Free Affiliate Bonus

Today I’d like to talk about Free Affiliate Bonus sales and conversion pattern. That’s an interesting technique, which, surprisingly, allows not only increase your conversions, but also brings a real value to your customers, if done properly.

To Internet profits!
--Ely

Summary:

Free Affiliate Bonus offer is basically when your free bonus for purchase of your product is a free product by somebody else, who gives it away in exchange for opt-in or registration and with whom you may or may not have an affiliate relationship.

Name of the pattern:

Free Affiliate Bonus

When to use this pattern:

1. When you are out of bonuses to offer and need one fast.
2. When you are at the end of your sales workflow and the customer, you hope, is still in the buying mode.
3. When you want just one little extra punch to your Thank You page to make the customer feel even better about the purchase, so that he will come back for more.
4. When you are just beginning to build your reputation on Internet and want to boost your sales by adding an established authority.

How to use this pattern:

Steps, when you are using Free Affiliate Bonus offer:

1. Find relevant high-quality free product (eBook, pdf report, video) that somebody else give away to build his mailing list.
2. Join his affiliate program, if referral to his free product is counted once the customer makes a real purchase on his site.
3. Offer this free product as a bonus to yours in your sales letter without disclosing too many details but with the high praise to the product and its creator.
4. Give a link to it on your Thank You pages. Don’t forget to praise it again, you want your customer to go and get it.

That’s it. This pattern has several options in its elements.

Step one is optional. It will help you to increase the conversions, but if you are uncomfortable with that, just give that free affiliate bonus right on the Thank You page as a surprise. This way you trade better conversion rate on a sales page to more free will and higher chances of the customer coming back. In essence, you give more than you promised.

Step two is not always available. Many people would be discouraged to use somebody else’s offer if no affiliate program is involved. However, if the quality of the stuff is really good, you still can use it to boost the free will, your customers have to you, and you can even boast that you give it to them for free without any monetary rewards for yourself.

Steps, when you want others to use your free product as a Free Affiliate Bonus offer:

1. Create a separate landing page.
2. Make it a look and feel of private area. Something like “Welcome, members” header, login page with a comment “if you still did not created login, leave password blank and you will be taken to one time registration page”, and login id is, of course, the customer email. Just don’t forget to mention that they’ll get communications form you.
3. A real smart move is to instantly make them your affiliates, once they have registered. This way they also can start giving away you free affiliate bonus and benefit from it.

Caveats for both sides: don’t use it with lousy products. You’ll just alienate your customers, hurt your credibility and undermine your backend sales, if you have any. And backend sales is where you make real money. You have backend sales, right?

Attribution:

On Internet it was most notably introduced by Mike’s Filsaime in his Butterfly Marketing model. Otherwise, it existed for the very long time. Did you ever got “AOL Free Trial CD” with a new computer? That’s the one.

Related patterns:

Butterfly marketing, free bonus, launch tree

Related anti-patterns:

None

Comments:

Many people don’t get the purpose 4, adding established authority to boost your own sales. If you have this problem, imagine a beginner Internet marketer who tries to sell his course for $27, but gives away Jay’s Abraham secret launch plan for Internet businesses. People will buy his product just to get their hands on Jay Abraham’s report. That’s what I mean by adding established authority.

For reference, I am not aware of any secret launch plan by Jay Abraham and doubt that it exists. People of this rank don’t need one, they just know how to do that. So, I gave it just as a fictional example.

Don’t forget that as usual, that’s you who tells the customer, that the guy giving away that report, book or course is an established authority. Some may use it in a deceptive way presenting their buddy as an authority. I don’t do that and cannot advise it, but even when the guy you refer to IS a real established authority, don’t forget to TELL that. Your customer may have started to look for products in your niche this night and he may have no clue who is and who is not the authority.

Purpose #2 to keep the customer in the sales tree while he is in a buying mode basically allows you effectively increase the length of your sales tree (post-sales offers) at very little cost and effort to you. What’s happening is that you put somebody else’s (to whom you are an affiliate) sales tree to the end of yours.