Referral earning websites allow online marketers to send visitors to someone else’s products. When a sale is made, the referrer earns a commission. Referral earning websites are used by affiliate marketers to earn commissions on products they don’t personally own. It means they can automate online sales and earn commissions from their website, without actually closing the sale themselves or dealing with a customer. They simply refer people to products and services online through either their website or email list.
Referral Earning Websites
This site is a referral earning website. I make a commission if someone buys a product from my website. This business model is known as affiliate marketing. Drop shipping companies also offer a similar deal. Anyone can start a website and earn commissions by referring paying customers to products and services.
Two of the main advantages of this business model are:
- You can automate your business model
- It’s a global model – which means it’s scalable
But there’s other benefits to owning referral earning websites. It’s a business which can be built up around existing work and which can eventually replace your existing income. Online marketers can build a scalable internet business from anywhere globally. Once it is built, it’s a scalable model. This means you can grow your sales over time by creating content or by using paid advertising.
Referral Earning Websites – Paid Advertising
Paid advertising is the quickest way to grow an online business. However there are a few considerations. You should know that you can burn through a lot of cash with paid advertising, and not get any positive results. So it’s worth learning the skill and testing and measuring your adverts before you spend a lot of money. Once you have a successful campaign, and know from your tracking that it is producing sales, you can slowly increase your budget. Advertising platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Adwords etc all allow online marketers to test and measure advertising at a budget which suits them. As you increase your budget you grow your reach.
Paid advertising is super fast. You can start a campaign and get instant targeted traffic to your website. For referral earning websites, you will need to know that your website is performing before you start upping your budget and scaling to a larger audience. This is done through tracking, testing and measuring. See my eBook The Ultimate Guide To Online Marketing.
Content Generation – Referral Earning Websites
Content generation is a slower method of attracting targeted visitors to your referral earning website. As you create videos or blogs to be shared on social media and around the internet, your audience will start to visit your website. If your content does well, you’ll start to see a gradual increase in your website visitors. However, this doesn’t necessarily equate to making sales. Your visitors may just want some free information. The same applies to paid advertising too.
Once your visitor is on your website, you only have a small ‘window’ of opportunity to make a sale from your referral. If you try and shove your products and services down your visitors throat, you’ll be very unlikely to make sale! Like with any business, your customers must make a buying decision in their own time and if they think your products are a good match for what they want.
If I walk into a shop and the sales person comes over immediately and starts “selling”, my immediate reaction is to recoil and escape! There’s a period of trust building and value giving needed, especially on a website where there’s nobody to actually talk to in person, or ask questions of.
Lead Generation – List Building
Most referral earning websites have an option to opt-in to a list of some kind. This is usually by way of some kind of free giveaway. On my site I offer a couple of free giveaway eBooks which can help people with their online marketing. The one I already mentioned and a couple of others:
List building is a useful tactic for referral earning websites because it extends the time period for the customer to make a buying decision. When someone lands on a website, they only have a few minutes to decide whether or not to buy something. Once they have joined your email list, this time period is extended into the days, weeks and even months and years ahead.
Affiliate Products – What To Choose For Your Website?
Not all products are equal. Before starting out with a referral earning website, you need to make sure your products are going to make you a profit. This has as much to do with the business model you use as it has to do with your marketing ability.
Subscription Products
For example, if you choose subscription products to promote on your site, you can earn monthly commissions from individual sales. These add up over time and far outweigh products which only offer single commissions.
Up-Selling
Up-sells too, are another consideration. By choosing products which offer a range of services to your customers, you can benefit from sales closed on your behalf, after the initial purchase. Up-sells can make a massive difference to your business and give you more commissions after referring a customer, without doing any further work or closing the sale yourself. Up-sells are basically higher valued products which are offered to your existing customers.
High Ticket Products
High ticket items allow you to make larger commissions on sales of higher valued products. This has a couple of benefits besides the obvious larger commission.
- You can use better online advertising platforms and offset your advertising budget more easily.
- Scaling up into the higher salaries is much more attainable with high ticket items. You can achieve more profit with fewer sales compared to smaller valued items. To earn the same from lower priced items you would need to sell many more items to make the same commissions.
Build Your Own Referral Earning Website
You don’t need to be tech savvy to earn commissions from referral earning websites either. Anyone can learn the skills of online marketers. Building a website is now much easier than it used to be. Checkout this video which shows you how easily you can have a website up and running which is pre-populated with products and a sales funnel from which to sell. You can also access the full video series here.
