Anyone can promote products online and earn commissions, even if they don’t own the products themselves. A clever business model known as affiliate marketing is being used all over the world. It’s a model which pays third party referrers commissions for sales they make of other people’s products and services online.
If you’ve only just heard of this, it’s time to join the party! Affiliates work from anywhere and so long as they have an internet connection and a laptop, they are in business! To make money through promoting affiliate products you need to join an affiliate program. Once inside you’ll get access to a unique affiliate link which tracks sales back to you. You’re then rewarded for generating sales through your link and are paid a commission based on the sale value.
To make sales as an affiliate marketer you need to learn a strategy which places you between the customer and the products. There’s various strategies which affiliates use. The tactics they use depend on marketing budget, available time and the product they choose to promote.
Affiliate marketing is incredibly flexible and you can build an affiliate business around a full time job until your income surpasses your employment income. At this point it can give you a huge amount of freedom and flexibility. You can also automate the process of selling online to let systems and software do the work. This can be scaled up globally since you can sell affiliate products worldwide, regardless of the country you live in.
Promote Products Online And Earn Commissions – Marketing Methods
There’s a variety of marketing strategies which affiliates use and not all affiliates do the same things. Some affiliates will use paid marketing platforms to drive traffic, while others will use cheaper methods of marketing such as blogging and/or video blogging or v’logging.
Depending on your marketing budget, you can also implement a combination of strategies to suit your particular needs. Blogging is a much slower marketing method than paid advertising though, and it will take much longer to gain traction through blogging. Paid marketing is the fastest method and can be used to send people to websites or to a marketing list through a landing page. Here’s some other strategies which are used by affiliates to sell their products and services:
- Email marketing
- PPC – Pay per click advertising
- Retargeting – showing ads for people who have already landing on your website/marketing materials
- Social media marketing – both paid and unpaid social media marketing methods
- Blogging & Video blogging
- Offline advertising – traditional advertising methods (e.g. newspapers, marketing banners etc)
Promote Products Online And Earn Commissions – Which Products?
There’s a huge variety of affiliate products to choose from as an affiliate marketer. Many new affiliates will head directly for Amazon, because it’s such a well known site and has thousands of products to choose from. Most people have also used Amazon personally and bought something from the site, which they can obviously recommend as an affiliate! However, Amazon affiliate marketing commission rates are some of the lowest around. They pay from 1% to 10% commission on most of their products to affiliates. Compare this to most digital products for instance which pay from 20%-40% commission to affiliates.
If you go the Amazon route you’ll need to sell a lot of products to make it a viable business option. There’s other products you can find on sites such as Clickbank.com too. Clickbank is a marketplace for affiliate marketers to find digital products in all kinds of topics. There’s several alternatives to Clickbank too which offer similar types of products.
Some of the best products to promote as an affiliate are those which offer the highest and recurring commissions. Recurring commission affiliate programs are typically training programs or software products which are used by businesses. These are great to promote because businesses need them to survive, and so the customer is very likely to maintain their membership, often for a lifetime. So if you have referred multiple recurring income affiliate programs to the customer, you’ll get recurring commissions potentially for years!
High ticket affiliate marketing products are something to consider too. These are products which typically sell for a much higher price than most. So the commissions are typically much larger – over $500 in most cases.
Summary
Anyone can learn how to promote products online and earn commissions. The key to doing so is to stick with a particular strategy for long enough to break through and start making sales. Depending on your strategy it can take anywhere between a few weeks and several months just to make your first sale, although it’s different for everyone.
Once you’ve made your first sale online, congratulations you should pat yourself on the back! This can be the hardest part but when you’ve achieved it once, you can do it again many times. Ultimately you can be making sales every day and in your sleep as you improve your marketing strategy over time. With a scalable marketing method affiliate marketing can be completely life changing.
Affiliate marketing can be a little tricky in the beginning, especially if you’re unsure of how to go about it. So it’s well worth getting some training and help with learning your marketing strategy. You can access a free series of training videos here to get started.