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How To Make Money Selling Software

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.

Earn Money Software

One of the most popular earn money software ideas is app creation. An App can be bought from anywhere globally; and instantly downloaded to any smartphone, computer or tablet in the world. Which makes it a global business model. Most app developers use one of several business models to monetise their apps. You can either offer your app for free, with the choice of an upgrade, or charge upfront to download the app.

Many app developers opt to give the app away for free. Most people aren’t prepared to pay for an app, especially when many of them can be accessed for free. The app itself is free, and you only pay to remove adverts or upgrade the accessibility of the app.

Earn Money Software – A Stocks and Shares App

A great app anyone can use to make money from their smartphone is the Moneybox app. Moneybox is an app you can use to buy shares in certain companies and build up a stock and share portfolio. It lets you connect your bank account and “round up” spendings to the nearest whole amount automatically.

This means you’ll be putting small amounts into savings and investments on “autopilot”. It’s great if you know nothing about the markets, but would like to build up some investments or savings.

Affiliate Marketing

If you want to earn money with an online venture, affiliate marketing is your best bet. With affiliate marketing you can sell other people’s products over the internet. Affiliates use a range of software to help them build their businesses.

Software ranges from email marketing autoresponders, to sales funnels and paid marketing platforms. Most affiliate businesses can run completely on autopilot once they are up and running. This means the owner can work from anywhere and scale up to a global audience too. See autopilot online business. A good affiliate business will be built on a good foundation. This means using all the tools which can automate your business, and working specifically on scalable strategies.

An Email Autoresponder

An email autoresponder is a great piece of “earn money software” which is used by business owners everywhere. For an internet based business it is particularly useful because it can automate much of your marketing efforts. An autoresponder lets website owners collect their visitor’s email details and follow up with a number of automated emails. As your database of subscribers grows, you’ll be able to reach larger numbers of people with a single email.

Some online business owners build their email lists into the tens of thousands of subscribers. By sending out a single email, they can sell hundreds, if not thousands of products over the internet globally. With digital products, affiliates can sell items online without being concerned about delivery costs or location of the customer. You can sell products over the internet from anywhere globally. And this makes for a very automated and scalable business.

Earn Money Software – Digital Products

Affiliate marketing is one of the best models for an online business. This is because you can use other people’s products and services. Simply refer people to a pre-existing business, for a share of the profit. Certain digital products are more lucrative than others too. For example, a popular affiliate program is Amazon.

Anyone can join Amazon’s partner program and promote any product from the site. But Amazon’s products are physical not digital and so have more costs associated with them such as manufacture and delivery. Amazon pays affiliate marketers from 3-10% commission on the sales they make.

In comparison, certain digital products pay out 40-50% commissions on a sale. This is because advertising online products is one of the biggest costs for product owners. Digital products carry no delivery or storage costs. Once products are created, there’s no, (or very little), manufacturing costs with digital products. So the savings can be passed on to the affiliates who promote the product.

The best digital products to promote are the ones which offer recurring commissions. These tend to be software products and memberships. High ticket items also offer the best levels of commissions, and allow you to use paid marketing platforms to promote them.

Earn Money Software – Marketing Platforms

Online marketing platforms let business owners send customers directly to their websites. From there, they can collect the visitor’s email address and start a marketing campaign. Paid marketing platforms like Adwords, Facebook and YouTube, for example, are awesome bits of kit if you have a pre-existing business, or product to sell. Some of the most expensive marketing platforms offer the ability to super-target a specific audience by their interests, location, age and a number of other demographics.

When you get this right, you’ve got a great tool to build a business. Usually marketers start off with a small budget and learn as they grow their business. Once you get a positive return on investment from a marketing campaign, simply increasing the budget will bring you more customers. Get this right and it can be like turning on a ‘tap’ where money comes out the other end!

(Access a free video series on this website to learn about building an online business from scratch, even with no previous experience).

Free Automated Money Making Software

There’s a few ways to use free, automated money making software using a business model called affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing is basically referral marketing on the internet. You can earn commissions on sales made to other people’s products. Depending on the product, you can make up to 50% and even 60% commissions on some products. Amazon is an obvious example of an affiliate marketing website. Anyone can join Amazon’s affiliate program, and promote and sell any product from their website for a commission.

How you do this will determine your level of success.

Free Automated Money Making Software – Which Products?

If you’re going the free route, you’ll want to choose products which don’t incur a cost. Clickbank is one of the best places to find digital products which can be promoted as an affiliate. See also my article clickbank autopilot money making software.

Why digital products? Digital products are good for affiliate marketing because they pay out larger commissions. With no postage, storage or manufacturing costs for the vendor (seller), those savings can be passed on to you (the affiliate marketer).

Digital products can also be accessed from anywhere globally, making them very versatile for growing your business internationally. Typically, Clickbank pays out 40-50% commissions. Compare this to physical products you might find on Amazon which pay out much less – typically 3-10% commissions. See chart below.

Free Software? Where Is It?

So where’s the free automated money making software you say? I know, I know. I’m coming to that!

One of the best free ways to automate sales to digital products online is through blogging. Blogging isn’t a magical system which runs by itself though; sorry to disappoint. But if you want free money, you’ll have to put the work in! That’s the catch with a free strategy. If you want faster results, you’ll need to use a different kind of strategy. Ideally use high commission affiliate programs and paid marketing strategies. That way you’ll get more traction more quickly.

But this article isn’t about that. It’s about free automated money making software. So I’ll get on with it! To create completely free sales online you’ll need to use a free blogging site such as Hubpages.com. Hubpages, lets you create content and use blocks which you drag into your content. These blocks can be monetised with affiliate marketing, eBay, Amazon and Adsense. Adsense lets you put advertising on your content and earn money from the clicks you get from your visitors.

Amazon and eBay are both affiliate programs which you can join and integrate with Hubpages to earn money from sales made through your content.

Hubpages has a few rules though which can limit how you earn money through the site. Earlier I recommended Clickbank. However, Hubpages sometimes limits affiliate links to sites such as Clickbank. However they do allow you to use Adsense, eBay and Amazon affiliate links within your content. See the Hubpages user agreement for the latest terms and conditions.

Want To Use Clickbank?

So, with Hubpages you may not be allowed to use Clickbank products. Not directly anyway. This is due to the large number of new affiliate who write content only with the intention of driving traffic to affiliate offers.

They don’t create valuable content and so Hubpages stops it from happening. The same is true of building your own website and attempting to rank it with Google. Google don’t like shady practices either, and won’t give your site any ranking ‘juice’ if all you do is post spammy affiliate links and provide little of value.

If you want to build your own site, it’ll cost you a few dollars, so technically it’s not entirely free! If you want free automated money making software, as the title suggests, you’ll need to use Hubpages or another free blogging tool. Another limitation with free websites like Hubpages or Weebly for instance, is that Google doesn’t rank content built on a shared hosting platform like those ones.

Build Your Own Website

To get around this issue you should build your own website. See my article Create Free Website and Earn Money. This can be done by purchasing a domain and hosting your website. $10 for your domain name and less than $10 a month for hosting.

Where’s The Automation?

There are two main parts to automating an online business with affiliate marketing. First you need customers, or traffic. No one will visit your content unless you promote it, or unless Google ranks it on the free search engines. This is what you need if you’re going for the free strategy. This means building content and sharing it as much as possible. See Niche Blogging For Profit. If you want traffic fast, you’ll need to buy it.

Part One Traffic – Automating Sales

To automate online sales you need to send people (website traffic) to affiliate products and make sales. The products have already been created and many of them create sales pages and landing pages which affiliates can use in their own marketing.

To generate traffic you can do two things:

Pay for it
Create content

Part Two – Selling Products

Choosing the right products to promote is pretty important for affiliate marketers. If you’re going for the free traffic route, you’ll need to build content and this takes time.

Pick a topic which you know something about or have an interest in. That way, you’ll be able to write more easily and for longer. Choose products which you would buy yourself and which you have some affinity with. That way it’s easier to promote them and you’re not being incongruent with your audience – something which they can ‘smell’! Why would they buy your recommended products if you won’t!?