One way to grow a business is to establish a strong sales force. Making your own sales force used to be very expensive, and due to that it was a substantial barrier to entry for product creators. Due to the advent of amazing online tracking technology, you can not only become a salesperson yourself for many different products and creators, but you can also create your own products to sell. Using affiliate technology, you can also create a sales force that can bring in multiple six figures and even millions of dollars - all without hiring employees. You only pay your sales force if they make a sale. As an affiliate, you only earn money if you make a sale. It sounds simple, and actually it is. However, it’s a good idea to learn all you can about affiliate marketing before you jump in. To learn about affiliate marketing and the various ways you can maximize your earnings will push your business to the next level and take you toward being the true CEO of your business. To be successful with making affiliate marketing profits you’ll need to find your niche, discover the right products to promote, create your own products, find the right affiliates to market them, and keep your affiliates motivated. It all starts with finding & understanding your niche.
• Who Do You Want to Work With?
One way to figure out the type of people you’d like to work with or help is to look inside yourself to find your interests and passions. If you really enjoy being around certain people, and you know about their hopes, desires, and needs due to being part of that audience yourself, that’s one way to do it as you will already have insight. However, don’t let this give you an excuse not to do your research. Your experiences, even as part of your niche audience, are subjective and real results may be very different than you imagine. Try describing your ideal customer in one or two sentences to help you move forward.
• Who Serves That Audience Now?
Once you have identified a potential niche audience, it always helps to look at the competition. After all, if this niche has no competition, is it really a profitable niche? Some people will say that you should go for the low competition niches, but it's better to go for the niche that offers enough potential customers for you to reach your income goals if your conversion rate matches industry standards. For example, if there are 1000 potential customers, and according to your research there is a 4 to 7 percent conversion rate, and you know that you can get your materials and information in front of those 1000 customers, you may get at most 70 customers from a campaign. Is your price point high enough for those 70 customers to make you profitable?
Problems and Solutions
Once you have an idea of who your audience is, you can focus on figuring out their problems and then locating solutions to help them. Make a list of at least three problems that you want to solve for the audience, based on the niche you’ve chosen. Here is an example:
1. Audience: Married working moms of school-aged children who thrive on order
2. Problems: Keeping a family calendar, meal planning, organizing
3. Potential Solutions: Digital calendars and shopping lists, organization tips and organization products Once you have a list of problems and solutions, go to some known affiliate networks to look for the products you have identified as a good fit.
A quick search on ClickBank.com - a popular affiliate network where you can find products in any niche to market, as well as use to promote your own products - reveals several products that you might want to promote, such as Get Organized Now Don’t just start promoting that now, though. Make a list of several products. Then, do some research on each product. Find out about the creator, look at the conversion rate for the product, and think about how the creator’s values and style fit in with the brand voice you want to display. If you don’t know someone who knows them to vouch for their professionalism, test them out by buying the product yourself so that you can evaluate the quality of the product and the company for their customer service. After all, as an affiliate marketer, you are turning your customers over to someone else to serve. You need to make sure they will take good care of your customers so that your audience continues to value your recommendations.
A few programs to check out are:
1. JV Zoo
2. Affilorama
3. ClickBank
4. Amazon Associates
5. eBay Partner Network
6. CJ Affiliate
7. Udemy
8. Skillshare
Each network has its pros and cons, and there are many more than these. You can find huge lists of affiliate networks by searching Google for "affiliate networks," and you can also find specialized networks. For example, if you want to sell organic goods only, you’ll find many options. You can also look up specific products you’d like to promote, find a link to their affiliate program, or email them for information about it. Some business owners don’t use affiliate networks, but so many do that you’re sure to find many profitable products that you can promote. Even if you don’t see one, you can always email the creator to offer your services by showing them your social proof.
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