There are many affiliate networks available, such as clickbank.com, which list thousands of products in various different niches, for which anyone can become an affiliate. Commissions range from fifty per cent to seventy-five per cent commissions, and all affiliates are free to join.

Standard affiliate marketing usually consists of signing up as an affiliate for a particular product and sending traffic to the affiliate link using email marketing, blogging and social networks.

However, when it comes to these standard affiliate marketing strategies, you can miss a lot of sales opportunities.

Let me explain.

When an affiliate puts effort into sending traffic to an affiliate product, the majority of visitors choose to opt-in to the free offer first. (Most websites selling a product include the option for people to submit their contact details in exchange for a free offer.) This means that the product owner is generating leads that can be used for marketing for years to come, from the effort of the affiliate.

The affiliate, on the other hand, has to generate traffic for a chance to make a sale—and is not capturing any leads. Considering that a standard website converts at one per cent, the affiliate would have to drive 100 visitors to a web page for a sale to occur, and would need to drive traffic to a web page constantly in order to make substantial income from it.

However, when combining affiliate marketing with the power of webinars, you not only benefit from a ten per cent conversion rate (as webinars usually convert at ten per cent), you capture the leads before the product owner does.

In addition, should you choose to sell an affiliate product on a webinar, which is priced below the preferred price point of minimum $297, it is easy to add value to the product by adding other services and products for yourself.

For example, should you be selling a $97 course as an affiliate, when adding a few one-to-one coaching sessions, adding a done-for-you service, a ready-made template, an interview recording, etc… the whole bundle could easily be sold for more.

Therefore, webinar affiliate marketing is a more lucrative business model than the standard affiliate marketing strategy, allowing you to sell ten times more products, at a higher price point, while simultaneously building your list, for the same amount of effort.

Putting together a webinar for affiliate marketing — step-by-step

1. When using the webinar affiliate marketing method, the process is exactly the same as with any webinar. Firstly, you devise an attention-grabbing headline,
2. Write an introduction,
3. Break the content into easy-to-follow steps
4. Write a pitch.
5. Point people to your affiliate link in order to purchase the product (instead of pointing to your purchase link)

An affiliate link is usually a long, quite ugly URL, which can easily be masked using a wordpress plugin such as “pretty link”. The plugin will allow you to use a domain name of your choice that you’ve purchased, and use it to mask the long affiliate link. Therefore, you end up sending people to a link that looks like www.yourdomainname.com special instead.

Case Study: How I came up with the Webinar Affiliate Marketing strategy

I often wondered what would be the best way to prove to people that webinars are the best cash flow generating strategy on the web, bar none.

One day, I came up with the idea that he could put together and launch a webinar from scratch for someone, in front of a live audience. All I would need was a willing person, an Internet connection and access to a computer.

My wife’s eyes immediately lit up. What a great idea to prove in front of a live audience how webinars are the fastest and easiest way to make money online! It became a major priority on our to-do list.

I was on vacation with Mark Anastasi, who had just released his New York Times best selling book, The Laptop Millionaire. In between boating, spear fishing, snorkeling and relaxing on the beach, I suggested that Mark should promote on a book tour. His book covers over 21 ways to make money online, and includes our webinar strategies.

Mark loved the idea of a world tour to deliver seminars on online wealth creation, and he agreed to use that opportunity to showcase the power of webinars in front of a live audience.

The 3-day seminar tour, The Laptop Millionaire World Tour, went to 12 cities around the world. In every city, hundreds of people gathered, and on the first day of the seminar, the attendees willing to participate in the challenge would come up on stage and have a few seconds to pitch their webinar idea to the rest of the audience.

The rest of the attendees then voted for the best idea. The first 3-day seminar took place in Melbourne, where Shane Price, a business consultant, won the challenge.

His webinar ended up generating $21,425 in under 90 minutes. Later, more sales came in boosting the total revenue to over $35,000.

We knew we were on to something. The challenge became very popular as people found out about our seminars—how some people were leaving them thousands of dollars richer. Soon, we had more challenge contestants on stage than voters in the audience.

The first selection criteria was for the person to have a webinar idea, but had never used webinars before to monetize their idea. The finalist was decided by audience applause.

Once the challenge winner was selected, he or she had to spend the rest of the day filling in my one-million-dollar-webinar-formula template—with slides—which has been responsible for generating over 50 million dollars in sales for my clients and I. The template includes:

• The headline (the webinar title)
• The introduction, explaining what led the presenter to deliver this presentation,
• The content (which teaches the strategy)
• The close (which presents the product offer and call to action). Note that in all cases, the product hadn’t been created yet.

Wait a minute, the product wasn’t created yet?

That’s right, we never create the product until we’ve sold it, and customers actually prefer it that way.

Once the challenge winner had finished putting together the slides, they were sent to my graphic designers for branding.

On the second day, while the seminar was being delivered, the contestant had to use that time to practice the webinar, making sure that it flowed well, wasn’t too thin in terms of content, and didn’t go overtime. We would then schedule the live webinar on gotowebinar.com to be delivered at 11am on the final day. Once the webinar was scheduled, an email to our database would be sent out, inviting people to watch the live presentation.

Unlike other webinars, where we would allow three days to promote it, we had just one shot at getting enough attendees to generate sales. At 11am the next day, the contestant stood on the stage and delivered the live webinar while attendees watched the process.

The process enabled random attendees, some of whom had never generated any money online, to make from $2,000 to $22,000 in as little as 90 minutes.

We had proved our point.

In Sydney however, an interesting thing happened which led us to discover a brand new way to leverage webinars… even without having to put together a product or deliver a product…

The lucky Sydney contestant, Helen, won the challenge with the idea, How to make a million dollars thanks to Pinterest. At the time, Pinterest was a new social network that was proving to be a very promising platform in terms of traffic, leads and sales generation.

When Helen was then asked to put together the webinar slides, she confessed she had no desire to put together a Pinterest-related information course to sell at the end of the webinar. I wish I had known that earlier! It’s always best if the experts you work with have a passion for delivering information and helping people.

Although we’d been taking contestants through the process of putting together a free webinar to sell a course or product and then delivering the product or course after it was sold, in Helen’s case I had to think fast about an alternative.

The easiest way for Helen to have a course to sell, was to become an affiliate of someone else’s product. I searched on Google for the best and latest Pinterest course, which led us to finding a product that had an affiliate program and was priced at $97.

Although $97 is usually too low a price point for a product to sell on a webinar, as we often recommend people to sell products on webinars for $297 or more, in Helen’s case she wouldn’t have to do anything after the webinar. All she had to do, was point the webinar attendees who wanted to learn more about Pinterest, to buy the course through her affiliate link.

For every sale that went through her affiliate link, she received a fifty per cent commission. Best of all, she didn’t have to handle any customer support enquiries, or any customer related questions. The product owner was handling everything.

Her webinar, which generated over $2,200 in sales, proved once again that webinars are the fastest and easiest way to make money online… regardless of whether you even have a product to sell or not!