Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing is when you sign up to promote other people’s products (or services) for a share of the sale in the form of commissions.  As an affiliate marketer, you usually don’t need any special training or start-up funding.

Your tasks as an affiliate marketer will be to drum up traffic to the product owner’s pitch page, allowing them to convert the prospect into a buyer.  The more targeted you are with your traffic promotions, the higher your conversion rate will be.

There are many things you can promote as an affiliate. On Amazon, for instance, you can promote anything tangible (and a few digital download to boot).  If you want to be in the paintball niche, you can include links using your Amazon associate (affiliate) ID to sell specific paintball guns, paintballs, and attire. Promotional Banner - 1

You can go to sites like ClickBank or PayDotCom and get a unique affiliate ID to promote an endless supply of information products.  They house everything from acne to organic gardening.

You can even become an affiliate promoting actions.  There are many Internet marketers who focus their business on getting a steady stream of traffic to take an action, such as filling out a survey online.

With affiliate marketing, you don’t have to worry about developing ideas and creating products.  You don’t have to deal with customer service follow-ups or continually process more products for the marketplace.

Your job is often made easier by product owners who care so much about their own success, that they provide a toolbox to help you with yours!  The toolbox usually includes ready made emails, web reviews, and banner ads you can use with your own link embedded in them for instant plug-n-play success.

Most Internet marketers will eventually blur the lines of product owner and affiliate marketer.  Product owners continually use their list of buyers to promote affiliate items, and affiliates often build such a good reputation in a niche that they’re urged to come out with a product of their own.

How much can an affiliate marketer earn? There are no limits. You can market multiple niches and work as much or as little as you want to generate targeted traffic through your links.  Super affiliates earn six figures or more, but even a beginner affiliate can earn enough to pay the bills each month – with some change to spare!

Affiliate Marketing For Newbies

You might choose to get involved in affiliate marketing. This is a process where you sign up for a link that’s connected to your account. Sometimes people call these referral links because you’re basically recommending a product.

Whenever someone clicks on the link and then purchases the item, you earn money. With affiliate marketing, you can be an affiliate promoting someone else’s digital or tangible products.

Affiliate marketing can be for courses and information you can find on sites like ClickBank, JVZoo or Warrior Plus. But it can also be for items that someone can buy from Amazon, Share-a-Sale or Commission Junction.

There are dozens of reasons why you might like getting started with affiliate marketing. It’s a booming business. There’s very little expense involved and sometimes, no expense whatsoever.

It can be a good side hustle that you can build into a nice income-earning business. You don’t have to know everything about it to get started. You can learn as you go. There’s a lot of freedom with affiliate marketing.

The reason it’s so simple and easy is, at its core, this type of marketing is like having a conversation with a friend. If your friend asked where you got a cute pair of shoes, you’d tell her where.

With affiliate marketing, it’s like having that conversation online. You would point your friend (and others) to the link where she can purchase the same pair and you would make a commission as a “thank you” from the company.

If you decide you want to sell stuff and use affiliates to help you promote the items, then it works the same way, only in reverse. They would share the link to your products, people would click and buy and you’d pay them a small commission fee.

Almost every niche you can imagine is involved with affiliate marketing and can be used to help sell products. For example, if you’re in the keto dieting niche, a tangible that you could promote might be a set of portion control dishes or a body composition scale.

For digital, you could promote keto eating plans where the customer gets a PDF of how keto works, along with all their meals planned out for them. You could even promote something like a monthly program where they get a keto snack box sent to their house.

In this event, affiliates would receive recurring commissions for as long as the customer stayed a subscriber. If you’re not sure what you want to promote, start by looking around at popular websites and blogs in the niche you like to see what’s already being touted.

This can help you see which products are popular and get an idea for what customers are looking for. When you’re choosing a product to promote or thinking of one to create, make sure that what you choose has value to the audience.

Never choose to promote a product based on payout alone. If the product is bad, you can lose your audience’s trust. Always put the value of the product first. You should investigate the product yourself if you can.

You might be able to order the product yourself and try it out. You can even do an unboxing video on Facebook Live or YouTube and put the affiliate link in the description.

But wherever you promote something or have others promote your stuff, make sure that you or those helping you disclose the affiliate connection. It’s legally required in many areas, but it also builds consumer trust.

When you promote anything, make sure that you highlight both the good and bad about whatever it is you’re promoting. Too many newbie affiliates make the mistake of writing glowing review and gloss over anything that might be a problem.

This can also cause audience distrust. So when you write your reviews, make sure you include a genuine opinion of it. If there is something negative, offer a solution or workaround to it.

For example, if you’re promoting a blender, you could say that while the blender is fast and makes a great smoothie, it’s a small capacity and you wouldn’t recommend it if the consumer is looking for a blender for a large family.

To get started with affiliate marketing, pick the niche that you’d like to be in. This might be something like health, relationships, dating, wealth, outdoor survival and more. After you pick the area you want to be in, dig deeper to find a demographic or slant within that niche.

So if you chose health as your niche choice, under the umbrella of health, you could choose a slant like fitness or dieting or certain conditions for a particular demographic like diabetes in seniors or weight loss for women or whatever.

It’s always best to choose something that’s evergreen like heath or success because there’s always an audience for evergreen topics. People who are struggling financially are always going to look for ways to make more money.

Look for common issues that affect people and you’ll be able to select a good niche.
Once you have all that, search the products or programs that are associated with your topic.

You can look products up on sites like ClickBank or Amazon. Have a place online to promote things, such as a blog, a Facebook group or whatever. Make sure that the content that you put on the page with the product is valuable content.

This will help build your audience. You’ll need to market your affiliate promotion. You can do this by creating written tutorials about whatever it is that you’re promoting. You can also create YouTube videos about the product or showing you using the product.

You can create ones where you compare products. Create a buzz by talking about the product on your social media. Do these steps for each niche that you choose to promote.

Affiliate marketing success is all about repeating the same cycle over and over again every time you choose a new product. You’ll create a review, write or record your thoughts on it, share it online and engage with your audience.

Launching Your Own Affiliate Program 

If you have your own product, launching an affiliate program is a necessity if you want to reach your full profit potential.  Even if you manage to control a massive 10% of your entire niche market on your own, that still leaves 90% of that niche’s traffic on the table.

By setting up an affiliate program, you can harness the power of having other people make money for you.  Instead of spending your time promoting your product, you can let other people do it for you while you spend your time forming JV partnerships, developing new product ideas, getting new products created, and taking care of other tasks to grow your business.

There are many ways to set up an affiliate program.  Which one you choose will probably depend on what type of product you’re selling, and where you’re located in the world.  A lot of people purchase affiliate scripts that allow them to run their own affiliate program through PayPal.

But PayPal doesn’t allow users from many countries, and if you live in one of those countries, you’ll have to find a different solution. If you’re selling physical products like shoes or books, you might go through Commission Junction.

Located at www.cj.com, Commission Junction is one of the largest affiliate systems in the world.  They may be a little complex to set up, and they have certain rules you’ll have to comply with, but they have a huge database of affiliates ready and waiting to promote your products.

If you’re selling digital products like software or eBooks, you might want to go through ClickBank.  ClickBank is the world’s largest seller of eBooks and other digital products.  They make it extremely easy to run an affiliate program, and they take care of almost everything for you.

They handle the billing for you, they handle customer refund requests, and they can even handle some of your customer service questions.  They’ll even pay your affiliates for you.  ClickBank does take a percentage of your sales, so if you’re paying your affiliates a 50% commission, you’ll be making quite a bit less than 50% yourself, because of ClickBank’s fees.

They also charge $49 up front to approve your product before you’re allowed to sell through them.  But you’ll have fees with any billing solution.  After all, they have to make money somehow.

An alternative to ClickBank is PayDotCom.  PayDotCom is very similar to ClickBank, but with a few differences.  With PayDotCom, you currently don’t have to pay an upfront fee to sell a single product through them.

The money also goes to your PayPal account, which can be another big benefit.  But for people without PayPal accounts, PayDotCom isn’t going to work.  You need a PayPal account to be paid, and you’ll also have to pay your affiliates out of your PayPal account, as well.

Another easy solution for selling digital products is e-Junkie.  E-Junkie has an affiliate program built in, and they also host your product downloads.  They’re very inexpensive to use, charging a monthly fee rather than high percentages.

But not as many affiliates promote products through e-Junkie as through ClickBank or PayDotCom. Running your affiliate program can be very simple with a hosted solution.  You might be tempted to use a script you host yourself, but it’s probably better to leave it to the pros.

Don’t forget to create an affiliate toolbox, too! In order for your affiliate force to make sales, they’ll need readymade marketing materials such as banners, buttons, eCovers, emails, and articles they can use.

Merging Your Affiliate Offers 

If you launch your Internet marketing business as an affiliate marketer, then you’ll want to know how to merge your offers to play off of one another.  On eBay, it’s called cross-promotion.

You go to an eBay auction for an iPod and find cross-promotions of all sorts of accessories, battery packs, and bling they can add onto their order.  You can do the same with an affiliate business.

Let’s say you want to promote work at home opportunities – like Internet marketing to stay at home moms.  First, you start with an eBook promotion about affiliate marketing.

It’s broad, it fits a large demographic – and it converts well.  What else could the stay at home mom – soon to be entrepreneur need that you can sell?  Think of her personal situation.

She has kids running around the house, she may have limited space, and she’s in need of a home office.  You could promote affiliate items through Amazon that cater to her home office needs, such as:

But there’s more she’s going to need. If she’s learning the ropes of affiliate marketing, she’ll need to understand tactics and tools that are available to make her work easier and increase her profit potential.

You could cross-promote offers such as:

This is just the tip of the iceberg.  When you first scout out your affiliate product promotions, think of all the ways you can merge other offers into the mix so that they complement the original product and still suit the needs of your prospect perfectly.