Many affiliate marketers generate six-figure plus incomes. It’s possible for you to do this too. With affiliate marketing, you do not need to have your own products or services to promote. Being a famous brand is also not necessary.
If you are skeptical about earning a fortune through affiliate marketing then there is no need to be. There is a mountain of evidence around to validate that many affiliates are earning a lot of money.
Affiliate marketing is promoting other people’s products or services for a commission. You can promote physical products such as those you would find on e-bay, Walmart and Amazon.com, or digital products from affiliate networks such as JVZOO, Warrior Forum and Clickbank.com. Or you can promote both physical and digital products.
Physical product commission will usually be on the low side, normally in the region of 3% to 8%. Digital product commissions tend to be much higher. You can find digital products to promote that will pay you 50% to 100% commissions but it is easier to sell physical products though.
One way to make consistent affiliate commissions is with new product launches. These are very popular in the make money online niche. Every day new products are launched in this niche and you can become an affiliate for them.
The Money is in the list
There are other ways to make commissions. You will often hear the money is in the list. This refers to having an email list of subscribers that are interested in your chosen niche. If you are serious about consistent commissions then building a list is essential.
Promoting new and existing products to your list via automated emails and broadcast emails will produce commissions on demand. When you decide to create your own product in your niche you can then promote this directly to your email subscribers.
Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to make money with affiliate marketing and we strongly recommend that you build an email list. It is an effective means of marketing.
Affiliate marketing is all about having targeted traffic see your offer. One way to increase traffic is product reviews. Create a video review of the product, post the video to YouTube and link the video back to your site containing a more detailed review.
Getting professional
Anyone can get started as an affiliate marketer cheaply, but your business needs to present professionally to maximise success. We do recommend purchasing your own domain name and web hosting. This is much better than going with a free website or blog offered by Weebly.com or WordPress.com.
People are savvy these days and know if a blog is free. You are trying to encourage your visitors to purchase the products you are promoting as an affiliate. If you can’t be bothered to purchase your own domain name and hosting, why should they trust you?
Here are the main benefits of being an affiliate marketer:
- No need to create your own products
- Thousands of affiliate offers
- No customer support issues such as refunds
- No inventory to hold or ship
- No office required
- Entry costs are low
- Not limited to one niche
These are the main reasons that so many affiliate marketers these days promoting other people’s products and services to try and make commissions. Only a small percentage of these people are successful for a variety of reasons.
No experience is required to succeed with affiliate marketing. If you are an experienced online marketer then you can promote affiliate offers as a way to increase your income. Once you have set up your affiliate marketing campaigns, they can be a source of regular passive income for you.
The Basics of Affiliate Marketing
It’s easy to get started
Affiliate marketing is popular because it is very easy for anyone to get started. You do not need any experience to become an affiliate marketer and you can get started for next to nothing.
You don’t even need your own website but we strongly recommend that you invest in one. It will cost around $10 a year for a domain name. Web hosting will cost you between $5 and $15 a month and you need this to make your website live on the Internet.
Many people think owning a website is too difficult. This is not the case as you can use the free WordPress blogging platform, and choose a free theme to use for the look and feel of your site. It is very easy to add new content to your website using the WordPress platform.
Once everything is set up you can start to make affiliate commissions in a very short time. There are plenty of resources online such as YouTube videos that will show you how to start a profitable affiliate marketing campaign.
You can promote your offer on social media platforms such as Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, and others. If you just do this then you do not need a website. The problem is that a social platform can take your content down for any reason and then you have nothing.
The Process of Affiliate Marketing
The main elements in an affiliate marketing transaction are:
- The product or service vendor (the person or company that owns the products)
- The affiliate marketer (which is you) who promotes the products or services for an agreed commission
- The end customer that purchases the product or service
The product or service vendor takes care of the following:
- Product or service creation
- A compelling sales funnel to sell the product or service
- All customer service support
- The provision of unique affiliate links
- The provision of marketing tools for affiliates
- Paying affiliate commissions on time
Your job as an affiliate is to:
- Find customers for the product or service.
- drive visitor traffic to the offer.
The customer is the individual or business that purchases the product or service. If they have any support issues they will deal directly with the vendor. They will probably not even know that they have purchased a product or service using an affiliate link.
