Affiliate marketing is an “evergreen” way of making money online.
Internet marketing strategies and ‘fads’ come and go, but affiliate marketing remains eternally popular and for good reason…. there’s good money to be made as an affiliate if you know what you’re doing – and it’s relatively easy to get started. Since you’re reading this report I’ll assume that you know what affiliate marketing is. If you don’t then it’s extremely simple – you promote other people’s products using your unique affiliate link (they can be digital or physical products or service) and then you get paid a commission whenever somebody you’ve referred purchases something.
The great thing about affiliate marketing that you don’t have to worry about things such as product creation or buying in products. There doesn’t have to be an investment when you become an affiliate marketer – you simply sign up to get your affiliate link from the product vendor and away you go. You might choose to invest money in promoting your links of course but that’s totally optional.
Affiliate marketing works because it solves two key problems in one go:
1. Product vendor’s always need more customers and thus they use affiliates to help them find them – for free.
2. People who don’t have products of their own to sell can promote products as an affiliate and they instantly have something to sell with very little effort.
Of course the reality is that most affiliates are also product vendor’s and vice versa. Any successful marketer will both have their own products AND promote other people’s as an affiliate. But if you’re just getting started you can start off by being an affiliate-only and then move into creating and selling your own products as you build up experience.
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How much is it possible to earn as an affiliate marketer?
Affiliate commissions can be anywhere between 1% and 100% of the purchase price. You tend to find that physical products pay lower percentage commissions whilst digital products such as eBooks and courses will pay a higher commission. This is simply because the digital vendor has very little costs involved to run their business and thus they can afford to be more generous with their commissions.
In addition, digital vendor’s tend to have other products inside a sales funnel, which will often be of much higher value. They might offer you 100% commissions on the “front-end” product, for example – but that might only sell for $5, whereas their “back-end” product might sell for $97. In this case they might only offer you 25% commission on the back-end product or even non at all. They are basically using the front-end product to attract as many people into their sales funnel as possible – and offering 100% commission to affiliates is a key way of helping them do that.
How quickly do you get paid?
Some products offer instant commissions which are paid straight into your PayPal account as soon as the sale is made. Other affiliate schemes make you wait until the end of a set period (say 1 month) before they pay you anything – and it sometimes takes into account things like refund periods. After all, product vendor’s don’t want to pay you a commission and then have to later refund the customer because they would obviously lose out.
If you’re new to Affiliate marketing then you might be wondering how product vendor’s know which affiliate sent them the sale, since they might have hundreds of different affiliate promoting their products.The simple answer is that every affiliate is given a unique affiliate link (URL) to use. These links are tracked by cookies, so they always know exactly who sent them the sale and when. In many cases cookies can last for months, so even if you send somebody to the vendor’s website and they don’t make a purchase initially but come back 3 months later and buy something you’ll still get paid. Pretty cool, eh?
Selection of the Right Product
There is certainly no shortage of products out there to promote, whether you’re interested in digital or physical. Actually, that brings up an interesting debate… Is it better to promote physical products or digital products such as eBooks, courses, videos etc?
There are advantages and drawbacks to both – and it will depend on things like where your particular interests lie and what niche you are in. For example, if you’re in one of the hobby niches then you’ll probably find no shortage of physical products to promote -but if you are in a niche such as internet marketing then digital could be the way to go. Many people prefer digital products because you often get paid more generous commissions and they are often paid to you immediately – and that’s what we are going to concentrate on primarily in this report. However, if you’re in a niche such as diet or weight loss for example then there might be an opportunity to promote both digital and physical products.
Now we’ve got that over with its time to introduce you to some of the main affiliate programs.
Product selection
– so let’s get back to the primary focus of this chapter: choosing products to promote as an affiliate. This is one of the most important parts of being an affiliate because when you choose the right product to promote then you can make an awful lot of money and your customers will love you for it too. On the other hand, if you promote something that doesn’t quite capture the imagination of your target market then you’ll probably not make many sales. That’s no biggie of course and it’s definitely true to say that nobody picks the right products to promote 100% of the time…
Promoting bad stuff is a surefire way to lose the trust of your prospects and fail in your ventures, so it’s important to do your very best to choose products that your audience will both find appealing AND which deliver what your audience actually wants. Let’s cut to the chase and look at how to go about selecting the RIGHT sort of products. To start with, head over to one of the affiliate network’s we’ve just discussed. Have a browse through products that would appear to fit your niche and get a feel for whether they appeal to you
Golden rule number one:
Promote the product that your prospects will get the most value from, NOT the one which you think will make you the most money. There’s a general philosophy shared by many of the most successful marketers and that is that you should always put your customers interests above your own.
Let me ask you a question.
If you knew for certain that you could promote a particular product and make $1,000 in commission even though you knew the product was crap, would you still promote it?
The answer should be NO because even though you can make a lot of money up front people won’t make the mistake of trusting your recommendation’s twice if you promote total garbage.
If you promote GOOD products and place other people’s interests ahead of your own then you’ll earn the trust of your prospects and people will purchase your recommendation’s again and again. Part of being an affiliate is being a trusted advisor. Let’s say you’re using email marketing as the main way of driving traffic to the offers you’re promoting as an affiliate. The people on your email list are placing their trust in you to recommend offers to them which you believe can help them.
There are thousands of products out there – some good, some bad and some that aren’t relevant to your audience. If you can point people in the direction of product’s that can genuinely help them or which they will find useful/interesting/relevant etc then you’re setting yourself up for success.So if I’m a trusted advisor, does that mean I have to purchase and review every product before I promote it?”Nope – not necessarily.
There are several ways around this and sometimes you might choose to take an educated gamble on a product.
Here are several scenarios:
1. You buy a product, like it and think that your niche will like it too, so you decide to promote it.
That’s the ideal scenario because:a. The product sales page or listing was persuasive enough to make you buy it – and if you bought it then the chances are that other people are going to find it so too.b. You like the product and so you give it a personal recommendation.But you’re not always going to want to purchase every product before you promote it, so….
2. You could ask for a review copy. Many people who produce digital products will be willing to give away a review copy to affiliates. So, you can check out the product for free and then decide if it’s something your audience will want to buy and whether you can give it your recommendation (or not).
3. You’ve bought from the same product owner before and you know you like their products.OK, so it’s possible that you loved all their previous products but their new one turns out to be bad. That’s a slight risk, but nine times out of ten if you liked their previous offerings and thought they had value then the new one will too.
4. You take a punt based on reviews.OK, so this is the most risky strategy of all – but it can work.
Let’s say you’re on the list of somebody who you consider to be one of YOUR trusted advisers and they send you an email promoting a particular product. You trust their recommendation, check out the reviews and see that they’re decent and you think the product’s a good fit with your niche – so you decide to promote it without seeing it.
NOTE: If you are promoting something that you haven’t personally checked out then it can be good practice to tell people so. Some other thing’s to think about when choosing products(Note that these are all of secondary importance to choosing good products that are a good fit with your niche)
In all honesty it doesn’t take a genius to make sales the right way… I hope that this report will help you to do that. Whatever you do now make sure you go away and work hard on your business.
Whilst affiliate marketing can provide one of the easiest ways of making money online it still requires considerable effort in order to be successful. As you become more experienced as an affiliate marketer you’ll start to learn and get a “feel” for what works and what doesn’t.
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