Ep 56 | How To Promote Affiliate Marketing With Facebook & Google Ads

The first question for today is by Dan Martel – Dan said,

Hi Fred! Thanks for all the valuable information you provide during these huddles – just awesome! Great stuff! There’s been a lot of talk from other e-commerce pros. I’m sure you know who they are saying that “free plus shipping strategy” is dead and no longer effective. What are your thoughts on this? Thanks, Dan.

Great question that you brought up, Dan. The answer to your question is it is NOT dead. Free plus shipping is obviously not dead. I have a lot of students and including my campaigns all running with free plus shipping. Here’s the deal though, if you want to continue to grow your business to actually afford higher advertising dollars, for you to actually make more money. You got to start looking at building funnels which is basically using free plus shipping to bring your customers in and to upsell them to have email marketing in place to really increase the profits that you are going to make.

Now a lot of people say that free plus shipping died only because of one reason – you are a 100% just focusing on free plus shipping and you just focusing on the initial product. You did not look into creating a funnel. You did not look into creating a back-end on having emails in place. You don’t have any other strategies like retargeting to actually have your customers to come back to buy from your store. If that’s the case, then yes in a way free plus shipping is a lot harder now only because the mass public started to know about it; but even if a lot of people know about it, there’s still going to be a lot of people that don’t know about free plus shipping and you can actually go to a mall ask someone, “You know what free plus shipping is?” And a lot of people will be like huh what are you talking about?

So again, all these are based on assumptions. Again, like I said when you’re running an e-commerce store, free plus shipping is just one strategy. You want to implement other strategies in place for your business to actually continue to grow and continue to evolve but again like I said, free plus shipping is not dead. It’s been working phenomenally. It’s been working great not just for me but my students at the same time. I hope that answer your questions, Dan.

So now let’s go to the next question of the day it’s by Heveen Kejiou.  This is a pretty in-depth question and I may not be an expert on answering this question but I’ll still talk about it and share with you my feedback on this. Heveen said,

 Dear Fred, I have a very important issue that I would like you to enlighten me and especially online entrepreneurs living outside of USA. It’s the Visa Merchant Outlet Location regulation

https://www.visaeurope.com/media/images/providing-the-proper-location-of-your-merchant-business-vbs-73-40136.pdf

What I understand is that the Acquirer,  the business/company and customers should be in the same country. I live in Mauritius, a tiny island in the middle of the Indian Ocean. The drop shipping model you taught us works extremely well if we live in USA but what about those living outside of USA like me? According to Visa, I cannot have traffic from USA as my business is running for Mauritius. Fred, I would be grateful if you can enlighten me on this pressing issue and how to work around and make my online entrepreneurship become successful. Thank you very much.

Again, you sent me a PDF link and this is simply from Visa Card. This is literally from Visa Card. Here’s the deal, at the end of the day right now, you can be anywhere around the world as long as you have the ability to actually process credit cards online. Now, being you in Mauritius, that means that you may not have Shopify payment, but you can actually accept PayPal or Stripe in your store. Again, what you show me is basically just saying that if you actually go directly to Visa to actually get an account with Visa, you just need to have something called Card at Present so you’re swiping a virtual terminal. Now, at the same time, here’s the deal though, you are running an online business as long as you have a merchant account which either Stripe, PayPal or Shopify payments that can help you collect credit cards online that’s all it matters.

So, you can be anywhere around the world and you can build your business if you’re in Mauritius, you can build it Mauritius and basically as long as you can ask you can accept credit card through a merchant provider, that’s all that matters. It doesn’t matter where you are at and the beauty is that again, because of the internet, we get to actually build a business wherever you are. There shouldn’t be any limitation at all. Again, you just have to get a merchant provider that will allow you to process credit card online and like I said again PayPal, Stripe, Shopify payment or to checkout will be one of the solutions for you. I hope that really helps you out.

Moving on to the third question is by Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje – Adewale asked,0

Hi Fred, I am an affiliate marketer. Did you say that Facebook now won’t allow us to advertise straight to free offers? How should we send prospects to our opt-in pages through native ads, bridge pages, blog posts, etcetera.

Great question! Here’s, the deal when you are advertising at affiliate offer. Majority of time, you will get slapped in the wrist and get your account suspended because Facebook actually do not like affiliate marketing and the reason why is that a lot of times, websites that actually have an affiliate offer majority of them do not comply or their landing page do not comply with Facebook or Google’s policy. Now, as an affiliate marketer one of the most important thing is that you need to know that number one you are building someone else business and making a percentage of the commission so you don’t have to worry about fulfilling a product. You don’t have to worry about customer service. You don’t have to worry about all those things in between like creating the products; however, with that, it is a great thing for you to get started because you don’t have to actually go through all those routes.

Affiliate Marketing is great but here’s the thing, you got to start building your very own list first. So, if you’re basically saying let’s say for an example right now, you’re going after the fitness niche, you want to actually have a personal blog or a personal website that is all about giving away amazing content or articles so that when Google and Facebook looks at it, they can see that you are providing value to the visitors that are being showing your ads to. Now, with that being said when you are simply advertising, you can simply create an opt-in page and give away a free report, free video training or something that is free to acquire that email address. When you acquire the email address, obviously they are putting into an auto-responder and you can actually market to them with email marketing.

Now, here’s the thing you cannot create bridge pages. So, when someone actually goes to your opt-in page, give you their email address and then you suddenly redirect them to another website that is an affiliate offer with your affiliate cookie, you’re now bridging to an affiliate offer that maybe not compliance with Facebook Ads or Google Ads and you will actually get your account banned and you will get your ads disapproved. So, what your goal is it’s very simple, if you’re an affiliate marketer and you want to actually learn how you can run ads or promote affiliate offers through Facebook or Google you want to create an opt-in page where it gives so much value and on the thank you page, so once someone give you their email address, you want to tell them to go into the inbox to open up their emails so you can actually sell them through emails.

That is the key when it comes to affiliate marketing. Again, you cannot bridge an affiliate offer because you are going to get yourself suspended. You need to know your goal when it comes to affiliate marketing and we want to advertise on Facebook and Google, you want to basically create it in a way where you are just collecting the leads, you’re giving value and you’re only selling or basically linking to an affiliate offer through email marketing.

So, very important point and I hope that really helps you out and really clear that out. Again, you want to promote affiliate offer that is the best way to actually go at it. It is to simply create an opt-in page, you give away something for free but make sure you don’t bridge it.

So fourth question of the day is by Deqa. Deqa said,

WooCommerce versus Shopify. I want to start a dropshipping business and I don’t have money every month to buy $29 Shopify. I am also good at building WooCommerce on WordPress; which one is better for dropshipping?

For me, I am all in a 100% into Shopify. Here’s the deal, a lot of people go well I got to pay $29 a month in order for me to actually use Shopify versus WordPress it is free. But the truth is, WordPress isn’t free. You got to buy hosting to host your website. You’ve got to buy security features to make sure that your WordPress site is secure. One thing that is very, very dangerous about WordPress is that it is known in to get malware attacks and it’s known in to get hacked because it is such an open source and it’s so easy. So, imagine yourself right now having all your customers information in your WooCommerce and WordPress and you don’t have your security in place and you lost your customer data by someone hacking into your site that is a big liability over there.

That doesn’t even include even include what we call the SSL Certificates which you need. SSL certificate nowadays to actually process credit card orders online so if these three monthly charges, it is already equal to Shopify payments. Even if you actually go with Bluehost on getting like a $12 a month hosting and if you add up the security and you add up the SSL, it does come up to near Shopify payment. So, there’s a lot of hidden charges involved that you are not aware of inside WordPress. Now again, with WooCommerce you still need other apps to actually help you with your store and those apps also cost you money.

For me, if you want to start dropshipping business, I always encourage you to simply use Shopify. Now, if you say, “Well, I don’t want to pay $29 a month.” Well, guess what I can give you a link right now and you can get 10% off the entire year and a 21-day free trial. All you got to do is simply go to www.shopify.com/fredlam. There is going to be a 21-day free trial plus 10% off the entire year so you don’t play $29 you pay it like $26 or $25 a month saving you that $3 or $4 a month with that link. So, I hope that helps you out.

Now, to the last question of today is by Isidore. Isidore said that,

 I am dealing with many merchants in AliExpress and printing invoices from AliExpress for tax purposes and giving me a headache. Is there a way around it? Can e-packet reduce the delivery time to 2 weeks max? Can you recommend the best app for customer service?

So Isidore has 3 questions let me address the first question first. You may want to basically find a virtual assistant to get you all the invoice or simply see if there is an app that can download all the invoice. I know that it is a pain in the butt but that’s what it is when it comes to filing for taxes and all those other stuff. There isn’t really a way around it other than maybe finding a programmer in www.upwork.com to actually create something that is specific to you.

Talking about e-packet, there’s really not much you can do because it’s outside anyone’s control. It’s really to the shipping carrier when it comes to wanting it deliver like two weeks max. It is really out of control on that end of things. It really depends on the shipping even if you actually go DHL or FedEx, it’s not going to be guaranteed unless you pay a hefty amount of overnight shipping, that’s a different story.

Now, to your last question can you recommend a best app for customer service? So for me, what we use is we use something called the live agent. It costs like $49 or $97 a month where it basically have a ticket system, also a live chat and everything. We use live agents and if you’re ready for that, you may want to take a look at that. So, everything is all centralized. I hope that my answers to these questions really helped you out.

For those of you that want your question to be featured in my daily huddle, make sure you go to www.fredlam.com/ask, fill in the information in there. Ask your question and make sure you only ask one question. I don’t do any reviews. I simply just answer your question. It can be anything about maybe you’re stuck at your ads, maybe something about your store, something about your business, you have an idea that you want to basically get my input, let me know right into that form and I will get that featured in our daily huddle.

Other than that, that’s all I really have for today and I know that obviously today is Valentine’s Day not a lot of people on. I acknowledge that, but I actually surprisingly have a lot of people on, on YouTube. Well, less than what I usually get but at the same time still a hefty amounts. So, guys very important for those of you that are still watching right now – go spend time with family, go spend time your loved one that’s very important at the stage.

Other than that, that is it for our daily huddle for today and tomorrow it’s going to be what we call the last day towards Chinese New Year. So, I don’t know what time I’m going to come on live because I have family dinner to go to and all those other stuff. I’ll get on live as soon as possible and as soon as I can but it may be pretty late. Just letting you know in advance. Other than that, Happy Valentine’s Day to every single one of you and I look forward on seeing you tomorrow in our daily huddle.