If you’re wondering how to make money selling software, there’s a simple strategy available to anyone. It’s called affiliate marketing. Affiliates make money online by selling products of all kinds. Software products can be the most lucrative products to sell because they pay ongoing commissions in many cases. See recurring income affiliate programs.
With any affiliate program you get paid for a referral. Affiliates act as third party advertisers. They recommend other people’s products and services over the internet. A good analogy is that of recommending a friend to a restaurant. Only with affiliate recommendations you get paid a commission if someone purchases a product because of it.
How To Make Money Selling Software
Affiliates sell all kinds of products over the internet. They sell digital products and physical products. Software products offer some of the most lucrative affiliate opportunities available for affiliates for a few reasons:
- Many online businesses depend on software products
- Software products pay out ongoing commissions for each sale
- Sell to the right people and you have a lifetime of commissions for a single sale
- With only a few sales you have an income, not just a few stand-alone commissions.
Here’s a few software products which are used for online businesses:
Aweber – Aweber is an autoresponder. Autoresponders collect email addresses from websites and can be used to automate email marketing campaigns. Online businesses rely on autoresponders for the running an operating of their business.
SEM Rush – This is an online data collection tool used by online business owners. It lets them collect data and better understand their marketing resources – SEO, competition, paid marketing etc. SEM Rush is a great software product to promote as an affiliate because it pays ongoing commissions (of up to 40%) and customers pay a subscription for the service. (at time of writing).
Hostgator – offers multiple hosting services for website owners. Hostgator is a great software product to promote as an affiliate. Join the program here.
How Do Affiliates Sell Software Products?
Affiliates marketers sell products in all kinds of different ways. Some affiliates create content like this article, and sell products through their links. Others use paid marketing and emails to promote products to their subscribers.
Because online affiliate products let you refer customers, (and there’s no delivery/service issues for affiliates), sales can be automated and scaled. This means affiliate marketers can sell globally and build huge businesses out of selling other people’s products over the internet.
Paid Marketing – How To Make Money Selling Software
Paid marketing is undoubtably the best way to make money selling software products online. However, it does take some time and effort to learn how to do this. With paid marketing, you send targeted customers directly to a product or through an email marketing campaign.
Initially you will likely run some paid adverts which don’t work. But, over time if you stick with it, you’ll get to learn which campaigns work and which don’t. Once you have the data, you can then easily run the winning campaigns (and scale up), and close down the losing adverts.
Of course this costs money just to learn. So you should aim to keep your budget low at the start. After you find a winning advert, you can slowly increase your budget. Over time, following this strategy, you should be able to automate sales and just let them run. This is a great situation to be in when you’re profitable!
Free Marketing Methods
Free marketing methods such as creating content, video or building a following on social media take some time. They are much slower strategies than using paid marketing. But if you are time rich, they can prove to be effective if you work hard at building a following.
This website is an example of a free marketing strategy. You can read how I built this site and how niche websites generate revenue in my article create free website and earn money.
Blogging is a popular form of online marketing which is low cost. V’logging, or video blogging is another strategy which involves building a “bank” of content from which you can build a customer base.
Get Help And Support
Learning any strategy to make money online takes time and patience and selling software online is only one single strategy. There are lots of others too!
Here’s an online training resource which has helped me learn the best strategies for selling online and to choose the right products for maximum profitability.
