Welcome to affiliate marketing 101 pdf. You can download this entire article here. Let’s start with what affiliate marketing is.
Affiliate Marketing 101 PDF – What Is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is a kind of referral based marketing in which ‘affiliates’ refer website traffic to various products online. By linking to products and services which are suitable for the audience of a website, affiliates can earn money for their sales. A link placed in some content contains a referral code.
When a sale is made the referral code is traced back to the affiliate. They receive a commission based on their sale. What’s great about this model is that anyone can learn how to do this and it can be operated from a laptop from anywhere. All you need is an internet connection and the right training.
Do I Need A Website?
Not all affiliate marketers use websites. Some use paid advertising to direct traffic straight to products online. However it’s a good idea to have a website if you’re just starting. A website gives you the opportunity to create content at low cost to generate traffic to your offers.
Many affiliate marketers start out with a simple blog. Blogging regularly can build up over time. As your traffic builds up, you can increase your online sales. You can access a ‘plug and play’ website with a range of built in products here. Even though you don’t need a website to sell affiliate products, a website is a useful thing to have, even if you decide to generate traffic from paid adverts aswell.
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What Products Should I Sell Online?
You can sell almost anything over the internet. You just need to join an affiliate program and you can promote thousands of products. Many affiliates choose to sell digital products rather than physical products because they offer larger commissions.
Digital products can be downloaded instantly and require virtually no cost to store and deliver. Physical products on the other hand have more costs involved in their storage and delivery. As such, affiliates tend to earn smaller commissions on the sale of physical products. Digital products can pay up to and even above 40% of their ticket price. This means more money can be earned with digital products by affiliates per sale.
However, as an affiliate you can choose which products you want to promote. Often, affiliates will build a business around a particular interest or hobby. If you have a passion for something, you can turn it into a website and use that as a platform to sell other people’s (or your own) digital/physical products.
The best products to sell online can be sold globally. That way you have an unlimited audience to sell to. Digital products also offer this benefit and anyone can download a digital product. Providing there is an internet connection, anyone can access digital products from the internet.
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Do I Need To Make My Own Products?
Some affiliate marketers create and sell their own products. However, you don’t really need to do this unless you really want to and have something unique to offer. You can spend a lot of time creating products which may not have a large enough market to sell effectively online. There are already thousands of products online which have been proven to sell. Using other people’s products is a far quicker way to get started with your own online business. Plus, the time you spend creating a product could be spent better, particularly if you want to start earning quickly.
It is far better to learn how to promote and sell products online than to get caught up in the detail of creating your own products. You can spend (waste) a lot of time doing things which don’t make you money.
How Do I Sell Products Online?
Most affiliate products come with sales pages and landing pages. These are web pages specifically designed to sell, and then deliver digital products. As an affilaite you can join a program which already has these pages for you to use. Once you have your affiliate link, you simply promote that link around the internet in any way you can.
The affiliate link will send people to sales pages and either collect sales from the page itself or send visitors down a ‘sales funnel’. With some products you will also have a sales team in place closing sales on your behalf. Simply use your affiliate link to promote a webpage and generate traffic to that link.
You can download this full article “affiliate marketing 101 pdf” here.
How Do You Generate Traffic To Your Affiliate Link?
Some affiliates use paid advertising to advertise their links. Others generate content and link to products through their content. Content which you create can be shared on social media, advertised with paid advertising and found on search engines for ‘free’ traffic. Paid advertising is much quicker if you want faster results.
With paid advertising, you can use platforms like Google’s Adwords program to send leads straight to your sales pages. Facebook also has a paid advertising platform as does Yahoo and Bing and many other social media platforms. Content can be articles, blogs, podcasts, videos or webinars. By generating value for potential customers you place yourself between the customer and the product.
Paid Traffic Or Content Generation?
So which is better paid traffic or content generation? While paid traffic is quicker, it obviously costs more. Just because you start an advertising campaign doesn’t necessarily mean you will make instant sales. You need practice like anything to get good at something and PPC (pay per click) paid traffic is no different. However, once you start to master paid traffic you can scale up your advertising very easily. With content this is much more difficult. Learn more about paid traffic in my ebook The Ultimate Guide To Online Marketing.
Content generation is much cheaper but also much slower than paid traffic. Paid traffic is like turning on a ‘tap’ for instant visitors to your website/landing pages. Content creation however can generate momentum once you have a lot of it. If you write good content in the right way, and share your content, you will get shared on social media and picked up by the search engines. This means free traffic if you do it right. Learn more about content generation and how to write and get found in my ebook Niche Blogging For Profit.
What Is A Landing Page?
A landing page is a page specifically designed to capture email addresses. By offering a free guide, e-book download or some kind of information to a visitor, you give them them some ‘freebie’ in exchange for their details. This is so that you can market products through an email marketing campaign.
An autoresponder, (software which allows you to automate your email marketing campaign), lets you communicate directly to your subscribers over a number of emails. By offering value to your subscribers you can extend the opportunity for a potential sale. With a website, a visitor only has a small opportunity to make a buying decision. Once you have an email address, this time period is stretched over days months and even years.
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What Is A Sales Funnel?
A sales funnel starts with the landing page. As your subscriber enters the start of the funnel (the landing page) they enter their email address. Once they have done this they get an automated response by email. They then receive a series of automated emails giving them more information on the chosen topic. Each subscriber will be in a different place to another.
Some will know exactly what you are offering from the start. Others will be more sceptical and so the sales funnel can act as an informative means to educate and inspire. It gives you the opportunity to inform your potential customers of what it is you are offering, and educate them about the usefulness of your products or services. Ultimately the sales funnel is built to sell products. Usually it starts out with a base level product at a low cost. Customers who purchase items are led to more products which they might get more value from (up-selling).
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