Do Affiliates Need a Unique Selling Proposition?

I cranked up TweetDeck this morning to see a tweet from Perry Marshall leading back to a post on his blog about niche marketing and the need for a unique selling proposition.

In short his post says: differentiate.

He explains the need for a Unique Selling Proposition. If you’re not familiar with the USP concept, it’s essentially a marketing message that succinctly explains how what you offer is different from all other options.

Great advice for anyone marketing their own products, but what about affiliates?

“Do Affiliates Need a Unique Selling Proposition to Succeed?”

From my own experience as an affiliate and from what I’ve seen other affiliates achieve the short answer is…

No. It’s not a requirement for affiliates to have a strong USP to succeed.

Before you run off and try to clone someone else’s success in pursuit of “easy riches” you need to understand that the most successful affiliates do bring something unique to the sales process. I’ll come back to this in a bit.

But the fact remains that there are some affiliates that do not add anything of themselves to the sales message. And since a unique selling proposition is focused on weaving uniqueness into the sales message, these traffic brokering affiliates don’t have a USP.

If you’re familiar with the Google Cash strategy, you know that it’s basically a direct linking strategy to send traffic straight from Google Adwords over to a merchant’s website. Definitely an approach devoid of a USP.

Direct linking from Google search ads is much more difficult than it used to be but that’s just one method that traffic brokering affiliates can use to send traffic to a merchant without changing the sales message in any substantial way.

The X Factor of Top Affiliates

While some affiliates succeed without a unique sales message, the top performing ones all bring something unique to their marketing.

Most of the zero-USP affiliates are masters of finding traffic and redirecting it to a merchant.

They’re experts at one of these:

• Natural search marketing
• Paid search advertising
• List building
• Social media marketing

Most affiliates have a great deal of difficulty finding fat torrents of traffic to send to a merchant. And frankly, that’s one of the reasons why most affiliates fail to earn even a part time living with their efforts.

Knowing how to tap into serious traffic is unique.

It’s not a selling proposition, but it’s the “X Factor” that some of the best affiliates bring to the table.

For Affiliates Without Much Traffic: Focus on Conversion

In the most cut-throat marketing spaces the top affiliates are ruthlessly testing and tweaking the few components of the pre-sales process that they can control.

They’re adding something unique to the sales message.

They’re sending traffic to their own landing pages and testing:

• Headlines
• Calls to actions
• Bonus offers
• Graphics
• Testimonials
• Layouts

Focusing on conversion isn’t just for super affiliates in competitive niches. It’s for anyone that wants to maximize profits, regardless of traffic. And if you’re having trouble finding rivers of traffic, then you really need to make every visitor count.

Let me show you a method for increasing conversions while making it much more difficult for someone to steal your secret sauce.

How to Make Your Affiliate Marketing Clone Resistant

These are shark infested waters.

After researching a market, a top affiliate can siphon off a list of your best keywords using SpyFu and Keyword Spy. They can duplicate your ads and headlines in seconds. In under an hour they can harvest the html and graphics from your top landing page.

And then like a Texas hold ‘em poker pushing a mountain of chips onto the felt, they whisper “all in” as they outbid you… on your best keywords.

How do you keep these sharks at bay?

For one, you should invest the time and training to eventually become a shark.

But in the meantime you find something unique you can bring to the sales message that’s difficult, if not impossible, to duplicate.

You develop a Unique Selling Proposition.

How to Develop A Unique Selling Proposition as an Affiliate

Some gurus of affiliate marketing will recommend focusing almost entirely on the market… finding a high converting product in a hungry market where there’s lots of money flowing.

That’s great advice, if you’re a shark, or shark in training.

But for the small affiliate looking to carve out some extra income in a crowded marketplace I’m going to suggest the opposite:

Focus on what makes you unique.

• What industries have you worked in?
• What’s your preferred communication method?
• What’s your real story?
• What’s your passion?
• What do you have more of: money or time?

If you dismiss these questions as touchy feely new age nonsense you’ll miss a great opportunity to differentiate. And differences sell.

So let’s look at these questions one by one and how they might apply to you.

What industries have you worked in?

If you’ve worked in real estate sales (and the economy has kicked your tail) then you know terminology and lingo of real estate agents. You know the most popular forums and the most popular blogs. You know their pain, their concerns, and their hopes.

You might ask yourself, “how can I tie in Perry Marshall’s training on adwords and marketing to what real estate agents really want right now?”

What’s your preferred communication method?

• Networking?
• Teletraining?
• Videos?
• Blogs?
• Articles?

There’s no right answer. If the thought of making regular blog posts makes your palms sweat then don’t try to be a blogger. If you have no technical skills at all then creating and uploading videos could be a challenge.

Pick the communication method that’s right for you.

What’s your real story?

Too many affiliates jump into the internet marketing niche and try to pretend that they know enough to teach “newbies” how to do internet marketing.

I’m not going to tell you to stay out of the internet marketing space — there’s a lot of money there — but be authentic.

Saying you’re an expert doesn’t make it so, and most people figure it out sooner or later.

Here’s a more authentic story line: journeyman.

A Great Affiliate to Learn From

If you want to see an example of the journeyman story line go over to Entrepreneur’s Journey. I love Yaro’s site, I highly recommend that you subscribe to his updates. Yaro said goodby to newbie-ville a long time ago, but one of the great things about Yaro is that he started out by honestly saying “I’m still trying to figure this marketing thing out… I’ll share what I find with you on this journey.”

It takes the pressure off and helps him bond instantly with his audience.

Now what if you did that for an audience that you had some experience with, instead of the internet marketing space where it’s difficult to get your message to rise over the noise…?

What’s your passion?

Passion will carry you through the obstacles.

Passion will help you connect with your audience.

What do you have more of: money or time?

There’s no such thing as free traffic, unless your time is worthless.

You’re paying one way or the other.

Some affiliates wouldn’t dream of writing an article or spending time with search engine optimization. They buy traffic with greenbacks. Period.

Other affiliates, especially when they’re starting out, don’t have a war chest to invest in buying traffic.

No problem… use your time.

• Write articles and submit them to article directories.
• Make blog posts.
• Make videos.
• Create Squidoo lenses and HubPages.

I’ll go into more detail on the mechanics of each of these in the private affiliates only section (coming soon).

How this works in the real world: case studies

The perfect example is Yaro Starak. He makes a great income by focusing on his audience and being authentic.

Yaro puts 100% of himself into his content and whenever he reviews a product he’ll point out the flaws just as quickly as the strong points.

And I think he’d be one of the first to admit that even though he makes great money from affiliate marketing, some of the top PPC super affiliates can make an eye popping seven figure income.

Yaro uses his own style. It’s in line with his passion.  And so it works.

If you want to replicate Yaro’s method, you might want to sign up for his  blog mastermind course.

To give you another example, I’ve contacted an affiliate I personally helped to close some quick sales for Perry Marshall during my push to become Perry’s affiliate manager. My hope is to give you a real world peek into a successful promotion and how it came together.

I expect to bring that to you soon.

In the meantime, turn off the computer, grab a pen, and spend some time putting together a list of of answers to these questions:

• What industries have you worked in?
• What’s your preferred communication method?
• What’s your real story?
• What’s your passion?
• What do you have more of: money or time?

The way to get your message to rise above the noise of the internet is to be authentic, genuine, and passionate.