’m horribly wrong.
 


 

Step 5

Now under List Settings navigate to the Web Form option. Here is where we’re going to create the actual form where the user submits their email. Let’s fill that out…
 


 

Step 6

Now that we have that, it’s time to get the HTML that we can just paste wherever we want. I recommend copying the HTML as it’s going to allow you to customize the text and size of the form to your liking, and fit it perfectly into your page.
 


 

Step 7

Now it’s finally time to start creating our messages. Click on the Messages tab at the top, and then click on “Create New”. The details for the message come up that you will then fill out :
 

Fill out all your details, add in HTML/images that you want, and save the message. Now we have one message that will immediately go out to the user once they opt-in. Note that you can use the Personalization Fields drop out menu to dynamically insert their name into the list. Brilliant!
 

Step 8

Now it’s time to create all of our follow-up messages. Just add a new message and you can plug as many new messages in there as you want. Note that at the top we can change the time in between messages. The default is 4 days, but you can change it to whatever you want. You can test out sending mails every day if you want, I set mine to every two days.
 

 

And there you have it, the step by step newbie guide to setting up your Aweber campaigns. You can do so many things with this it’s awesome, you can even have it be a secondary option on your landing page. Instead of making them enter their email to continue, just add a little newsletter box and say “Enter your email to be informed when other great auto insurance offers come around.” or something like that.

You may make money with it, you may not. Like I said I’m just starting to play around with this stuff and it’s definitely an interesting way of combining both PPC and mailing methodology.


20 Comments

  1. nate
    March 19, 2008

    Cool article Paul. I was going to try to do my own newsletter/autoresponder stuff a couple months back but realized it would be a pain without a service like Aweber. CAN-SPAM compliance scared me too. Looks like you’ll be making a commission off my Aweber sign up shortly.

  2. Matias
    March 19, 2008

    Nice, thanks for share.

    Now, it would be nicer to know if it is working for you…

  3. March 19, 2008

    I just started working with aweber and trying to build my own email list in order to promote CPA offers. It’s starting off slow and getting people to opt in takes a lot of work depending on the niche I’ve found.

  4. March 19, 2008

    Awesome! But sometimes I get scared getting into affiliate marketing.. so i have never really tried it yet..

  5. March 19, 2008

    I was just reading more about opt-in lists and Aweber. Thanks for this post! Very informative. I have heard others mention that they wish they would have started using opt-in lists a long time ago when they first started. This should really help anyone that is interested.

  6. March 19, 2008

    I’m apart of a group of people working on affiliate marketing and such. E-mails seem tough.

    The one thing that bothers us is how do you decide on what you want to spend. With straight PPC you can see returns minute by minute. This e-mail marketing, you may not see returns until a week later after your 2nd or 3rd e-mail. That is my biggest issue, is how do you say ok i’ve spent enough, I better drop it?

  7. Cash
    March 19, 2008

    Get ready to get flagged for spam and all your messages sent to bulk mail. Had to cancel Aweber for that…

  8. March 19, 2008

    How do you measure the value of a subscriber?
    And what’s an acceptable CPA to you for getting a new subscriber?
    Also, do you start pitching subscribers right away?

  9. March 19, 2008

    Ha would make a great ebook for dp mister uber affiliate.

    Can I have resell rights :)?

  10. invisible777
    March 19, 2008

    wow – now that was a POST

    thanks for taking time for the write-ip

  11. March 19, 2008

    Here is a little trick that most people are not aware of that aweber is capable of – your aweber subscribers can get added onto your feedburner subscriber lists also, giving your site a higher rss subscriber count. :) Need proof? Look at JohnChow’s recent rss surge.

  12. Just a heads up…this post was a featured post on today’s Daily Blog Summary. Great post.

  13. anon
    March 19, 2008

    instead of just using it, couldn’t you just write up an informational piece and add affiliate tracking code to the outgoing links so that users who click on the link and actually order give you 20% commission?

  14. March 19, 2008

    Hey paul, what kind of php script or wordpress plugin are you using to hide affiliate links like:
    https://www.uberaffiliate.com/recommends/aweber.php

  15. March 19, 2008

    Great tips Paul, but I’d like to caution all of the aspiring affiliates to make sure you understand CAN-SPAM and the affiliate agreements you are signing with your advertisers.

    Advertising an advertiser, and not protecting them from future CAN-SPAM litigation by not suppressing people who have already opted-out of that advertiser’s emails could cost your advertiser money, and depending on your agreement with that advertiser, could cost you money too (check the indemnification section of your agreements).

    If your advertiser hasn’t specifically said “okay” to email programs you are running, you might risk losing that advertiser altogether if you get them in hot-water with the FTC of state AG’s.

    That said, if you’re running these types of niche marketed offers to people that have opted-in for them, and know that they opted-in for them, you’re looking at a great way to make money… targeted email typically converts two-three times better than search in my experience.

  16. March 19, 2008

    I think also you have to think about email marketing an opt-in lists as a good business practice for increasing value in your company or website. Email lists are SO valuable, especially targeted ones. Creating an email database for your website can do multiple things including creating another source of revenue, adding value to your portfolio and creates awareness to your business or website. Great post!

  17. March 21, 2008

    great article… you should do posts like these more regularly

  18. March 23, 2008

    It’s great that you bring up Email marketing. A lot of affiliates only think of putting up banners and affiliate links on their websites. But they are leaving tons of money on the table. People should explore other ways to monetize their websites/projects. I mean, they already spent the time and money to bring the site/project online, so spending just a little more time exploring other revenue sources can only help to increase ROI. Remember, ROI is the name of the game for small businesses like ours.

  19. April 2, 2008

    It looks convincing, only thing is can I change the links in the email sent. Like say I want to send them 10 affiliate links of mine to make me money, can I sign in and create a new email of links and send it out? I don’t want it sending the same thing. I would like to control is so I can email my affiliate links only when I updated them.

  20. May 22, 2008

    Can’t tell you how good this is! Cheers!

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