In this affiliate marketing course free pdf downloadable document, we’re going to look at what affiliate marketing is and the different ways to do affiliate marketing.

What is affiliate marketing and why should you care? Affiliate marketing is a business model in which third parties are paid for referring products and services online. Anyone can be an affiliate and earn commissions if they learn how to sell online. They don’t need their own products and services because they can refer customers to existing products.

To do affiliate marketing you can join an affiliate program and choose a product to sell. You can then get your unique affiliate link, which tracks any sales back to you. Once you’ve done that, you need to learn a marketing strategy in order to promote your link earn money.

To join an affiliate program is quite easy. Amazon, for example is one of the most popular affiliate programs and anyone who joins it can promote any product from the site for a percentage of the sale value.

Affiliate Marketing Course Free PDF: Products

There’s thousands of affiliate programs available online and a huge choice in products you can promote. Amazon, as mentioned, is one of the most popular ones but mainly because it’s been around so long. (See the when did affiliate marketing start.).

There’s many other programs too and you can find affiliate programs in almost every area online. Not all affiliate products are the best to promote and there’s a wide range in affiliate commissions throughout the product range. For example, physical products like you would find on Amazon pay affiliates between 1% and 20% commission, with most products falling into the 5-10% commission range.

You can also promote digital products as an affiliate too. Many new affiliates will head over to Clickbank.com which is a site with many digital products to promote. Digital products are usually available for instant download and as such there’s fewer costs in their delivery.

Because you only need to create a digital product once, and you can sell it over and over again, there’s also fewer costs involved in manufacturing than with physical products. Because of this, most digital products will reward affiliates with higher levels of commission. Since the main cost in selling digital products is advertising, product creators can afford to pay much more, often from 30-40% of the sale value. This is obviously much better for affiliates than many physical products.

Affiliate Marketing Course Free PDF: Subscription and High Ticket Products

Affiliates can also promote subscription products and high ticket products. Subscription products are those which carry an ongoing regular charge. Memberships, trainings and software products often carry subscriptions and they are good for affiliates who can earn recurring income from each sale they generate. These are good, especially for beginner affiliates because they can help stabilise your income more quickly.

With one time sales (which pay you only once) you need to keep making sales in order to keep making money. But with subscription products even a few “one off” sales can generate a regular income. Subscription products which are hugely valuable are good ones to choose, such as business tools which require a membership. These kinds of tools are necessary for online businesses, so members are more likely to maintain their memberships once they buy.

High ticket products are those products which carry a larger than average price tag and as such they offer the largest levels of commissions to affiliates. A good high ticket sale can earn affiliates the same as thousands of sales of a low value product. When you consider than most affiliate sales, even high ticket ones, will require the same or a similar amount of work to achieve, it makes sense to focus on high ticket affiliate marketing products.

Affiliate Marketing Course Free PDF: How To Sell Affiliate Products

There’s various strategies and methods which affiliate marketers use to sell their products and services online and offline. Most affiliates will concentrate on online sales using a variety of tactics:

• Blogging or video blogging – content marketing involves creating a lot of content and attracting a specific “target audience“.
• SEO – search engine optimisation (optimising website content for the search engines)
• Paid marketing – Google Adwords, Bing, Facebook and YouTube are just a few platforms which offer targeted advertising for affiliates.
• Social media – both paid and unpaid social media marketing methods can be used.
• Email marketing – many affiliates collect emails from a website and automate an email marketing campaign, sending out emails on a regular basis to their list.

Depending on the products you choose to promote, the return on investment available to you, your marketing budget and available time, you might choose any one of these kinds of marketing as an affiliate. If you’re working in a busy job and have little time, you might choose a paid strategy which is faster and more scaleable. Whereas if you don’t have a huge marketing budget, or have more available time, you might choose content creation as your strategy.

Ideally choose a strategy which suits your working style and circumstances and which you can maintain for long enough to get some traction. See also 22 ways to promote affiliate products.

Is Affiliate Marketing For You?

Affiliate marketing is a clever business model which allows anyone to earn an income from anywhere globally. All you need to start is a laptop and an internet connection. However, not everyone is successful at affiliate marketing and there’s a huge drop out rate. Only around 5% who try it stick with it long enough to make it work, so you can bet that affiliate marketing isn’t easy, despite the low bar to entry and low cost of starting.

Depending on your strategy, the time to start making sales will vary, and this is something which is different for everyone. Some people will have some early success and others will struggle because affiliate marketing isn’t an exact science. However if you stick with it longer than most, your chances of success dramatically rise!

It’s definitely worth getting help and support if you’re going to take the affiliate journey seriously. Access a free video series to learn more here.