If you are looking for a way to make money online but do not have your own product to sell, then affiliate marketing might be your best option. Affiliate marketing online might be new to a lot of people, but it has existed offline for a long time. Affiliate marketing simply means selling someone else’s product in exchange for a commission. The difference between now and then is that now, you do all your marketing online, from home, or from wherever you want as long as you have a computer or phone, and internet.
One key benefit of affiliate marketing online is that you do not have to buy any products to resell. This is a huge benefit compared to what a typical store does. Normally, physical stores, have to buy a large amount of inventory, and then they have to sell everything or incur a loss. With affiliate marketing you will not have that problem because you will not be buying inventory. If you invest anything, it will be for your own benefit, for example, buying a sample product to get better results when writing reviews about it, or investing in your own knowledge to be more successful.
Another benefit of affiliate marketing is that you usually get a really good commission. Before deciding what product to promote, you can see what commission the seller is offering, and an estimate of how many people have been successful with it. You will have complete freedom to choose products with the commissions that work for you. Some products could give you a commission anywhere from 3% to 90%. This is a huge gap. It all depends on the company and the seller. You might wonder why anyone would take the 3% commission, but as you gain experience with affiliate marketing, you might start doing math and figuring out what works best for you. Companies like Amazon might offer commissions as low as 3% but they offer the benefit of being a well-known company and having a lot of traffic. On the other hand, a product that offers you 90% might be a less known product, and the seller just want to get his / her product more popularity. The more affiliate that are promoting a product, the more popular it gets. Another reason for the different in prices sometimes has to do with whether a product is physical or digital.
You might wonder how can be possible that a seller gives away 90% of his/her earnings. The reason why they are able to do this and not incur a loss is that affiliate marketing is usually for digital products. You can resell a digital product over and over and never run out; so the seller will have nothing to lose. If a lot of affiliates are getting the seller 10% for his/her product, that is 10% extra, on top of what they would normally make without affiliates. They have no loss because they are not giving you any product; all they give you is a link so you can do the promotions for them. It is a win–win for everyone because the seller or product creator gets lots of free advertisement, and extra money; and the affiliate gets paid for a product they did not create. It is also a win for the customer because you, as an affiliate, will do your research and only choose those products that would actually benefit your customer. There are so many affiliate products to choose from that there is no reason for affiliates to promote a product they don’t like or don’t trust; they can just look for another one.
So, How Do You Get Started as An Affiliate Marketer?
Whenever you are trying to make money, you need a product to sell. This is true for traditional sellers and affiliate marketers. But where do you find these products? There are different ways to find products to promote:
1 – Go to the website of a product you want to promote and look for their affiliate program. For example, if you want to promote Fiverr, you go to their website and sign up. Click here (my affiliate link) to sign up for Fiverr.
If you are not familiar with Fiverr, it will benefit you to get familiar with it for many different reasons. On Fiverr you can find people to help you do just about anything you need to do digitally as an entrepreneur. For example, they can help you with your website, grow your social media, create graphics, social media post, etc. All for a low price (starting at $5). If you want to become an affiliate, click the links above.
If you want any digital services, virtual assistants, etc, click here (my affiliate link) or the image. I suggest you have two accounts; one to buy services and one for affiliate marketing (you can also make money by providing services. Just look at what other people do to get an idea).
2 – Join one or two affiliate networks. Why? because affiliate networks give you access to hundreds or thousands of sellers in one place. There is no need to sign up for a thousand different websites, when you can join an affiliate network. And some sellers only offer affiliate products through affiliate networks. There are lots of affiliate networks you can join, but I recommend concentrating on one or two at the beginning while you get more familiar with it. Popular affiliate networks are Amazon (about 3 -10 % commission), Click bank, CJ affiliates, JV Zoo, and Warrior Plus. All of this have high commission products. Find the one that you like the best and start with that.
If you are just getting started with affiliate networks, CLICKBANK is the best choice because you can sign up right away and start promoting products; you don’t have to wait to get approved and you don’t have to fill out applications; you just click on a button. And with CLICKBANK you can get access to all kinds of products. If you want to get started with click bank, check out CLICKBANK University (my affiliate link*).
Once you sign up as an affiliate, the next step is to find products to promote. From your affiliate account, you’ll look for the products you want to promote based on your personal preferences, your niche, commissions, and success rates.
Once you find a product, then you’ll get a link to that product. Follow the instructions of the website to make sure you get you own unique link. With your unique link, you will refer customers to the product, and you will get a commission when they buy something.
After you get your affiliate link, the next step is to promote your link so people can click on it. With so much information on the internet, it is virtually impossible to just put a link on a new website and expect people to find it; you have to promote your link. There are multiple ways to promote your link including free and paid.
You can also promote your link on YouTube. To do this, make YouTube videos where you talk about topics related to the product, or do a review of the product. You then put the link at the bottom (always let people know it is an affiliate link)
To promote a link for free, you can open a social media account just for your niche, and direct people directly to that link, or better yet, direct people to your website where you post the link.
Another way to promote your affiliate link is by email. To send out emails, you first need to sign up for an email list plan (like mail chimp) where people can subscribe and unsubscribe. Never send out unsolicited emails. And why would people sign up for your email list? You have to give people a good reason. You can provide really good content in your website and offer to send out content by email. Or the most common way is to use a lead magnet. A lead magnet means that you give out something for free in exchange for people signing up for your email.
Affiliate marketing is a very popular way to make money online because as you can see, it is easy and quick to get started, and you have potential for making a lot of money. There are super successful people who became successful with affiliate marketing and they are now experts in the industry.
By now you probably have a general idea of what affiliate marketing is, where to find training, choices for marketing, etc. The next thing to do is to create a plan to for how you are going to promote the product. You will need to think about what niche (interest / topic) you want to promote (for example, yoga, or dogs, or cooking, etc.). Then you need a platform to promote. The best thing to do is to create your own website and write lots of information related to the products you want to promote. You then need to bring traffic to your website. For this, you will need free (social media) or paid advertising. Before you promote any affiliate links, make sure you read the sellers rules. Each seller has specific requirements about what you can and can’t do with their links and info.
Next steps:
1 – ) Get a website and hosting. Click here to go to DreamHost (Affiliate link*).
2-) Sign up for Fiverr. Click here to sign up for Fiverr (Affiliate link*).
3 – ) sign up for Click bank.
Click here to go to CLICKBANK University (Affiliate link*).
Watch free webinar to learn how to successfully promote clickbank products (Affiliate link*).
5-) Create social media accounts to promote your website.