Using referral programs to make money is one of the most popular online strategies. With a referral program, you can send customers to it through an affiliate link. If you make a sale you receive a commission. It’s pretty simple and straight forward. Plus, there’s no customer service or product handling on your behalf to worry about. All of the customer service and product delivery is taken care of by the third party who owns the products.
This leaves the question of how. How do you get customers to purchase products through your referral link? And which programs/products do you choose to promote in the first place?
Referral Programs To Make Money
Lets start with the “how?”. There’s many ways to promote goods and services over the internet. All of the main strategies fall into two main categories:
- Paid marketing – Google, Facebook, YouTube, etc. Paid marketing is expensive so you’ll need a good return on investment (ROI) in order to use this strategy.
- Content/”free” marketing – Blogging and creating videos for YouTube fall into this category – there’s masses of competition online for content though so you’ll need to work hard at this to get any traction. You can also find free strategies on social media platforms too.
So it will depend on your own personal circumstances (and your product choices) which strategy you use. With low value products, like you might find on Amazon’s partner program, you’ll most likely need to use cheaper strategies. Physical products tend to pay much less than their digital counterparts too. A typical physical product from Amazon for example will pay out a referral commission of somewhere between 3% and 11%. For some digital products it’s as much as 50% commission on a sale.
A cheap strategy of marketing such as building a blog also takes some time. However, if you’re successful you can generate sales without paying for marketing. Eventually, if you stick at it, your blog can generate free traffic (visitors) and sales.
Referral Programs To Make Money – Email Marketing
Regardless of which marketing strategy you choose, most affiliate marketers use an email autoresponder. An autoresponder allows a marketer to collect email addresses and keep in touch with their website visitors and potential customers. To get people from a website or landing page into your email list you need to offer something of value. This can be in the form of an ebook, automated download or a series of useful videos. (See my video series on this site for more information about making money referring customers).
Which Products?
There’s so many products you can choose to sell as an affiliate marketer; which ones do you choose? As a referrer of products it’s a good idea to choose products which you yourself would personally buy. This is true for a few main reasons:
- If you’re creating content to help people make a buying decision, it’s a good idea to choose items which you’re personally involved with and know something about.
- It’s much harder promoting products you don’t have a clue about!
- You can be more genuine and congruent in your sales messaging if you’ve personally bought and had value from something you’re promoting.
- Imagine someone recommending a restaurant to you, but they haven’t gone themselves – they just want the commission. Do you go? Affiliate marketing, or referral marketing is similar to this. Except you get paid for recommendations.
Types Of Products
There’s many types of products online to choose from as an affiliate marketer. Ideally choose products you have already purchased and would recommend. If you’re looking for a training resource for learning about online marketing, you can also re-sell training courses you’ve put yourself on. (See free video series).
Digital products tend to pay more than physical products: 40% compared to 3-10% typically. Then there’s recurring income affiliate programs and high ticket programs. These tend to give the highest levels of commission but you’ll have to purchase them yourself before you can get the higher commission levels. See also highest paying affiliate programs list.
Many bloggers and video marketers choose affiliate programs or products which match their interests. That way they can continue to create content around their interest while promoting affiliate products. This is a good idea if you’re going down the free marketing route. If you’re going to create a lot of content to draw people to your products, it’s far easier to create it around an interest or hobby. See how to find a niche for affiliate marketing.
Referral Programs To Make Money
The key to making money with referral programs is to automate and scale the process. You can easily get lost in the process of becoming an affiliate marketer and lose your way! Automating the process either means paying for marketing or creating daily habits which build up your online presence over time. With automated systems and a scalable marketing strategy, you’ll get there much more quickly than with content marketing alone.
Get the right help and training too and you’ll shave months if not years off your affiliate marketing journey! Access a free video series on this website to learn more about the training and online business resource available here.