Are you looking for a way to start making money online that is easy to learn, easy to start and can be done with little investment? Are you someone who has never heard of affiliate marketing at all?
Or perhaps you have heard a little bit about it from different people but are confused as to how exactly it all works and how to put it all together to make you money. Then this post is for you!
Affiliate marketing is a great option for anyone. It will work for you if want a part-time side income, want to bring in a full-time income or you want to make millions.
It’s scalable and the sky is the limit to how far you can go with affiliate marketing.
It can be done from anywhere in the world, any time you want, whatever fits into your lifestyle.
I am a stay-at-home mum of a toddler who is on the go all day, every day. Affiliate marketing fits around her nap and bedtimes and I can fit my work in around her daily schedule.
If you don’t want to read this whole post and just want to get started with affiliate marketing, I’m holding a live training workshop where my good friend, John Crestani, will be showcasing how he generated $1,500,000+ in only 5 months WITHOUT a product.
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HOW DOES AFFILIATE MARKETING WORK?
Affiliate marketing is where you are “the middle-man”. You basically refer people to a product or service and when they purchase that product or service you receive a commission.
The customer doesn’t pay any extra by purchasing through you instead of directly with the vendor. In fact, there’s a good chance they can get it even cheaper by purchasing through you as some vendors offer coupons and discount codes for their affiliates.
Once your customer has made a purchase, you receive a commission from the owner of the product for referring that customer to them.
In other words you receive a referral fee or a “finder” fee for finding that customer for them.
In very simple terms, think of yourself being a freelance Sales Representative who works on commission only!
Why do people do this? Why would anyone pay YOU to promote their product when they don’t even know you?
You are finding customers they probably wouldn’t have had access to if you hadn’t referred them. So, for doing that you get a commission.
They have done absolutely nothing to make that sale, so they are happy to share a little bit of their profit with you for you finding that customer for them.
And, obviously, you want to promote someone else’s product because you will get paid by them for doing so.
There are a few different ways that you can get paid for promoting affiliate offers.
One way is a percentage based fee. You receive a percentage of the total amount your customer spends. For example, you are offered a commission of 20%. If your customer spends $100, you get $20 commission.
Another way that you can get paid through affiliate marketing is CPA which is also known as Cost Per Acquisition or Cost Per Action. This is where you receive a fixed amount for each sale of a product or service. For example, a company is selling an E-Course for $500. They decide that if you refer a new customer to them who signs up to their course you will receive $75.
And, the third way to receive affiliate commission is CPL or Cost per Lead. CPL offers are generally a lot smaller commissions but you do a lot less work to make the commission.
For example, a company may be doing a giveaway and they want you to get as many people to enter the competition as possible. They offer you $1.50 for every lead you send to them and enters the competition.
Or a company might want to gather information on zip codes. All they want is for you to send someone to their site and enter their zip code. They pay you $1.00 every time someone does this.
As you can see, the commission is small but it can be a lot easier to get someone to enter their information in to win a competition (especially if it’s a good prize!) or provide some information than it is to get them to spend money.
WHAT’S SO GREAT ABOUT AFFILIATE MARKETING?
Affiliate marketing is easy, cheap and flexible especially for newbies to online business. As I mentioned earlier, it can fit around your lifestyle. It doesn’t matter where you are located, what day or times you do it.
You can work from the beach, the hotel, your home office, a restaurant, the mall – all from your laptop and anywhere you get an internet connection.
You don’t need to invest much money at all to start building your affiliate marketing business.
Let’s compare affiliate marketing with starting an online store. You decide you want to start an e-commerce boutique. Great! Now, you need to source products and inventory, purchase that inventory in bulk before launching your store and have somewhere to store it.
Then, you create you online store either yourself or by paying someone to do it for you. Now your store is ready to launch!
Wait, now you need to promote it so that people can actually find your products and buy them. But you did that for a few months and guess what you finally got an order. Awesome!
Once you start to receive orders, as they come in you need to package them up, take them down to the post office and mail them out to your customer.
Beyond this, you also have to take care of customer service, any complaints you may receive, returns and exchanges – all that stuff.
Now let’s give affiliate marketing a go. You are purely referring someone else’s product so you just need to find something to promote and find somewhere to promote it. Done!
You can literally get started on your way to making money within a day.
Heard enough already?!
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HOW DO I PROMOTE AFFIATE PRODUCTS?
There are so many different ways to promote affiliate offers theses days, especially with all the different social media platforms and you have probably seen them yourself without even realising it.
One of the most common, well-known and oldest way to promote affiliate offers is through a blog.
You can do this as simply as doing a review of the product or service. It could be something you use yourself already and you love it or it could be things you buy purely to review and blog about.
Alternatively, your blog could be more of an informational site and you subtly weave affiliate offers into your blog posts. You then add links to the product so that your audience can go buy it if they want to.
If writing isn’t your thing and you don’t mind being on camera you can promote affiliate offers through a YouTube channel. It works the exact same way as a blog – you can do a straight up review of a product or service or your video can be informational or educational and you add mentions of affiliate products within your content.
On YouTube you simply add your affiliate links to the product or service into your description box below your video.
A bit of a newer way to do affiliate marketing is via social media using coupons or discount codes.
Have you ever been on Instagram or YouTube where you see someone talking about a product, then they say they have a discount code you can use?
That code is how the vendor tracks what sales come from whom. The Instagrammer or YouTuber are given a unique discount code and whenever someone uses that discount code, the vendor knows who to pay the affiliate commission to.
Another option, which also used to be quite big “back in the day” but would still work quite well if done right, is setting up an affiliate online store.
You set up a website that looks exactly like an online store and stock it with products. Companies will provide you with a product feed, which is some code or a plugin that you put into your site and it pulls their products, as well as their stock and inventory levels, onto your site.
When a customer wants to make a purchase they click on the product on your “store” but they are taken to the product owners store to complete the purchase. You just get a commission for connecting them to each other.
HOW DO I GET PEOPLE TO BUY MY AFFILIATE OFFERS?
First of all, there are free methods and there are paid methods and which method you choose will obviously depend on your budget and how much time you have to invest into building traffic.
Free traffic is a very attractive option because you don’t have to outlay any (or a very small amount) money but it takes time, patience and persistence.
Some free traffic methods include:
Setting your website and blog posts up to be SEO friendly in order to get ranked in Google. Eventually, with time and a good SEO strategy you can get your website high up in the Google search rankings which will bring you traffic.
Setting up a YouTube channel and posting video’s related to the affiliate offers you are promoting. This Works just like Google search where you set your videos up to be ranked within YouTube search rankings.
Building an email list so that you can regularly email your subscribers with informational, educational and also affiliate offer emails.
Using social media platforms to promote your affiliate brand, product or service is another way to get free traffic and again is just something that takes time to build up an audience and a following.
Using paid traffic methods is much quicker to start and scale but obviously you need to have a budget to allocate to this. You would look at purchasing advertising on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest and YouTube advertising.
Another paid traffic method is by using Solo Ads. Solo Ads can be quite cost effective and this is where you pay someone to email their list with your offer. It’s great for times when you haven’t yet built a substantial email list or social media following.
WHAT CAN I PROMOTE AS AN AFFILIATE MARKETER?
Anything! Seriously!
One of the biggest affiliate programs would be Amazon.com’s affiliate program which is called Amazon Associates. Once you have joined you can promote every and any single product on the Amazon website.
As of January 2018, Amazon was recorded as having 564 million products available for sale. What?! That’s how many products you have access to by joining their affiliate program.
Amazon have a lot of tools to help affiliate marketers such as feeds you can plug into your website, pre-made advertisements you can use and tools to help promote their products.
If you are interested in online education, online courses are a great product to promote. Everyone wants to learn new things and there are online courses in every single niche these days.
Another great product to promote is software or programs such as programs for trading stocks, bitcoins or cryptocurrency as well as website software for online businesses.
Websites need things like shopping carts, themes, plugins etc and people like to be pointed in the direction of the best ones to purchase. Why not have them do that by giving a nice review of the software then giving them your affiliate link to purchase through?
Lastly, if you have no idea which niche you want to promote it’s best to stick to the three major money-makers – HEALTH, WEALTH AND RELATIONSHIPS!
HOW DO I FIND AFFILIATE PROGRAMS TO JOIN?
A really great resource to start with is Offervault. This is a website which curates all affiliate programs and offers that are available in one place and tells you where you need to go, to be able to request access to promote a particular product.
The next place to look would be at Affiliate Networks such as Commission Junction and Share A Sale. These are websites that you join (for free) and once you have an account you will have access to many different products and vendors to promote.
If you are looking for something more specific that you can’t find in any of the affiliate networks then a simple Google search will help you out.
For example, you would like to promote a jewelry product. Hop onto Google and search for “jewelry affiliate program”. Or you love the brand Canon and want to promote their products, so search for “canon affiliate program”
If they have an affiliate program, it will most likely come up in the first few search results in Google.
HOW DO I GET STARTED IN AFFILIATE MARKETING?
While it is very easy and you don’t need much to get started with affiliate marketing, it will help things move a bit more smoothly if you have a few things ready before you start.
Choose and register a domain name, get some hosting and have a website set up. Although you don’t need to have a website to promote the products on, you will need to provide a website address to affiliate networks and vendors when you are applying for their programs.
They want to see that you already have a business set up, that you possibly have some experience with affiliate marketing and that your website is related to their niche.
If your website has nothing to do with the niche their product is in, they will be hesitant to let you promote their offers as they may think your audience won’t be interested in them.
Have some social media platforms set up such as Instagram and Facebook to promote yourself or your company as a brand to affiliate marketers.
Have some basic information ready about your business such how you are going to promote their offers, where you will promote their offers, where your audience is located etc.
If you are joining affiliate networks, they will ask this information to help their vendor’s determine if you are a good fit for their company.
Then, start joining networks! Find networks that have products and services in them that you are interested in promoting.
Join Amazon Associates. It might not be exactly what you want to promote but it is great to start with Amazon if you’ve never done affiliate marketing and you just want to build up experience while you are waiting to get access to other affiliate programs or offers.
Lastly, if you don’t get accepted to the affiliate program you want, don’t stress about it. You may get a few declines in the beginning.
Some programs are very strict on who they accept into their program or they may only want to work with affiliate marketers with some experience. If you do get declined just find something else to promote in your niche and as you get more experience and you start making sales you can then go back to those other programs and ask to join again when they can see you are going to send them sales.
Where To From Here?
Now I’ve told you what you need to do to get started in Affiliate marketing, are you ready to know HOW to get started?
I’m holding a live training workshop where my good friend, John Crestani, will be showcasing how he generated $1,500,000+ in only 5 months WITHOUT a product.
Register For the Free Workshop Now
On the webinar, we’ll be covering…
- The Proven Step-By-Step System That Generated Him $1,500,000+ in Only 5 Months (Just Copy What He Shows You!)
- The EXACT Way He Deploys & Profits with Ads in ANY Niche… The best part? You’ll NEVER have to write an ad ever again!
- How He Generates Over $100,000 a Month with “Secret” Traffic Sources that ANYONE has Access To.
- How to Gain a “Competitive Advantage” Over Your Competition In Any Niche With The “Landing Page Profits Tactic” He Only Show 1-on-1 Coaching Students (Revealed LIVE!)
… and MUCH More!
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