In this affiliate marketing free PDF I’m going to discuss (you guessed it) affiliate marketing! I’ve been an affiliate for over 10 years now and it wasn’t always an easy ride for me. But that rollercoaster has given me some valuable experience of the pitfalls and benefits of one of the world’s most popular online business models.
Affiliate marketing is a business model where third parties get paid on a performance basis for selling other people’s products. Although affiliates can use any form of advertising, it’s mostly done online. When someone uses my affiliate link to purchase something from my website, I earn a commission based on the sale. The sale is tracked back to me as the affiliate and I get paid by the “vendor” (product owner).
Anyone can learn how to do this and can make money from their laptop from anywhere. So long as they have an internet connection, they can make money through the selling of other people’s affiliate products. However, it’s not all plain sailing being an affiliate and around 95% of affiliates will quit. If you want to be in the 5% of affiliates who make money with affiliate marketing, I suggest you read this article in full!
Affiliate Marketing Free PDF – Why So Many Fail
So why do so many affiliates fail? This can be for a number of reasons and it’s a testimony that affiliate marketing is not easy. Pretty much anyone can become an affiliate marketer simply by joining an affiliate program and learning how to promote their unique affiliate link to sell a product. This is perhaps one of the main reasons for the high drop out rate – the low barrier to entry. All you need is a laptop and internet connection and you can become an affiliate.
What most don’t have is the mindset of a business owner. With affiliate marketing you only get paid if you make a sale through your affiliate link. It’s therefore a performance based business model. Unless you “crack” a strategy to make this a reality, you won’t make it as an affiliate. This can take some serious dedication and hard work, even before you make any money.
Are you willing to roll up your sleeves and learn for several weeks or months before you can even earn anything? Most people aren’t!
Affiliate Marketing Free PDF – Discipline & Commitment
Affiliate marketing takes some serious dedication and commitment and those who stick at it are the ones who reap the rewards. If you’re looking for a quick win or a “get rich quick” scheme, affiliate marketing definitely isn’t it!
There’s some high earning affiliate marketers for sure, but they typically didn’t hit the big time over night. Rather they stuck at it for months or years before they understood how to scale up their businesses and sell products to an ever growing audience.
But there’s also many ways to do affiliate marketing which is one of the reasons it can be so confusing for beginners. If you flit around with affiliate marketing, jumping from one strategy to another, it’s likely you won’t gain any traction in any given method.
Sticking to a single method for long enough to generate regular sales requires commitment and belief. So for a beginner who is unsure of their direction, this presents a lot of problems. How can you commit to a strategy you don’t believe in, or trust will work?
Here’s another reason why so many new affiliates become dismayed and drop out. If you want to succeed, you need to keep going when you’re at the point of quitting!
Affiliate Marketing Free PDF – Strategies
There’s many strategies used by affiliate marketers to sell online. This article is an example of a piece of content. Content creators (like me) build a lot of content to attract their target audience. While content marketing is a slow method of building an audience for affiliate marketing, it’s also a cheap one.
With lots of content you can attract an audience for free through the search engines (Google search). Or, if you’re using YouTube to build a channel of video content you can attract free traffic from YouTube.
PPC – Pay Per Click marketing is another strategy used by affiliates. Paid marketing platforms such as Google Adwords, YouTube, and Facebook can be used to target a specific type of person to sell affiliate products to. Paid marketing is fast but you need to be careful with it. An ad platform can suck your budget very quickly. The benefit of using paid marketing to sell affiliate products is that it’s fast and you can easily scale. Once you find a profitable advert, you can simple spend more to make more sales.
There’s many other free and paid for strategies affiliates use such as email marketing, social media marketing (paid and free), SEO (search engine optimisation) etc.
See also 22 ways to sell affiliate products.
Affiliate Marketing Free PDF – Types Of Products
Many affiliates will flock to platforms such as Amazon and Clickbank when they start their affiliate marketing journey. Depending on your training and influences, this might be suggested as a course of action. However, Amazon has one of the lowest paying affiliate programs in the industry. Physical products tend to pay lower levels of commission to affiliates.
So it’s well to be aware of this before you start out doing affiliate marketing. Amazon pays between 1% and 10% on most of its products. Clickbank.com, on the other hand will pay more (often between 30% and 40%). Thats because Clickbank is a marketplace for selling of digital products. With digital products you can earn considerably more than with physical products.
Digital products need no manufacturing costs, handling or delivery costs. This saving can be passed on to the affiliate who does the advertising.
The best kinds of products to promote as an affiliate are those which pay you larger amounts and more than once. Subscription affiliate programs allow you to earn multiple recurring payments from each sale. So you can even earn more (over the longer term) from fewer sales than you would from a physical product of similar value.
High ticket affiliate products pay more than the average in commissions. They carry higher price tags and/or commission levels.
Target Audience For Affiliate Marketing
One of the most important things you can understand as an affiliate marketer is your target audience. The “target audience” is the small cross section of the online marketplace who you are most likely to serve with your choice of affiliate product.
Remember that with affiliate marketing and the internet, you can choose who to place your marketing message in front of. With a global audience, you can waste a huge amount of time and resources trying to sell to anyone and everyone! Most people don’t want what you’re selling.
So trying to sell everyone simply doesn’t work for affiliate marketers. When you get clear on your “perfect customer”, that is, the types of people who would value what you are offering, you can target them more specifically. This means you’ll waste less time and be more productive in whatever marketing strategy you decide to use. The “perfect customer” is also known as your customer avatar. You can learn more in the customer avatar worksheet pdf.
Choosing Products You Love
Another top tip for beginner affiliates is to choose a product to sell which you genuinely align with on a deep level. I spent years trying to flog any old product and to my dismay, nothing much sold. That’s because I was only trying to get the end result and I didn’t understand that I needed to be aligned with my activity in order to be congruent and authentic and of service.
Although you can simply refer customers to products as an affiliate, this isn’t very satisfying over the longer term. If you can align your values with your affiliate business, and genuinely work on something you feel is meaningful to you, beyond the obvious monetary gain, you can have a lot more success, both personally and professionally.
As an example, Martin Lewis built his website MoneySavingExpert.com and it’s hugely successful. But his site is also providing a massive service and genuinely helping people. When you figure out how to help people genuinely with your products/service, you’re on to a winner!
Summary
So that’s my affiliate marketing free pdf guide! I hope it’s been useful. If you’ve enjoyed it please share it! Affiliate marketing is one of the simplest business models you can do. You don’t need any product of your own and you can do it from anywhere. However, the best thing you can do if you’re serious about making money as an affiliate is invest in your education and keep learning and growing.
95% of affiliates quit which means if you do so you’re giving yourself a much better chance of success.
Access an online training resource which offers all the tools and training you need to succeed here.