If you are still sending traffic to the affiliate product sales page, you are doing it wrong. There are steps in doing things right, the same goes for promoting your affiliate products. This is why, you need to presell your affiliate products with an affiliate bridge page.
Sending your traffic directly to the affiliate product page is like forcing people to buy without any preselling. Not only that, you don’t get any details of info for the potential customers for you to follow up.
Today, we will be sharing what is an affiliate bridge page and how you can build your affiliate bridge page.
Start Building Your Affiliate Bridge Page with 14 day free trial
This is especially important if you are still using an affiliate bridge page in your affiliate marketing business.
Let’s go.
What Is an Affiliate Marketing Bridge Funnel?
When you are doing the affiliate marketing business, you are linking up the potential buyers to the affiliate product. You are the bridge between them and the product owner.
Hence, the bridge funnel is your bridge to link both of them together. Instead of directing your traffic to the affiliate product page directly, you have a lead generation and pre-sell page in your bridge funnel to inform your potential customers about what to expect on the affiliate product page and what you can provide to them if they buy from your link.
In normal cases, your affiliate marketing traffic will be either from paid ads, social media, emails, YouTube, content marketing, forum and etc.
From there, instead of sending them to the affiliate link directly, you build a two-page funnel to collect their email address and presell them with your unique bonuses.
You want to collect their contact details because not everyone will buy on the first attempt. They might need more time to decide or to research the product before buying from your link. Unless they know or trust you, they will take some time before buying from you.
This is why, after collecting their contact details, you must follow up with them and build a relationship with them.
The benefits of Affiliate Bridge Pages?
Although we have explained most of it in the previous paragraph, we would like to emphasise more on the benefits of using an affiliate bridge page.
First of all, most social media platforms don’t allow affiliate marketing links on their platform. This will include those links shorter or redirect links. If they detected that it links to an affiliate marketing link, they will block it.
However, by using the affiliate bridge pages, you are sending the traffic to your landing page only but not the affiliate link, hence avoid being blacklisted by the platform.
Not only that, having the bridge page or landing page, you can capture their contact details to follow up and build your own customer list. If you are sending traffic directly to the affiliate link, you don’t know who you are sending and who bought the product. So instead, you build a bridge page and collect their contact details so that if they bought or not, you will know. And if they don’t, you can always follow up with them.
And finally, before sending them off to the affiliate product page, you are going to presell the product. In this step, you can thank them for signing up to your list, explain a bit about the affiliate product on the next page and then, your unique irresistible offer for them to buy through your link.
Example of a Bridge Page Flow
Today you are scrolling through your social media and you saw an eye-catching sponsored post. You clicked on the link and redirect to a landing page.
On the page, you are prompted with a free gift that you can claim if you sign up for their email list.
After you submit your contact details, you will then go to a thank you page where there is a video to explain how you can claim the free gift and what they are trying to promote on the next page.
You will now see a list of bonuses they provide if you buy from their link. And at the same day, you will receive an email from them to introduce their business.
5 Bridge Page Ideas You Can Use Today
There is a different types of bridge pages that you can use for your affiliate marketing landing page. For instance, it can be a simple opt-in page with your lead magnet offer only where it will consist of just a headline, sub-headline and contact form.
Or it can be a survey form, blog/article or presell videos.
Depending on the type of product and niche you are in, you can use a different type of affiliate bridge funnel. Let’s see the 5 most commonly used affiliate bridge page funnels.
1) Lead Funnel
The lead funnel will consist of two pages. The first page will be the offer promotion page where they will sell you the lead magnet. It can be a free or very low-price item. The key here is not to make money selling the lead magnet item but to get your contact details. Even if you make them pay, it was just to recover your customer acquisition cost.
Start Building Your Affiliate Bridge Page with 14 day free trial
There are many more to make in the future. They won’t want to make you leave by rushing to sell you something now.
And then, on the second page, it will be the time when they presell you the affiliate product.
For the lead magnet, we normally offer something digital because it is easier to fulfil and free to duplicate. Once you created it, you can duplicate it without much additional cost like a physical cost where you have the production cost and the delivery cost.
For your lead magnet, you should consider something valuable, actionable and measurable result. This is why we don’t really like to offer an eBook as a lead magnet. Instead, things like cheat sheets, checklists, reports, guides, how-to video webinars, and online courses are more favourable.
And if we really would like to offer a book, we will offer the physical book for free and charge for the shipping and handling cost only. This free plus shipping model works by tricking their mind into that they are getting free products, but actually, you are embedding the book price in the shipping cost.
Again, the goal for a lead funnel is not to make money but to provide value to get their contact details so you can follow up and build relationships in the future. The long-term relationship is more important than your front-end sales now.
2) Survey Funnel
A survey funnel is excellent because it creates a different experience for your visitors. Compared to a plain funnel page, a survey funnel gives a different experience. They will expect to get a different result from their answers that should end up with something personal.
This is why, cold traffic will feel more appreciated with such interactive sessions. The action to answer the questions related to their interest.
The survey is a great way to create curiosity and hook your visitors to continue to the next page.
It can be a 5-7 questions survey where you can design for it to be the same response for either option they choose. Or a different journey personalized based on their answer. Either way, the importance here is to create a fun journey for them to explore.
Although they are only a few questions with you, they feel like you understand them more now through the journey and start to build some bonding with you.
And in the final page where you are ready to share the result with them, you can have a contact form for them to enter their contact details to get the full report. And upon the form submission, they will be directed to the affiliate product page.
Start Building Your Affiliate Bridge Page with 14 day free trial
The survey funnel is popular too because users love the differentiated experience. They feel like part of the process of crafting their own reports. Hence, they will appreciate it more.
3) Calculator
If you are doing things related to finances or health, the calculator funnel is useful as your presell page. It can be a mortgage eligibility calculator, monthly commitment calculator, calorie intake calculator or weight loss calculator.
For people that land on your calculator funnel and key in their figures, you know they need the service. They are interested to get the service.
For example, you are promoting a housing loan affiliate product. Having a house mortgage calculator will help to attract potential customers that want to know their affordability and monthly commitment after buying the house.
Once they complete the calculation, you can do two steps.
Step 1: Send them the calculation report via email.
Step 2: Direct them to the financial product affiliate link.
Now they know their eligibility for getting the loan and their pre-assessment from your report, once you direct them to the affiliate page, they will be more likely to submit their application. Even if they don’t do it right now, you still can follow up with them via email.
This example of using a calculator, you can use it for any products or niches that require calculations. Let them to aware of what they want to improve or achieve and then, give them the answer they want.
4) Blog or Article Funnel
A simple blog post or article can be a great bridge page for your affiliate offer as well. If you are having a great blog with a huge audience, you can use that directly. Else, you can have a simple one-page website of your blog post or article, and then run native ads to your page.
A native ad is an ad that blends into the page organically so it doesn’t look like an ad. Although you will need to add a disclaimer and label it as sponsored or paid partnership post, it typically shows as part of the website itself. People will click on it naturally when they saw something interesting or wanted additional info about it.
While you can’t change the original page structure if you are buying a native ad, you can design your one-page blog post to look professional, sharing professional knowledge about a topic so it doesn’t look salesy. And when they can trust you with your article, then it’s time to get them to subscribe to your email list to get more valuable info like this in the future.
And ideally, all the links in your blog post will either direct them to your other content or the affiliate product link.
5) Video Squeeze Page
Depending on your product, a video tends to sell better than a text-only squeeze page. If your primary traffic source is a video channel like YouTube or TikTok, then most probably your target customers are more video people than text people.
Having a VSL or video sales letter will definitely resonate with them more. Not only that, if you are looking at the trend now, people are moving from text and image to video.
In your squeeze page or lead page, instead of using mock-up images and text to list down your products and features, you can record a short video to explain it.
A video will add another sense of communication with your target customers. Instead of looking at the image and reading the text, they now have another option of watching and listening to what you say.
Start Building Your Affiliate Bridge Page with 14 day free trial
Your landing page is no longer a static page. But now, it’s with a real person speaking to them. You are now presenting your proposal on why they should buy from you and what your solution will benefit them.
How to Build Your Affiliate Bridge Page
There is no doubt that the bridge page is very useful for promoting affiliate products. If you are still not convinced, you may head to ClickBank and check out its marketplace. Choose a few products and see them on their affiliate resource page. Some will provide their landing page for you to customize and use to promote their products.
And if you decided to start building it but wondering about how to do it, don’t worry. We got you covered.
We are going to show a few different landing pages and funnel builders that you can use to build your affiliate funnel today.
1) WordPress
WordPress is one of the widest-used website CMS platforms. You can build different websites from personal websites, business websites, ecommerce stores, blogs or landing pages.
Different from other platforms, you will need to get your own hosting service and install WordPress on it before starting.
Then, with different drag-and-drop page builders like Elementor, Spectra and so on, you can start building your bridge page. And if you want to have some more advanced sales funnel type of features, you can always use tools like WPfunnel or WooFunnel to add the feature to your WordPress.
If you already have your WordPress website or blog running, just add a new bridge page to it. It will look more trustable with the combinations of full websites with the landing page instead of a standalone page.
If you already have a WordPress-powered blog, just add your pre-sales page there. It’ll look more authentic on an actual website, as opposed to a solitary page on its own somewhere.
2) Landing Page Builders
A landing page builder is focused on building individual landing pages. With the popularity of the landing page and sales funnel concept these few years, there are many landing page builder solutions available out there. Some start and focus on landing page building, while some evolve from other tools to be a total solution.
Some of the common landing page builders include GetResponse, LeadPages, Instapage, and Unbounce.
All these landing page builders work well in building landing pages. They offer pre-designed templates, hosting services, and drag-and-drop builders all included in their monthly subscription plan. So, you can create a landing page without going through the steep learning curve or technical coding knowledge.
After launching your landing page, a very important step would be analysing your data and optimising it to increase the conversion rate. One of the ways we do this is to split-test different variants to get the best combinations.
3) Funnel Builders
A sales funnel is a combination of a series of landing pages linked together to form a complete sales process. It is a whole big topic about a sales funnel and the intelligence behind increasing your sales. With a sales funnel, I always do recommend ClickFunnels as the best sales funnel builder.
ClickFunnels has been one of the first funnel builders out there with the co-founder constantly promoting the concept of a sales funnel and how to use it.
If you would like to build a lead funnel or a survey funnel, the sales funnel builder is good to create the sequence and link each page together.
For example, you can be building a two-page lead funnel or squeeze funnel with the first page the opt-in page follow by a thank you page.
Or if you want to build a survey funnel, you can create each step and link them together easily. Study how different sales funnel works in the funnel hacker cookbook and find the one that suits you.
Start Building Your Affiliate Bridge Page with 14 day free trial
The funnel builder is also a drag-and-drop builder with a pre-built template for you to start easily. You don’t need to hire a web designer and a coder to build your sales funnel. That alone can save you ten thousand in development costs.
Why Collect Emails on Your Bridge Page?
When people talk about an affiliate bridge page, normally they will link it to a presell page only. But that’s not true. We believe the importance of the bridge page should be collecting their contact details for follow-up.
This is because, if you send traffic to other’s pages but do not retain their contact details, they will never be your customers. They are the customers of the affiliate product owner. Although you earn commissions from the initial sales or sometimes recurring sales if you are promoting a subscription service. You are not going to sell them again in the future if you don’t have their contact details.
The key to a business is its customers. Don’t treat affiliate marketing as a marketing campaign only. Instead, treat it as a business. Your relationship with your target customers does not stop in the initial offer. It starts here and will only be better in the future.
The longer they follow you, the more they will know about you and trust you. People will buy from people they trust. And that’s you. In the future, if you have other products that you want to promote, these are the group of people you can promote directly for free.
You own this traffic and you are not going to pay to reach them again.
Final Thoughts – Increase Your Conversion Rate with Affiliate Bridge Page
You might still think that building a bridge page is not necessary for your affiliate marketing business. And it is troublesome as you can still earn commissions by running traffic to the affiliate link directly.
Nothing wrong with that, but you are leaving so much money on the table. The bridge page allows you to build your email list and pre-sell the product with your unique offer bundles to differentiate you from other affiliates.
And these are your key differentiators.
As an affiliate, you can’t control what the product sales page looks like. Every affiliate will get the same page. But your control will be your bridge page where you tell them what to expect and give them reasons to buy from you.
This will make your offer stands out compared to others.
Start Building Your Affiliate Bridge Page with 14 day free trial