Affiliate marketing is one of the most effective ways for anyone to earn money online. This is a quick and passive method to earn cash that is highly scalable, and that is easy to set up. No technical skill is required, and if you choose the right products and connect with the right market, you can stand to make hundreds of even thousands of dollars in a short space of time.
How Affiliate Marketing Works
So, let’s get a little more technical, shall we? How precisely does affiliate marketing work and why would a creator ever be happy to give away so much of their own profits?
First, let’s consider the type of content you are going to be selling. To many marketers, affiliate products will be digital products. There are plenty more options, which we will explore in this book later. But for now, that’s what we’ll focus on. That means things like eBooks, like online courses and like presentations.
Digital products are immediately a good choice for selling online because they have zero overheads and no ‘COGs’ (this is a business term meaning ‘Cost Of Goods Sold’. That means that the creator doesn’t have to pay out at all for each sale and they can instead just make profit and share that profit. It also means they never had to invest large amounts of money upfront and they don’t have to handle delivery either.
So, the creator likely made this digital product themselves using Word or a camera, or perhaps they outsourced the creation to someone else. Either way, they will have built this ebook or course with the intention of selling it for profit.
Selling Physical Products and Services
While selling eBooks through platforms like JVZoo is an excellent way to ensure that you can keep the maximum profit, it also has its limitations. Despite what some other marketers might tell you, the most popular type of product online is still of the physical variety.
And this makes sense if you really think about it. How many people do you know who buy physical products? Pretty much everyone right? But then how many people do you know who would buy an ebook? Your Grandma might not (unless it’s through Kindle) because she doesn’t know how to use a PDF file. Likewise, your friend who doesn’t like reading probably wouldn’t either!
And that basically leaves you with a much smaller cut of the market.
So how do we go about selling physical products as an affiliate marketer? The most popular option is to become an Amazon Associate.
Selling Services
Another option is to try selling a service or a SAS (Software As a Service). This option is potentially the most lucrative!
The reason for this, is that many services will offer you a recurring commission. Let’s say that you manage to get someone to sign up to a gambling website. Some gambling sites will offer commission on all earnings from that customer for their lifetime with the brand!
Likewise, if you can convince someone to sign up with a hosting account, or to otherwise join a recurring service, then you will often find that you are offered a commission that is paid to you every month that they remain with that hosting company.
Of course, this might start as a small amount of commission. BUT it can then add up to a large amount of time. In a few years, you might have hundreds or even thousands of conversions, which will then earn you recurring income even if your site were to close down!
What Not to Sell
Most people when choosing a product to sell will load up their affiliate network of choice (ClickBank, JVZoo, WSOPro) and then look for the items that have the most sales and the best commission.
This is a good move because those figures suggest that other people are earning a lot of money and so should you be able to. In fact, you can literally ‘copy and paste’ their business model!
But if that’s all you’re doing then you’re making a mistake. 99% of the products at the top of the listing are going to be on the same precise things: making money online, dating or fitness.
If you start promoting one of those books, you’re now competing with all the other people selling the same book and all the people selling similar books. Most people who have used the internet for more than a day are already sick of being sold ‘make money from home programs’.
Alternative Strategies
Instead then, consider picking something in a smaller niche. Let’s say you find an eBook aimed at a specific industry or job – maybe something telling people how to make money from flower arranging. It seems less exciting and the audience is smaller but your product is now unique.
What’s more is that you can easily reach those flower arrangers by posting on a few flower blogs. And you can probably get your sales page to the top of Google for ‘flower arranging eBook’ much more easily. It has a clear USP as well, which makes it very easy to sell.
Better yet though, is to look at the routes to market you already have. What contacts can you leverage? Where can you reach a lot of people? What are those people interested in?
Think about how you’ll sell the product and where you’ll reach your target demographic before you pick the product. That is how you succeed and it’s a strategy you can repeat over and over again.
How to Create a Brand That Sells
Gaining this kind of influence of course is not easy. In order to get to the point where people will buy things just because you recommend them means putting in a lot of time, and making an honest attempt to provide real value over time.
This starts by creating a website along with a strong social media presence. Don’t try and sell right away, but instead spend time building up that trust and loyalty through a campaign of delivering excellent quality content consistently.
The most important thing? Have a clear, strong brand, with a great mission statement, and a concrete “buyer persona.” (The buyer persona is the portrait of your “ideal customer.”)
The biggest mistake to make is to try and create a very general website with as broad an appeal as possible. As with the digital product you buy in the first place, this can be a mistaken strategy. The reason for that, is that when you go extremely broad, you also necessarily create a brand that is dull and uninteresting
Placing Your Link
As an affiliate marketer, selling couldn’t be easier. You’re given one link, which is a link to promote a product and you can then make sales and cash from anywhere you place that link.
So the question is: where do you put it?
Most of us will place our link on a landing page/sales page, but this is only one option. In this section, we’ll look at how that works, as well as several more options.
Creating a sales page
A sales page is a page on a website that has been designed specifically with the purpose of selling something. That means that it won’t provide any other content (no articles) and likely no other links or even adverts either. You don’t want anything here that could risk distracting people from the product you’re selling
So, there you have it: everything you need to know to build a highly successful affiliate marketing business. Whether you keep things simple or aim for the stars is up to you, but I highly recommend you follow the advice in this book and try selling real products that have broad appeal and massive prices as well as the traditional digital eBooks and courses.
The classic process for selling affiliate products is simple:
• Find digital product and get an affiliate link • Create a sales page • Place link on sales page • Send traffic to sales page both from your own website, and through marketing
HOW TO SUCCEED IN AFFILIATE MARKETING
• Wait until the product stops selling, then rinse and repeat
I am recommending that you slightly alter this model, to earn more money and build a more resilient, long-term business model.
Here’s the new strategy:
• Create a website and build an audience that trusts you and enjoys what you do o Do this by generating genuinely unique and passionate content with a strong visual brand and mission statement • Find a few big ticket affiliate products and services and create sales pages for those, then “launch” them from your site by using email blasts and teasers to create hype o Find the products that are most successful and then send more visitors here through paid advertising • Meanwhile, sell as many smaller digital products, Amazon physical products, and services, through articles and websites that you promote using SEO
Whatever you do, you can now enjoy earning money while you sleep – and the more you experiment, the more efficient your sales technique will become!
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