Mike Filsaime is a pretty big name in internet marketing circles. He is the creator of The Butterfly Marketing Manuscript that caused so much hype in 2006, among a host of other products and affiliate sites. As an affiliate, Mike probably earns in the vicinity of $75,000/month from his affiliate sites and lists alone, but when you add it to his earnings from his other sites and products, it’s more like $250,000/month. He’s also been known to earn over $1 million in a single week.

What are some of your key insights into the mindset of a successful affiliate marketer?

One of the most important things to realize as an affiliate marketer is that it all comes down to traffic. Selling things on the internet is about traffic and conversion, but since affiliates leave the conversion part to the merchant, all we have to worry about is traffic. Add to that, it’s easy to find products with good conversion rates... in fact affiliate networks like Clickbank will tell you straight out which are their best performing products. You can probably deduce that if they’re performing well, the merchant will probably have some good sales copy, good customer service, and that they will be testing different headlines and processes and tweaking their page to convert the best. This all makes it pretty easy for affiliates. All you have to do is drive traffic.

What are some of your best tips for affiliates to generate traffic?

The biggest opportunity for affiliate marketers that I can see is with AdWords. From my surveys, people fall into three categories: People who have never tried it, people who are doing it now, and people who have tried it and stopped immediately.

Of the people who have an AdWords account, 93% are not currently using it. Of the 7% of people who are, 85% of them are spending less than $500/month. It's astounding that we have one of the most effective ways to advertise online here, and so many people aren’t doing it right. In order to crush your opposition, all you need to do is learn just 1% more than what everyone else knows, and you’ll be a success.

This is what most people do on AdWords:

• Step 1: Find something to promote, like a radar detector.
• Step 2: Create AdWords ads, bidding on a generic term with a high search volume like "radar detector" "Cheapest radar detector" "Best radar detector", etc.
• Step 3: They spend $500 advertising on these words and earn $87 back. They think "well, that worked, but I lost $413"
• Step 4: They never try it again.

What these people need to understand is that it’s the long-tail search terms that are the best for AdWords. They also need to learn how to create a good landing page for their campaigns, and read the good books on using AdWords. Then the universe would be theirs!

For instance, in our radar detector example, the keyword "Radar Detector" might cost 80c/click.

However, "XBrand Radar Detector 9800i" might cost 5c per click, or as low as 1c per click with Google’s new algorithms. When you bid on longer tail keywords and play around with exclusion words, brackets and braces, etc, you should be able to get you bid prices down and your traffic far more qualified. Even if only 80 people are searching on these keywords per month, if you get a few of these long-tail ads going it will add up to significant traffic. It’s not about creating 6000 keywords, it’s about being SPECIFIC and drilling down into your niche.

How do you create your landing pages for AdWords? Do you send clicks directly to the product page? Do you try to capture email addresses?

If I had the choice of getting a sale today and not getting an email address, or getting an email address today and not getting a sale, I’d happily choose to get the email address and forget the sale. I would choose to build my business by getting the email address and turning that email address into a sale (or two, or more) further down the line.

The biggest mistake you can make as an affiliate is to build the merchant’s business rather than your own. Even if you’re earning 50% (or 75%!) commissions on products, if you’re not collecting email addresses you’re not getting an equal share on that sale. This is because the merchant is getting the customer, not you. They can build a relationship with this customer and promote on the backend, while you’re completely out of the picture.

One thing you can do (if you collect email addresses on your site) is cross-reference your database of prospects with your Clickbank reports to create a database of people who bought through your promotion. You can then contact these customers and say something like, "Hi, my name is Joe Bloggs. Yesterday you bought a product as a result of my promotion. This is an awesome product, but I can show you how to use it better. I’ve created a video to show you exactly how to go about getting the most out of ProductX..."

Now the customer is bonding with you more than with the vendor.

One common way of getting visitors to give you their email address is to offer them a free bonus for doing so. Or by requiring that they give you their contact details before you’ll show them the information they’re interested in. However, if you put up a gate like this where people can only get to your information by entering their email address, you’re likely to get frowns from Google, as well as getting fewer people making it through to your affiliate promotions. After all people were just there for a little information. They don’t want to sign up to something and risk being spammed, just in order to read your information, particularly if it's available elsewhere for free.

The solution? Simply give them the option to skip that step. Place a big, bold link underneath your sign up form saying "Skip this.. I’d rather not get a free bonus" and take them directly to the information inside. So people can either choose to get your free gift by giving you their contact details, or they can just skip that step entirely. The good thing about this is that Google are less likely to give you the slap, since their spiders will also be able to follow the non-signup link to see the content inside your page.

More ideas for appeasing Google

An important point to note is that Google don’t really approve of having a page where the only option is to give your name and address. This isn’t providing good content for your visitor, and Google will probably hit you with a high minimum bid for your PPC campaigns. It’s better to have an easy-to-follow no-opt-in link underneath your signup box.

Another thing that Google is VERY keen on (if you have a signup box) is seeing a privacy policy, disclaimer and terms of service. Google’s human reviewers will look hard for these. They’re not so convinced by the ubiquitous assertion that "I hate spam as much as you do. I will never rent, sell or pimp your email address." -- They really want to see policies.

One good idea that will usually be smiled on by Google is keeping all your content on the one page, and using bookmarks to give them impression that the information is on multiple pages.

For instance, you might have a signup box at the top of your page. It’s surrounded by white space, so it looks like it’s the only option on the page. When a visitor enters their details, though, it actually just skips to a point further down the page. The same thing could be done with your sidebar navigation -- it just skips to a point further down your page.

The way to do this is by creating invisible <a name> tags.

Example: <a name="my_bookmark_1"></a>

Insert this wherever you want your visitor to jump to. The link to jump to this point will look like:

<a href="#my_bookmark_1">Click here to jump to another part of the page!</a >

The # means "on this same page". If you wanted a hard link to this bookmark, you would write:

<a href="http://www.mydomain.com/mysqueezepage/index.html#my_bookmark_1">

Again, the # means "on this same page" or "on index.html".

You should also try requesting a name and email address multiple times on a page.

Of course, these tips apply predominantly to affiliates using PPC to direct traffic to a squeeze page. You’ll need different strategies for SEO, where you’ll be more interested in issuing a call to action than simply appeasing Google. You should also place this squeeze page outside your sitemap. A casual visitor to your site shouldn’t be able to click around your site and find this page. It should only appear to people clicking through from Adwords.

What would you say is a good follow up sequence for emails? Should you woo your readers with six soft-sell emails and then go in for a hard-sell? Or go straight to the hard-sell?

There’s a saying: "People love to buy, but they hate to be sold to." There’s nothing wrong with giving people an option to buy -- They get a good feeling from it! But you do need to treat your readers with respect and give them valuable information. Teach them everything they need to know about a product, like who it’s designed for, who it’s not suitable for, say "you’ll like this if...", etc. Be honest with them. Give them the pros and cons. You might, for instance, say "One of the things I didn’t like about this book was that it took 20 pages to get into the information, but after that there was some really useful stuff."

Think of it this way: every email is an opportunity to take your reader out of the "prospect " file and put them into the "customer" pile. So even in your very first email there should be some sort of offer where they can go and buy a product. But at the same time, you need to make sure your readers are learning with every email, and that they see value in your emails.

To answer your questions, you should really get as close to the hard sell as you can early on, while keeping your readers happy. Be as aggressive as you can, but keep a close eye on the performance of your emails so you can know when you’re losing prospects. With Clickbank you can insert tracking codes into your hoplinks, so a really good idea is to use a separate tracking code for each email in your autoresponder series. (Of course you can dress up the URLs so that they look more friendly to click on.) This way you can see which emails are generating the most sales.

You can also examine your unsubscribe stats to see where you’re losing subscribers. If you’ve got a lot of people opting out of your list after a particular email, examine that email and see what the problem is.

By combining these two methods of monitoring your emails, you can effectively double your conversions. How? Say your email number 6 gave you the most sales. And say your emails 3 and 4 caused the most people to unsubscribe. By moving email 6 up before emails 3 and 4 you’re able to hit a lot more people with your most effective pitch!

A new approach to viral marketing

Mike has recently released a new software that helps marketers build their prospects list.

Traditional opt-in form

• Visitor arrives at your site.
• Visitor enters name and email address.
• Visitor gains access to your materials.
• Visitor leaves.

Mike’s viral strategy

• Visitor arrives at your site
• Visitor enters name and email address
• NEW STEP: Visitor is offered a special bonus in return for giving the name and email address of three friends who might be interested in your website. (Visitor can skip this step, but doesn’t receive the bonus)
• Visitor gains access to your materials.
• Visitor leaves, but has attracted another three friends to your site, who also go through this process.

The result is an exponential increase in the number of people on your list. With the traditional opt-in process, if you stopped advertising your website, your list would stop growing. With this process, even if you pulled your advertisements, your list will continue to grow exponentially.

It's strongly recommended that all your email lists are double-opt-in. This means your visitor has to enter their email address on your website, and then click a link in an email you send to that address. While some people might find this process annoying, you can explain to them beforehand that this is in order to protect both you and them from spam.

Resources from Mike Filsaime

TheButterflyMarketingManuscript.com: This will really give you ideas about what viral marketing can do for you.

ProTrackManager.com is software for testing and tracking your ad campaigns.

PowerLinkGenerator.com is another piece of software which is really good for email promotions. It helps you create links that people will actually want to click on... essentially dressing your nasty looking affiliate links up in a tuxedo!

ViralFriendGenerator.com is software that automates the viral process described above.