These days it seems like there is no shortage of review sites out there, promoting this product or that. I recently had the opportunity to listen to Russell Brunson on a webinar and he was talking about a different spin on the old trick. It was new to me anyways, so I thought you might benefit.
The idea here is that you pick the affiliate product you’re going to market. I’m assuming you have an idea how to pick a decent product, if not let me know and I’ll post about that later on. So, assuming you’ve chosen a decent affiliate product to promote, the next step is to find out how it fits into the value ladder.
The Value Ladder
Russell talks a lot about his value ladder. In brief, the steps are as follows:
- Some sort of freebie
- Some sort of text based ebook. Could be free or cheap.
- Audio based version of the same thing. Could be worth a bit more.
- Video based version of the same thing. Again, worth more.
- Home study course developing the niche a lot further.
- Seminar, could be a webinar.
- Workshop. At this point we’re talking about in-person events.
- Live coaching.
- Direct one on one coaching with yourself.
That’s the value ladder in a nutshell. I know, you’re sitting there thinking, how could I possibly get all that going for me? Well, it takes quite a lot of work, and the good news is, you don’t have to have it all working for you to take advantage of the concept.
So you’ve got your affiliate product, (note the affiate product – you don’t need your own product to make this work), the next step is to figure out where on the value ladder your chosen product sits.
Let’s pick a mid-level internet marketing how to product for our example here, just because there are so few of them out there 
. Let’s call it Affiliate Cash Grabber. It is an in-depth guide to affiliate marketing, and it really has a ton of great ideas and content.It is a mixture of video and ebook.
The first step is to see if you can get a copy of it for free, from the author. Try the WHOIS information on the site the sales page is listed on. You should find a phone number there. Give it a try. Barring that, you can try the contact email.
If you’re utterly unsuccessful at getting a free copy of the product, but you really want to promote it, you might want to consider buying it yourself. Use your own affiliate link, so it doesn’t cost you much. If the product is on Clickbank, you can ethically use your own links as long as your account has processed sales from more than five different credit card numbers. Don’t do this on a brand new account, but rather from an established account you’re using for other sales.
Sit down and immerse yourself in their product. Chances are you will learn something you never knew before. Take notes. After you’re done, create your review product. This will be essentially a Cliff Notes version of the product. You can talk about what you learned, or how you think this could be applied, or how you know this is going to help your own business, or whatever. You get the idea.
Depending on where the product is on the value ladder, you want to create a product that is one step down on that same ladder. Now, because Affiliate Cash Grabber (I hope that isn’t a real product) is both video and ebook, you can pick what method you want to use. Video might be a good choice, because it is perceived as higher value, and it might take less effort to create a quick review on video than to produce a written report. Take your pick.
Once you’ve decided, you create your product and use that as your giveaway on the squeeze page. You then upsell from that free product to the real deal. It is a lot easier to sell to someone who has already “done business” with you, even free business, than to get someone completely cold to drop their MasterCard on the digital counter.
Alternatively, you can use a service like Traffic Geyser to upload your review video to a ton of different video sharing sites around the internet. If you do this, make sure you put a title in your video somewhere, showing people how to find your site.
So there you have it, the Value Ladder approach to selling an affiliate product in a nutshell. Once you’ve got everything set up, you’ll still need to promote your site in the usual fashion, however this method should give you a good edge over the competition.
