What is affiliate marketing? Affiliate marketing is an online business model which allows anyone to make money by promoting other people’s products. A popular analogy is that it’s like recommending a restaurant to a friend; only when you recommend an affiliate product over the internet, you’re given a unique code in your affiliate link. When a sale is made, that link is tracked back to you and you receive a commission based on the sale.
Affiliate marketing is growing in popularity because it can allow anyone to earn an income from the internet. Once you’ve mastered affiliate marketing it means you no longer need to work a job, commute, have a boss or rely on anyone else for your income.
What Is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliates are basically third party referral sales people. Although you don’t have to be particularly salesman-like to become an affiliate. Affiliates do all kinds of activities over the internet in order to make sales of products. Some affiliate marketers build websites, and others create videos. Some use social media to attract visitors and others build huge lists of subscribers to promote their products to.
This website is an example of one particular affiliate strategy. Should you purchase something from this site, I’ll earn a commission based on the sale.
Anyone can become an affiliate marketer too. All you have to do is join an affiliate program and start sharing your affiliate link. The real skill of an affiliate marketer is attracting a large audience and delivering products which are of value to them.
How Affiliates Build An Audience
There’s a few ways to build a following as an affiliate marketer. Most successful affiliates have a list of subscribers though. This is a list of people who have subscribed to a service. I offer a free video series on this website, for example. If you sign up for the videos you’ll join my list of subscribers.
As an affiliates list grows and they get good at communicating to their subscribers, they’ll be able to sell products to them. With a small list, they’ll only make a small amount of sales. But as their list grows into the tens of thousands of subscribers, they’ll increase their earning potential. See autopilot email marketing .
To get people to subscribe to your list you’ll have to offer something of value. Then they give you their email address so you can deliver your freebie!
What Products To Promote
There’s literally thousands of products available online which you can promote as an affiliate. You can do a Google search for affiliate programs in pretty much any area and you’ll find something. So if you have an existing website already, you can pick an affiliate product and stick it on there!
Most affiliate programs already have marketing materials such as banners, videos and webinars for example. The job of an affiliate is basically to send customers to the products. Customer service, product manufacture, handling and delivery are all taken care of by the product owners. This means affiliates can focus on one thing and one thing only – marketing.
Some products offer better commissions than others to affiliate marketers. Physical products tend to pay less than digital products. Amazon’s commission structure can be seen in the image above. Digital products tend to pay more to affiliates because there’s fewer costs involved in their production and delivery. A good product for affiliates to promote is one which offers recurring commissions.
Recurring commission affiliate programs are usually products which offer lifetime value to their customers. These are things like software packages, online business tools and trainings with a membership fee.
Affiliate Marketing And Automation
Because of the automation involved in marketing, affiliates can create huge businesses very quickly. Using paid marketing platforms means they can reach a very targeted audience too and promote products to a global audience.
If you don’t want to pay for marketing your products there’s other ways too. Blogging and social media marketing are two such strategies. However, results are typically much slower when you use free strategies to promote products online. A blog for example might take several months or years to get traction and generate regular visitors. Whereas a paid marketing strategy can generate thousands of visitors almost instantly.
Because websites and marketing platforms work constantly, an online business can operate around the clock and never stop! Within an international business you can scale your business globally and deliver products and services around the world to customers without having to touch a product or speak to a customer.
Get Started
If you’re interested in getting started with affiliate marketing the best thing to do is educate yourself in it. Affiliate marketing is no quick fix and it does take time and effort to learn and build an income from. But if you’re hard working it can be a great opportunity to earn an income from anywhere.
Access this all in one training package to get started.
