You can download this affiliate marketing tutorial pdf here. So what is affiliate marketing? Does it work and can anyone do it? What are the strategies to make money with affiliate marketing and is it a realistic business model? In this tutorial I am going to answer some of these questions and hopefully give you a better understanding of what affiliate marketing is, and what you can expect realistically from an affiliate marketing business.
Affiliate Marketing Tutorial PDF – What Is Affiliate Marketing?
So first of all what is affiliate marketing? Affiliate marketing is a kind of referral marketing in which someone can recomend a product or service over the internet. If someone goes on to buy something from that recommendation, the ‘affiliate’ earns a commission on the sale. Much like recommending a good restaurant to a friend, affiliate marketing allows anyone to earn a living from doing so online. For example, I recommend an affiliate marketing training course on my website. You can access it here. If you go on to make a purchase, I will receive a commission.
What Products Can I Sell Online?
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Affiliate marketers can choose pretty much any product they can find on the internet. As long as there is an affiliate program attached to it, you can join the program and earn commissions based on your referrals. This is done through an affiliate link which is tracked back to your affiliate profile.
When a sale is made from your link, your link will show up as having referred the customer and you’ll earn a commission. With digital products you can earn up to and even above 40% commission on the price of an item. Physical products tend to pay less due to the other costs involved like postage and storage. Digital products carry less costs and can be delivered cheaply over the internet. As such the product owners can pass more of the profit to their sales people – affiliate marketers.
What Are The Best Products To Sell?
If you have an interest or special knowledge of some kind already, it can be a good idea to capitalize on this. Many affiliates start out with a simple blog simply beacuse it’s a low cost way of generating website traffic. Matching products to your blog is an important skill. Unless your content brings the right audience to your products, you’ll be unlikely to make a sale. The ‘best’ products can be a matter of opinion, however, as already mentioned, digital products can pay out much more than physical products. That being said, the important part is the able to sell them, and this depends on how you go about it.
Product ‘Suites’
Even with the highest priced items, unless you can match your audience and send the right people to your offers, you can struggle to make sales. Struggling affiliates might have a great product range but might not have mastered the art of selling online. All that aside, it’s a good idea to sell products within a product range. If you sell a product ‘suite’ you can earn commissions later on after you have made the initial sale.
A product ‘suite’ offers a range of up-sells within a certain product type. For example look at Apple. They sell many products with a range of costs – Apple watch, Macbook Pro Laptop, Iphone, TV, Ipod, Ipod Nano etc, etc. By choosing a product to sell which has a range of up-sell products included, you can earn a continual income from later sales closed by the product owner.
Subscription Products
(Download this affiliate marketing tutorial pdf here.) Subscription based products are much better for affiliates when they start making sales. This is because a single sale of a subscription product can give them an income continually. As long as their customer continues to use the product, they will pay their subscription. If you referred that customer, you have created an ongoing income from a single sale.
This is obviously much better than just selling single products which only pay you once. Subscription products might include online software, website hosting, email autoresponders and websites with membership areas, for example. Choosing subscription products can make a massive difference to your affiliate business.
High Ticket Items
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Another useful concept to understand with affiliate marketing is high ticket products. Many affiliates start by choosing products which sell for $100 or so. They earn 40% commission on these or $40. However, choosing products like these to sell severely limits your earning potential. Plus you need to keep selling them over and over to earn regularly.
By choosing products which sell for upwards of $1000, you can earn $400+ on each sale. This gives you a much larger earning potential instantly for what can easily be the same amount of work. When you come to start using paid advertising for your business, this is more easily offset by the profit than for low ticket products. Imagine trying to earn $10,000 from your online business. If you went for the low priced item you would need to sell 250 items. For a $1000 item which earned $400 per sale, you would only need to sell 25.
I would much rather sell 25 items than 250. Even though they are higher priced items, they are not going to be 10 times more difficult to sell. Much of the work will be very similar in nature when selling both low cost and higher priced items. So why work harder? Don’t forget you have a global audience with an online business. Many people will pay more if it means they get more value from the products you sell.
Methods To Sell Affiliate Products Online
There are various different methods to sell affiliate products online. The job of an affiliate marketer is to find customers who are interested and have a need for the products they promote. This can be done in a few different ways:
- Article marketing – (This article for example)
- Video creation – Creating videos and uploading to YouTube
- Adverts – Youtube/Facebook/Adwords
- List building
- Holding webinars
- Pod casts
There are many other methods too of building an audience from which you can promote products to. Content creation is a cheap method which many new affilaites use to build their initial following. However, this can take time. A faster method is by using paid advertising. Paid advertising allows anyone to start an online business and instantly build a customer base. Of course this costs money and you need to know what you’re doing or you could be throwing money away!
List Building
Most affiliate marketers build a list of subscribers and then market to their list. As their list grows in size, they have much more ‘leverage’ and can generate more sales simply by delivering value to their lists (while selling products). List building can be done with paid advertising and content creation. Again, paid advertising can allow you to build a list very quickly.
By placing adverts and sending targeted potential customers to a landing page, affiliate marketers collect email subscribers and can then market to them over the longer term. This is arguably the best method of building a sustainable affiliate business because it puts you in charge of your traffic. Unless you have a list, you are placing your business at the whim of your ranking on Google or or continually paying for advertising. A list allows you to build a relationship with your subscribers, offer value and promote your affiliate products.
If someone lands on your website, they only have few minutes to make a purchasing decision. Once you have them as a subscriber, this time frame extends into months, years and even decades. This vastly extends the possibility and time frame from which they can make a buying decision.
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