Steps to Using the 12 Minute Affiliate Program - 5 minutes read
Steps to Using the 12 Minute Affiliate Program
1. Buy the product - obviously 😉
2. Sign in to your account.
3. Set the system up – which will involve the following:
- Creating your affiliate account with ClickBank
- Setting up your autoresponder
- Driving traffic to your landing pages
12 Minute Affiliate Quick-Start Checklist
4. Earn affiliate commissions (the part you're waiting for).
How the 12 Minute Affiliate System Makes Money
Now, let's talk about the "make-money" part. Here are the methods used by 12 Minute Affiliate that enable you to earn affiliate commissions on auto-pilot:
1. You’ll be provided with landing pages (equivalent to websites) when you join 12 Minute Affiliate. You get to choose from 3 niches – Home Business (this includes Making Money Online), Weight Loss (one of the biggest sub-niches in Health), and Personal Development.
2. You’ll connect your landing/funnel page to your email autoresponder (you’ll need to pay for this, so note that this is an added cost to you). Set up is easy (they have instructions in their members’ area), but you can opt to pay a small fee to have them do it for you.
3. They’ll give you pre-written emails which you can import to your autoresponder. These emails will contain promotional products which have been pre-selected by the system.
4. Get traffic by buying it (this is another added cost to you). Your traffic will automatically be sent to your landing pages. At this point, I’d like to make it clear that you’re only buying clicks, not opt-ins, so you really don’t know how many people will subscribe to your email list when they get there.
This can be a serious danger with paid traffic because you absolutely cannot make assumptions or be certain the traffic you pay for will result in sales. In other words, it's entirely possible to spend hundreds (even thousands) of dollars and not get a single sale.
12 Minute Affiliate provides their own traffic source but again, there is no guarantee this traffic will be profitable.
5. You’ll earn affiliate commissions when people buy any of the products you’re promoting (your emails come with your ClickBank affiliate link). Needless to say, having a large email list will give you more chances of selling something.
What You Should Know
I know, everything I’ve said so far sounds promising. But digging deeper we find some things you should also know...
- Disclaimer – As mentioned earlier, there are no guarantees, and 12 Minute Affiliate agrees.
- At the bottom of their sales page is a disclaimer that says they’re not guaranteeing you’ll earn money with their product. They said your earning potential will depend on you and the efforts you put into your online business. For me, their disclaimer is saying that their product is not sure to work for everyone. Well, I believe it’s like that for any business anyway…
- The 12 Minutes – This one I really find hard to believe. For me, it’s such a turn-off that they’re promoting a product which (supposedly) can be set up and running within 12 minutes. Even if everything is just filling up blanks and copy/pasting, I think it will take more than 12 minutes to complete everything correctly. Rushing can only lead to errors, so I’m not a fan of that 12-minute sales talk.
- Email Autoresponder – Ok, you need an autoresponder to handle your emails (so you can send out promotional emails to your subscribers/customers). Note that this is not included in the 12 Minute Affiliate package, so you’ll need to pay for it separately. They’re using Aweber, and this costs $19/month for your first 500 subscribers. Aweber has a 30-day trial period, so you can use that along with your 14-day trial period with 12 Minute Affiliate. But after 30 days, you’ll be charged $19 per month.
- Paid Traffic – Yes, you need traffic to be successful with your Affiliate Marketing efforts – and 12 Minute Affiliate has a built-in traffic source. You can buy traffic from them so that you can build your list and (hopefully) make sales. Here are some things you should know about their traffic strategy:
- - You’ll need to pay for traffic (you can also opt for free traffic, but you’ll need to manually work for it).
- - There’s no guarantee that the traffic will convert into buyers (remember their disclaimer).
- - You don’t know where your traffic is coming from (you’re just buying from their system).
- Upsells – Expect upsells once you’re inside the member's area. For the membership, you get to choose from 2 options:
- - Basic membership: You’re getting the basic membership when you first sign up to them. This is priced at $47 per month or a one-time fee of $397.
- - Gold membership: This will cost you $97 per month or a one-time fee of $797.
- The main difference between the Basic and Gold membership is the number of niches that you can use on your online business. Remember the 3 niches I talked about before (Home Business, Weight Loss, Personal Development)? In the Basic membership platform, you’re only allowed 1 niche, but you’re allowed all 3 niches when you’re a Gold member.
- Trial Period – 12 Minute Affiliate is letting you test drive their product for 14 days (for $9.95). They say that if you like the program, you can keep it for less than the price of a cup of coffee a day. Please know that they’re not giving it to you for free… you’ll need to pay $47 per month to keep using the system.