Ever wondered how to make money selling other people’s products online? I looked to the internet as a way to earn an income back in the early 90’s. In 1995 eBay opened its doors and I began to sell things from around the house.
Around 2010 I was using eBay to buy and sell for a profit and decided there had to be a better way. I bought a downloadable eBook which taught me a strategy to find badly listed items on eBay.
After a while of doing this business I thought back to the eBook purchase I had made. It was automated and the eBook itself could be re-sold countless times from anywhere. The seller wasn’t even a published author but was able to automate the sale of his own product. This idea made me start creating my own eBooks but when I couldn’t sell them I turned to online courses to help me.
How To Make Money Selling Other People’s Products Online – Affiliate Marketing
I put myself on many of these “make money online” courses in the hope it would teach me how to get people to buy my ebooks. However it led me in another direction entirely.
All the courses I took taught me how to make money selling other people’s products online. It’s a popular business model known as affiliate marketing. Affiliates send people to other people’s products and if they make a sale they earn a commission based on that sale.
Some affiliate products even pay up to 50% commission on a sale. This means that without even having a product of your own, you can refer customers and make money! A good analogy I once heard is that of recommending a restaurant to a friend. But with affiliate marketing your recommendations can earn you an income.
How To Make Money Selling Other People’s Products Online – How To Sell
How to make money selling other people’s products online? It’s a bit different than telling a friend you like a certain restaurant. With online selling, you are finding people you don’t necessarily know. Of course you can still recommend certain products to your friends and family too if you choose. But you’ll need to do it in a certain way or you won’t get paid.
If you tell your friend to go online, for example, and purchase a product, you won’t get paid! Unless of course it’s your website and you’ve used your affiliate links on it. With an affiliate link you code your recommendations so that the owner of the products knows who has made the referral. That way they can attribute the sale to the right person.
On this website for example, there are a few affiliate links. If you take a link and purchase something I recommend, I’ll receive a commission. Selling products online can be done in several ways. One strategy is to create content such as this article (or website). Over time as more people come to a website, you’ll get referral traffic to the products you recommend. If you keep working, building out content and sharing it, over time you’ll increase the traffic to your site and start earning more from it.
You don’t need to use a website either since you can purchase ready made sales funnels to collect subscribers and deliver emails with your affiliate links in them.
Selling Other People’s Products Through An Email
The fastest way to build a profitable internet business is through using direct response marketing (paid marketing) and a sales funnel with a variety of products in it. Using paid marketing is expensive though and you’ll need a good range of affiliate products to sell. Otherwise you’ll struggle making a return on your marketing investment.
With email marketing, affiliates build huge email lists of subscribers. Top affiliate marketers will have email lists which number into the tens of thousands of subscribers. They send out emails and make sales on complete autopilot! See autopilot business.
Making Money By Building A Website
There’s a couple of ways you can make money selling other people’s products by building websites. One strategy I discuss in my article create free website and earn money is through building a niche website. A niche website is built around specific keywords in order to generate traffic from the search engines for free. This is a much more difficult way to generate visitors to a site than using paid marketing. However, if it works you can have free traffic and sales without investing in a lot of paid advertising.
The other way to use a website to make money is through creating a site and driving traffic through an advertising platform such as YouTube or Adwords. This strategy involves building a site which adheres to the policies of the advertising platform you are using. Then use you site to collect visitors details and follow up with a marketing strategy via email. See autopilot marketing.
Collect Data From Your Website
In both these cases your website is used as a data collection “portal”! From a website you should collect your visitor’s details in exchange for some useful information which you can send them. This is done through a landing page. Here’s an example of a landing page:
A landing page is a single page of a website which is designed to give the visitors less options than a normal website. With a normal website, a visitor can browse around and have a look at many different things. With a landing page they have only two options: sign up or leave the page. This forces them to make a decision quickly, and ideally, gets them to join an email list from which you can market your affiliate products to them.
Choosing The Right Products To Sell
To learn how to make money selling other people’s products online isn’t easy. It takes time and effort and is a learned skill like any other. Without taking the time and putting in the effort to learn this skill, most people will quit within their first year online.
Here’s some common errors which newbie affiliate marketers will make on their journey:
- Choosing the wrong products
- Marketing in the wrong way
- Targeting the wrong audience for their products
- Quitting too easily
- Not building a list of subscribers
Choosing The Wrong Products
What are the “wrong products”? Surely any affiliate products will make you money? Well yes and no. If you already have a niche and a following online, it’s a good idea to choose products which are aligned with your interests and niche. So if you already have a blog with many followers around the topic of, self help, for example; finding a good self help products to sell is a good idea.
Selling car tyres from a self help blog is obviously not a good match. But selling self help books from a self help blog is. However, some products pay far more than others. Books from Amazon, for example will pay on tiny commissions. It’s a good idea to find products which will keep paying you after you make a sale. These are products which offer ongoing value to their customers. Physical products may sell well and sites like Amazon already has a good level of trust with consumers. However, it also only pays its affiliates from 3% to 11% commission on products they refer.
Digital products, high ticket products and products which offer recurring commissions are far better if you can find the right audience for them. See highest paying affiliate programs list.
Marketing In The Wrong Way & Targeting The Wrong Audience
An audience who enjoys the self help topic will be a poor match for selling car tyres. Just as a car enthusiasts blog will be a bad place to advertise self help products.
It’s easy to think that just because you have found an amazing product/s to sell, everyone who sees it will think the same way. When people are online they are often only looking for something very specific. Imaging you’re browsing in a car showroom and someone comes up to you and offers you a discounted carpet! This can be the experience for many when they are online.
Finding and targeting the right people, who want what you are offering, is therefore key to having a good experience with affiliate marketing. Get this wrong at your peril! You can also make the mistake of expecting too much from a poor marketing strategy. Blogging and free marketing tactics are far less effective on the whole than paid marketing which is much more easily automated and scalable.
Quitting Too Easily
This is the number one problem for 97% of affiliate marketers who quit before they’ve even got 1000 subscribers on their email list. They throw up some marketing strategy and it fails. With the right mindset, someone will learn from every “failure” they have. With the right mindset each “failure” is a stepping stone to success. Therefore there are no failures just learnings! But so many make the mistake of thinking that because one strategy failed, their business model doesn’t work at all.
Blogging for example can take years before you see the results of your efforts. You’ll need to put in many hours before you start to see regular traffic. You’ll need to learn the strategies for successful blogging and not just expect Google to find your blog and rank it! (It won’t – at least unless you put in the effort).
Paid marketing can fail too. When you start out expect most of your marketing campaigns to fail. You’ll burn through budget very quickly if you’re not careful. But if you stick at it long enough, and are wise enough to test and measure your advertising carefully, you’ll start to see what works and what doesn’t. Cut what’s broken and scale up what’s working. When you stick at it long enough you can automate the process and build a business which largely runs by itself! Surely this is worth working for!?
Not Building A List Of Subscribers
The most successful online entrepreneurs build a list of email subscribers and give them massive value. They build relationships with their subscribers by emailing their list regularly and giving value and insight to help and inspire.
Selling a product directly from a website, or an advert is much harder than by email. When someone visits a website, they only have a small window of time to purchase. When they leave your website they are gone forever! Once you get their email address you can keep in touch with them. The time period with which they can make a buying decision is extended, vastly! People can buy something from you years down the line if you build a list of subscribers.
Most affiliate marketers who start out don’t appreciate this though. Many give up too early and before they even have 1000 subscribers on their list.