Did you ever hear of an offline business that did not have customers, whether it is a tiny shop or IBM or Toyota? As an affiliate you have many advantages over other businesses, but so long as you send prospects directly to the merchant's site you have no customers. That means you have no business.



Maybe you don't want a business because you think it is a trap, and that you will end up going to an office wearing a suit and tie, and all that stuff. Not at all. A business is something you run to make money in a systematic way. That's it.

Autoresponders add a system to affiliate marketing

To put some system into your affiliate business and to get customers, you need an autoresponder. It is that simple. I will admit that I failed to do this for ages, and then got an autoresponder system I could put on my site, but it did not work well.

Sure it saved money, but what I did not realise then was that it was losing me much more money, and preventing me from doing thing that would make money. How come? Well, I wanted to promote a product and offer a free report, but I needed a proper autoresponder for that.

Also, I knew that people need to come into contact with a shop or business several times before they buy - there are exceptions, but on average it takes seven contacts to sell.

Without one you are losing a lot of sales

Without an autoresponder, you are probably losing four sales for every five people that visit your site or promotional page.

You don't just get a system that sends out messages with an autoresponder system. Here are a few of the things you will get:

1. When you enter your messages it checks them for spam rating, and if it high warns you to edit it. You want a very low spam rating for your messages to get through.

2. About two-thirds of your email messages get through to prospects. A good autoresponder service will get over 95 per cent through - that means you reach 50 per cent more people, which is worth a lot.

3. Forms where people can sign up, which you can customise without knowing any code. You just add them where you want.

4. Tracking, so you can see where the leads are coming from.

5. The ability to broadcast a message to all prospects.

So, if you want to turn your affiliate marketing into a profitable business, get an autoresponder!