In this new affiliate marketing training for beginners you’ll discover the keys to success with affiliate marketing. Not all affiliates succeed in affiliate marketing so it’s important to know the fundamentals if you’re going to earn money from affiliate marketing:
- What is affiliate marketing and how it works
- The best kinds of products to promote for maximum effect
- Types of marketing and what will suit you
- How long does affiliate marketing take and what does it take to be successful?
Access an on demand workshop series and get the answers to these and other questions you’ll want to know as a newbie in the affiliate marketing space.
Affiliate Marketing Training For Beginners – What Is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is a business model in which the affiliate refers customers to other people’s products and services online. When someone buys a product through an affiliate’s link, they earn a commission.
Anyone can become an affiliate marketer and you only need to find and sign up to an affiliate program in order to get your own unique affiliate link. Once you have it, you can promote it using any one of a number of online (and offline) marketing strategies:
- Blogging
- PPC – pay per click advertising
- Video marketing – both paid or organic (free)
- Social media marketing – using social media platforms such as Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter etc.
- SEO – search engine optimisation (used for organic marketing)
- Email marketing – list building
- Etc.
Affiliate Marketing Training For Beginners – Types Of Marketing
There’s a huge variety of marketing techniques used by affiliate marketers. Your marketing strategy is the key to your success as an affiliate. Many affiliates will quit far too early because they don’t see any results immediately. Depending on your marketing techniques, it can take months or even years to generate traction with affiliate marketing.
Blogging, for example is a very slow marketing strategy. Bloggers write content on a website (much like this post). Over time with due diligence they are able to get free traffic from the search engines through their SEO efforts.
A much faster method is through using paid marketing. Paid marketing platforms like Google Adwords, facebook and YouTube can be used to drive traffic almost immediately. Affiliates then learn how to target a specific audience who are interested in your products or services.
Email marketing is one of the best ways to promote affiliate products. It can be used in conjunction with many other forms of marketing, both paid and organic. See also the power of email marketing.
Affiliate Marketing Training For Beginners – Types Of Products
Your product choice is just as important for affiliate marketing as your choice of marketing. With the right products and services, you can get traction as an affiliate far faster than with the wrong product choice. Some products will pay far more too than others. Amazon, for example typically pays between 3 and 10% commission on product referrals. While Amazon is a huge site with a lot of choice of products, it doesn’t offer the best levels of commissions. However, Amazon do offer the ability to earn more if someone fills their shopping basket while having used your affiliate link. You’ll earn commissions on their entire shop, if you have referred any of their purchases.
Digital products tend to pay a lot more than physical products. Typically a digital product will pay 30-40% commission to affiliates for their referrals.
Then of course there’s also high ticket products. High ticket products will carry a much higher price tag than typical affiliate products that you would find on Amazon, for example.
A high ticket item should pay out at least $500 in commission. While many new affiliates assume that it will be more difficult to sell higher value items, this really isn’t true once you understand how to sell affiliate products. Often the same effort will be required to sell a low value physical products (paying only $10) as a high ticket item (which pays out $500 and above)! So as a beginner it’s worth making a note of this going forward.
Affiliate Marketing For Beginners – How Long Does Affiliate Marketing Take?
Many new affiliates want to know how long affiliate marketing takes. How long does it take to make money with affiliate marketing? This will depend on a number of factors and no affiliate’s journey is exactly the same. Some affiliates will take much longer than others to even generate their first sale. Depending on the amount of time you put in, and your marketing strategy, budget and the types of products you use, it can take anywhere from between a few months to a few years. Many affiliates quit too – see why do affiliate marketers fail.
Once you understand the journey of affiliate marketing and see it as a marathon rather than a sprint, you should be less likely to drop out, knowing what it can ultimately do for you. A good analogy of affiliate marketing is the Chinese Bamboo tree which takes up to 5 years before you see any shoots breaking through the soil. If you didn’t know it was a bamboo tree, you would probably give up on it and assume it was a dead plant! So many people make the same mistake with affiliate marketing, seeing it as some kind of “get rich quick” scheme! Before the Chinese Bamboo tree can sprout it needs water and fertiliser for many years. But once it breaks through the soil it can grow 90 feet in only a few weeks.
Affiliate marketing is like this too and initially you should expect to spend considerable time on your affiliate business before seeing results in terms of commissions. Your first aim should be to make your first affiliate sale. Once you have done this, you can repeat it many times. But the first sale is the hardest because you may have doubts, and you don’t have the data and knowledge of what to do in order to make it happen. Once you have made a sale, consider this a major victory! Celebrate the small wins and over time you’ll be celebrating the big wins too, which come out of the growth of the small wins!
Advantages Of Affiliate Marketing
There’s many advantages of affiliate marketing which make it suitable for anyone:
- You don’t have to ship/post anything personally
- You’re not responsible for product storage or handling
- No dealing with customers – that’s all handled by the product owners themselves.
- No technical knowledge needed – new tech and software have taken much of the need for technical knowledge out of the process
- You only need a laptop and internet connection
Access Free Workshop Series
Access the free video workshop series here to learn more about affiliate marketing.
You can also get started with Mentors All In program which gives you access to an all in one business system, and over 10,000 training courses. You’ll also be able to access a community of online entrepreneurs ask questions and sit in on live webinars.
