One of the best ways to make money online with no experience is through the selling of other people’s products and services. Anyone can learn the skills required to become an affiliate marketer. Affiliates promote and sell other people’s products for a share of the profit. What’s good about the business model is you don’t need your own products to make money from it. The downside is that you’ll need to spend some time and effort learning the basic techniques for online selling and implementing them.
So, how does affiliate marketing work? Affiliates are third party referrers who get paid for product referrals. By joining an affiliate program and promoting your own unique affiliate link, you can earn income from sales you generate online. There’s a few standard ways with which affiliates promote their products and services:
PPC – running Pay Per Click advertising campaigns
Blogging or video blogging – uploading content to a website or video channel such as YouTube, for example
SEO – Search Engine Optimisation – gearing your website/blog to attract organic visitors from the search engines (e.g. Google)
Social Media marketing platforms offer a huge opportunity to find your potential customers
Email marketing – is a strategy for collecting email addresses and building a list of email subscribers. Sending automated messages out to prospects and sell affiliate products through your emails.
Ways To Make Money Online With No Experience – Join A Course
There’s many online courses you can join as an affiliate marketer which will explain and show you step by step how to get going and make your first affiliate sale. You can find one on this website – click the image below to get started:
It’s definitely worth joining a course and getting educated in the various strategies for selling online. This is definitely the hardest part of becoming an affiliate. Joining an affiliate program is easy. You can get your affiliate link within a few minutes. It is promotion of your affiliate link that’s the important skill you need to learn.
Ways To Make Money Online With No Experience – Products & Niche
There’s thousands of affiliate products you can choose from in the online world. Just look at Amazon, which has an affiliate program anyone can join. Once inside the affiliate platform, you can choose to sell any of thousands of products from the site. You can also sell digital affiliate products too, which pay larger commissions than their physical counterparts generally.
The most profitable digital products offer high value trainings and coachings and often have recurring commission products attached to them. Whatever products you decide to promote, it’s a good idea to find a niche which you’re interested or passionate about. A topic close to your heart will be more aligned with who you are and it’s much better to choose such a topic for the longevity of your online business.
It’s much more difficult to sustain the necessary effort with a topic you’re disinterested in.
Learn A Marketing Strategy
Once you have chosen your product and niche, you need to learn a marketing strategy which suits your personality and budget. Not everyone wants to be a blogger, and not everyone has a large marketing budget. So it’s important to find a technique of marketing which suits you, whatever that might be! I enjoy blogging and have been blogging for years.
It’s much easier to keep creating content though when you’re passionate about your topic. I did make the mistake of choosing a topic I wasn’t interested in andI built a website around the topic of mushroom harvesting! I didn’t last long and soon got fed up! Here’s a few other marketing strategies you can learn:
Whatever strategy you use to generate traffic for your affiliate offers, it’s worth building an email list. An email list puts you in charge of your traffic. Whether you build traffic organically or pay for it, it’s going to cost you: either in time or money! So collecting email subscribers will save you a heap of wasted time. With an email list, you can build trust with your subscribers over a longer time period than is possible just from a website.
After building an email list my online business took off dramatically. But you need to stick with it until you’ve at least 1000 subscribers. Most new affiliates will quit. So to succeed with affiliate marketing you need to be in the 5% who don’t!
Get Started
Ready to get started? Learn affiliate marketing step by step through a modular training program which you can do at your own pace.
Setup your free account by clicking on the image below:
Is high ticket affiliate marketing legit? “High ticket” in affiliate marketing refers to the cost of the item. With a low value product, you’ll earn considerably less as an affiliate in commissions, especially if it’s a physical product. You can find high ticket products which are either physical or digital. Here’s a few high ticket physical products you can sell as an affiliate. You’ll find these products on a website called Hammacher Schlemmer, which and American company based in Illinois.
Take a look at the Amphibious Sub-Surface Watercraft! It retails are $300,000! With Hammacher Schlemmer (at the time of writing) you get paid 8% commission by selling this item. That’s $24,000 in commission if you can make a sale through your affiliate link! There’s nothing untoward about selling high ticket products and you can earn a lot more (for what can easily be the same effort) as by selling low value items which only give you a tiny commission.
Take a look at a product from Amazon, as a comparison. Items in the electronics category pay only 3% on Amazon (at the time of writing). So if you sell a set of these earbuds for £54.99 you’ll earn £1.64 per sale (around $2)! So as a comparison you’ll need to sell around 12,000 of these to make the same as the previous example of the submarine craft!
Is High Ticket Affiliate Marketing Legit – High Ticket Digital Items
With a high ticket digital item, you can earn even more than with a physical item because the commission structure is much higher. With a typical physical product you will earn somewhere between 1% and 10% in commission. But with digital products you can earn a lot more – between 30% and 40% in many cases. So if you’re selling a digital marketing course, or an online business training product, for example, you can earn 30%-40% on courses selling at $1-$10,000.
Here’s a few high ticket digital items you can access on this website and their commission structures.
With certain products like these, you’ll need to invest in the product to access top commission levels. So your “buy-in” level will determine what commission you can earn from the sale. This is similar to buying into a franchise but with the added benefit of access to coaches, training and support.
High ticket digital courses typically offer much higher value for those wanting to start out building an online income from scratch. Done for you systems, 1 on 1 coaching, mentoring and complete digital business setups are some of the products on offer. Generally speaking, the more you pay, the more assistance and help you can access with high ticket digital training resources. The less you pay, the more you have to do yourself.
Legitimate online products don’t advertise themselves as “get rich quick” schemes, nor do they guarantee income from the sale of their products. With any affiliate marketing endeavour, it’s up to the affiliate to generate results for themselves. So if you’re worried about investing in an online business make sure you do your research.
Even with a high cost digital course, no results are ever guaranteed in terms of affiliate commissions. Building an online business takes time and effort, regardless of how much you invest (financially)!
As with a high ticket physical product, affiliates will only earn commissions when they successfully sell a product through their affiliate link! Affiliate marketing is a performance related business model so even though high ticket affiliate marketing is legit, it comes with the same performance related conditions as with any other product you can sell as an affiliate.
However with a high ticket business model, it can be much easier to make a profit online; especially when using paid marketing strategies to promote it. With a low valued product there’s less room for error so especially for beginners it’s wise to use a high ticket digital sales funnel when they’re learning.
Can you really make money with affiliate marketing? The answer is a definite yes, of course. But in reality many new affiliates don’t make any money and they quit. Around 95% of affiliates drop out but for those who stick with it there are great rewards. You can earn a potentially unlimited amount with affiliate marketing because you’re simply a “middle man” for online transactions. You only need to learn how to place yourself between the customer and the product and you can benefit from affiliate commissions.
Doing this successfully does take some time however. New affiliates need to learn a strategy for attracting traffic and delivering their chosen affiliate products to the customer. With affiliate marketing you don’t have to deal directly with customers or handle products. That’s all done by the product owner (or vendor). But unless you actually make sales through your affiliate links, you won’t earn anything. So it’s usually at the beginning where affiliates will encounter the most difficulties.
You need to be patient in the early phase because there’s a few technical things to learn and this can take some effort and time. Many people are impatient and expect to make money easily, which is often why they quit.
Can You Really Make Money With Affiliate Marketing – Ways Of Making Sales
To make sales online as an affiliate you need to choose a product which has an affiliate program. There’s thousands of affiliate programs where you can find products to promote online. Amazon is one of the most popular affiliate programs and anyone can join and promote any product from the site.
Once you’ve chosen a product to promote, you need a method of attracting an audience. Here’s a few of the main methods which affiliates use to attract traffic to their products:
Blogging – this article is an example
Video blogging – using sites such as YouTube and TikTok, for example
PPC – Pay Per Click advertising – running paid advertising is the fastest way to generate traffic for affiliate offers
Email marketing – most successful affiliates build an email list of subscribers and promote products to their list
Social media marketing – there’s both paid and unpaid social media marketing techniques you can use to promote affiliate products.
Can You Really Make Money With Affiliate Marketing? Getting Started
To begin as an affiliate it’s worth joining a course which gives you some know-how and a few marketing skills. Many courses will help you to set up your website, give you products to sell and help you with your marketing. Check out this video to get started and find help and support.
As you go through the training you’ll be able to follow step by step instructions to build your online presence including things such as:
Building a website – using a plug and play software
Setting up your email autoresponder – to allow you to build a list of subscribers
Choosing a marketing strategy which suits your learning style and budget
Once you have set up your basic system for selling, you will need to focus on a marketing strategy. This can involve learning technical aspects such as setting up tracking, to track where your sales come from. When you make a sale online, if you don’t know where it came from it’s more difficult to repeat your success. So tracking is pretty important. Depending on your marketing strategy you might want to run advertising, build content or use social media platforms to find your target audience and attract customers to your products.
Your Customer Avatar
Many affiliates struggle so it’s worth getting the best education when it comes to affiliate marketing. One of the most important things to understand is how to target a specific audience online. When most online users aren’t interested in what you sell, once you learn how to “zone in” on those people who are interested, affiliate marketing gets a whole lot easier.
To define the type of person who is most likely to buy from you, you’ll need to do some work on your customer avatar. The customer avatar worksheet pdf will help you here. Once you get crystal clear on who your customer avatar is, where they hang out online, what their interests are and so on, you’ll get better at targeting them with your content and/or advertising techniques.
Can You really Make Money With Affiliate Marketing ?
Your first sale as an affiliate is an important milestone, so it should be celebrated! Before most affiliates make their first sale, there’s usually a lot of work that has been done. This is why many give up. They are just not prepared to lay the foundations of their business when there’s no money coming in from it immediately. But a business is different than a job and the benefits can begin to outweigh the effort over time; when sales start coming in automatically and even after you stop working!
The time it takes for this to happen can be determined by several factors but it’s an unknown since everyone is different. It will depend on your marketing strategy, the effort/time put in, products you use and so on. Two different marketing strategies will tend to give different results. For example blogging will likely take a lot longer than if you’re using paid marketing to get traffic to your website/offer.
Summary
You can make money with affiliate marketing and there’s a huge potential to make a lot of money with affiliate marketing. Once you break through the beginning phase and start generating sales, you’ve stepped out of the “time for money” trap where you trade your time for income. By selling products online you have a lot more leverage and your income isn’t limited by the hours in the day.
However there’s a lot of new affiliates who quit (around 95%) which means only a small number of affiliates actually make it work for them. Affiliate marketing is a business with performance related pay; which means if you don’t make sales you don’t get paid! But if you take affiliate marketing seriously, (as you would any other business), the chances of success are far greater! You should also expect a period of learning and implementing new skills before you can make your first affiliate sale.
What’s the affiliate marketing income per month? According to Glassdoor, $93,968 is an average to the total pay for affiliates (all years of experience) which equates to $7,830 per month.
However, this figure drops to ($69,634 per year) for those who are in the first year of being an affiliate, or $5,802 per month in the US.
As your experience increases your income is likely to rise accordingly too. Glassdoor reports a yearly income of $118,050 for affiliates with 15+ years of experience which is $9,837.50 a month.
Self Employed Affiliates Vs. Salaried Affiliates
See also affiliate marketing average income. The image below shows the pay scale for affiliates for the 2016 Affstat report. As you can see, most affiliates will fall into the annual earning bracket under $20,000. Top earning affiliates are in a minority according to this, with 17.12% of affiliates preferring not to answer.
Here’s the earnings according to emoneypeeps (self employed affiliates):
90% Of Affiliates Earn Between $0-$10,000 per year
7% Of Affiliates Earn Between $10,001-$100,000 per year
2% Of Affiliates Earn Between $100,001-$1,000,000 per year
1% Of Affiliates Earn Over $1,000,000 per year
As you can see there’s quite a disparity here. 90% of self employed affiliates earn between $0 and $10,000 a year, according to this. The higher earning levels indicated previously by Glassdoor are salaried affiliates – affiliates working for a company. Affiliates who work for themselves on average see much lower earnings, not even including their total profit which is usually lower than their total income (factoring in advertising and running costs).
Affiliate Marketing Income Per Month – Beginners
A beginner affiliate always starts in the same place as any other affiliate – at zero. Because affiliate marketing is a performance based business model, you have to make your first affiliate sale before you’ll make anything as a beginner. Even then, after your expenditures on business tools, training and advertising, you likely won’t make a profit on a single sale.
This is why for beginners the affiliate marketing average monthly income falls between $0 and $10,000 a year, or $0 to $833.33 per month. Of course your potential income will depend on many factors. See also how fast can you earn money from affiliate marketing.
Over time as you get better at affiliate marketing, and if you stick at it (unlike the 95% of affiliates who quit), you’re likely to see your income increase steadily.
Wondering how fast you can make money with affiliate marketing? For most successful affiliate marketers it will take several months before they see the fruits of their labour. This might mean they’ll make their first sale within a few months.
Some might even be able to quit a job in this time, although this is more difficult in the short term. For many affiliates the process is too frustrating to continue past the preliminary period of training and testing where nothing much happens. The large majority of affiliates quit (around 95%).
The speed at which you can build a successful and profitable affiliate business will depend on many factors such as your business model and advertising strategy. But ultimately an affiliate business can bring you a passive income which can surpass pretty much any job if you stick with it!
How Fast Can You Make Money With Affiliate Marketing? Business Models
There’s various different business models which affiliates can use and not all are alike. With certain products for instance, you can only earn 1% commission. Choosing to sell a low valued product can make it more difficult to make a good income from affiliate sales because you’ll need to sell a lot more products to make a profit. With high ticket affiliate marketing products, you can sell one item and earn the same as with hundreds or even thousands of sales of a low valued item.
Subscription affiliate programs also give affiliates a better chance of success. A single sale can give you a recurring commission which pays each month for the duration of the membership. With certain products, such as business tools, this can be for a lifetime. So a few hundred sales can mean a passive income can be built up quite quickly with recurring commission products.
So, to make greater headway with an affiliate marketing business you should choose high ticket and subscription items to sell. Even with fewer sales, commissions can easily add up to a larger income and subscription items give you a recurring revenue stream more quickly. See also how to increase online sales conversion rate.
How Fast Can You Make Money With Affiliate Marketing – Promotion Methods
There’s multiple strategies you can use to sell affiliate products online. The strategy you choose (and the products which allow it, or not) have a lot to say in terms of how fast you can build.
For example, if you have a high ticket sales funnel, it’s a lot more attainable to make a profit using paid marketing strategies. With low valued physical products there’s a much smaller margin for profit because commissions are much lower. Paid marketing strategies are very fast and scalable and although you’ll need to test advertising campaigns before you find a winning one, when you do you can simply leave it and scale up to a larger audience (simply increase your marketing budget).
A much slower method of marketing is blogging or creating a YouTube channel for organic traffic. This can take months of regular uploading of videos (and/or content) before you’ll create the same volume of traffic you can have instantly with paid advertising. The benefit of content creation though is that your content can bring in traffic for free! Once your content gets traction, you’re on to a winner. But this can take a lot of perseverance and in the interim, there’s very little evidence to show your strategy is working.
How Fast Can You Make Money With Affiliate Marketing? Email Marketing
It’s definitely worth doing email marketing whatever your traffic strategy is. With an email list you’ll definitely make faster progress as an affiliate. An email list puts you in charge of your traffic. Without one, you’re relying on your blogging/content or your paid marketing. Since most website visitors will leave without having bought anything, it make sense to capture your visitors details and follow up through an email marketing campaign.
On a website you’ve only a few minutes to “convert” a visitor into a buyer. But if they’re not ready to buy, you’ll lose them forever. By giving away some kind of freebie offer on your website, you can encourage them to join your email list. Once on your email list you have a much longer timeframe to build trust with your subscribers and offer your affiliate products to them.
There’s no hard and fast rule as to how long it takes to build a profitable affiliate business. For most it will take at least a few months before they see some positive results and then a couple of years before they can replace their income from their affiliate sales. But some can do it much quicker, given a high value sales funnel and a large marketing budget.
If you don’t have either of these two, you can expect a more difficult journey, especially if you’re using organic marketing methods such as blogging.
If you’re wondering how to increase online sales conversion rate, you’re not alone. Affiliates, e-commerce business and small business owners all want to know how they can improve their sales. So here’s a few ideas you can implement into your collection of online marketing strategies to increase your e-commerce conversion rates.
How To Increase Online Sales Conversion Rate – Get More Traffic
Of course more traffic is always the “go-to” answer if you want more sales. But not all traffic is equal. You can spend years crafting content which attracts the wrong type of person to your website, or spend heaps on paid marketing platforms without having a massive uptick in your sales.
To avoid this waste of time and effort you need to make sure you’re attracting the right kind of traffic to your website. Most online users are only looking for information. So knowing the type of search used for buyer traffic is going to save you a whole lot of time and wasted energy.
Buyer traffic has a different search intent to standard search traffic. For example, someone looking for a review is much more likely to buy from your product review than someone looking for a “How to” guide. So if you’re busy creating how to guides, you might be wasting a lot of time.
Back to this topic later for some practical steps to attract more traffic but this brings us nicely onto a very important topic; your customer avatar. If you don’t know who you want to attract to your website, it’s going to be much harder attracting the right kind of people.
How To Increase Online Sales Conversion Rate – Get Clear On Your “Customer Avatar”
The customer avatar is your “perfect” customer. They find your website and immediately (or very quickly) buy from you – and keep buying! To target the right kind of person is paramount to your online business. So get clear on who it is you want to attract. Just this step alone will save you a heap of wasted time, budget and effort.
With an online business your work goes further by targeting the right customers for your business/products
A “hot” customer will buy quickly or shortly after joining your email list (more on this later). Not all customers are like this and some will need some “warming” up through your email marketing efforts. Get clear on the difference between hot buyers, luke-warm traffic and cold traffic. A hot buyer is ready to buy when they land on your website. They have their credit card out at the ready. What kind of search keywords might they be typing into Google? Probably they are already looking for your products/service and want a small piece of information or “hand holding” while they pay for the goods.
A “luke-warm” customer might not be solution aware and perhaps they are looking for a product similar to what you might be offering. They take some more persuasion and you’ll need to get them on your email marketing list. Cold traffic will take a lot longer to buy because you’ll need to build trust and so it may be months after they join your email list that they actually make a purchase.
How To Increase Online Sales Conversion Rate -Blogging/SEO/PPC/Email Marketing
There’s lot of ways to get more traffic to your website. You can pay for it, build content for it, work on your SEO, build backlinks, upload videos and reach out to other website owners offering to guest post and so on. But content creation takes time, SEO takes time and building back links is a labour intensive pursuit. It’s all rather slow and tiresome. PPC (pay per click) marketing is the fastest way you can get instant traffic to your website.
But without a proven advert you can waste a tonne of marketing budget and make no more sales! So there’s going to be a learning period where you spend budget but don’t see any sales drop in. This can be tough, especially on a shoe string budget. But it’s worth doing none the less.
Eventually you want your advert to bring in sales and a good return on investment and once you reach this point, you’ve got a scalable strategy. SEO, blogging and link building is much slower and less scalable. See also SEO vs PPC
Email Marketing – Same Traffic More Conversions
It’s not just traffic which leads to sales. It’s also your email list which can give you dramatic results for your online business. With an email list you can convert cold traffic into hot buyers over time. You can “nurture” your list. Luke-warm and cold traffic, once on your list, can be turned into hot buyers. This isn’t possible on a website where they only hang around for a few minutes. So getting them on your email list should be a priority.
With an email list, for the same amount of traffic you can dramatically increase conversion rates for your e-commerce or affiliate website. So, focusing your efforts on creating a solid, benefit driven lead magnet can do wonders for your bottom line. This means placing your opt-in offer on every page of your website. Use multiple options to give visitors more choice to sign up to your email list. Test and measure different headings, images and titles to find the one which gives you the most conversions per 1000 visitors.
A good way to do this is through building landing pages which can be optimised through testing and measuring. A landing page is better at turning traffic into leads because there’s less choice for a visitor. On a website someone can browse around and click through your content. On a landing page they can only sign up or leave. See why use landing pages.
Use Subscription Products = Recurring Sales
With one-off affiliate products and online sales you only get paid once for each sale you make. This means you continually need to find more customers to sell to. But if you choose to sell subscription products from your website, you can earn a regular passive income from each of your customers.
Membership subscriptions, software and business tools are some examples of affiliate marketing programs which pay you a recurring commission. Even with fewer sales of subscription products you can earn more regularly.
One cheap method of building up your website to attract free traffic from the search engines is through blogging. Bloggers build content and place it on their website. Once you identify the type of person you want to attract to your site, look on Google’s keyword planner for the type of keywords which are suitable for your customer avatar.
Find long tail keywords which have low SEO difficulty. These keywords are easier to rank for. If you succeed in ranking, you can attain free traffic through the SERPS – Search Engine Results Pages. By creating a lot of content over time, you’ll eventually increase your domain authority with Google (and others). This gives you more opportunity for ranking your content and attracting free traffic.
Blogging is definitely playing the “long game”. But putting the work in regularly will pay off over time. There’s nothing like seeing sales drop in from organic traffic!
Push Engage – Web Push Notifications
Push engage is a tool for website owners which allows visitors to opt in and receive updates on your newly published content.
It’s a little like email marketing and it can give you a tonne of repeat visitors to your site if you use it. It’s especially useful if you’re a blogger. You only need to place it on your website and activate it. Once visitors opt in, they receive popup notices on their computers when you publish new content. I’ve made several sales through this software so it’s highly recommended!
Building Trust Through Email Marketing
Once on your email list, your subscribers will want to get some value out of your email marketing messages. If they don’t they won’t be subscribers for very long, and they certainly won’t become a customer! So make sure you’re putting value before trying to sell!
I’ve joined many email lists and unsubscribed from most of them. The ones which stand out are genuine messages from people, not businesses. People buy from people, not from websites. So if you can offer value, show you’re human and help people through your email messages, you can build trust – a very valuable commodity in the online world!
Not all your subscribers are going to like you, or your messaging. But if you are focused with your marketing, attract the right people and are genuinely trying to help them with your messages and your products, this alignment will help the right people find your products.
Add Marketing “Strings” To Your “Bow”
You’ll need to spend some time with a single marketing method, before you can see sales dropping in. Whether you choose SEO, PPC, content marketing or social media, your results will vary. Over time you should see some sales dropping in. Once you do, you can track those sales back to their source (providing you’ve set up tracking correctly). This information lets you know what’s working – so you can do more of that!
So often, once you reach a certain level with one marketing method, it’s easy to rinse and repeat that success. But even so, you can venture into new territory and try out new marketing methods to add “strings to your bow”!
Using only one marketing strategy can leave you vulnerable. For instance, what if Google banned your Adwords account, and you had built your entire business on it. Or worse, all your sales come from SEO and Google updates their algorithm and you lose 90% of your traffic in one go!
Using multiple traffic methods means you’re less vulnerable if something goes wrong so it’s worth learning some new skills and new marketing strategies even if you’re made progress on one strategy.
Wondering how to make commissions online? There’s huge benefits to earning an income from the internet. Firstly you can work from anywhere globally. By selling products and services instead of trading your time for money, you can use leverage and automation.
Fishing for online sales!
When earnings aren’t tied to your working hours, it gives you the potential of earning an unlimited income. With a regular income from employment, there’s only so many hours in the day. So whatever you earn, your income is capped. When you can earn through selling online, you can automate sales and expand your reach globally, selling multiple products and services.
So, how do you make commissions online? With a simple business model called affiliate marketing anyone can learn how to sell online. All you need to do is use an affiliate link which tracks a product back to you. When you make a sale, you earn a commission. So you don’t need products and services of your own to make money online. What you do need is a marketing strategy which helps you find online buyers who want what you’re selling.
How To Make Commissions Online – Marketing Strategies For Affiliates
There’s many marketing styles used by affiliate marketers. Some of them create video content and some of them create written content. This article is an example of a written piece of content I use to attract people to my blog. You don’t have to be a content creator as an affiliate. You can also run paid advertising and use email marketing to build a list of subscribers to which you can market your products and services.
Here’s a quick breakdown of some of the marketing strategies most commonly used by affiliates to make money online:
Paid ads – Paid marketing platforms such as Google Ads, Facebook and YouTube let you target specific online users according to their browsing data
Email marketing – collect emails from a website or landing page and send out regular messages through an email autoresponder.
Social media – there’s many social media platforms you can use: YouTube, Linkedin, Facebook etc. to find customers through paid and unpaid social media marketing strategies.
SEO – Search Engine Optimisation is a popular strategy used by content creators to attract website visitors to their blogs or video platforms
Content creation such as blogging and video are two popular cheaper marketing methods used by affiliates to attract an audience online in a more affordable way than using paid advertising
How To Make Commissions Online – Products To Choose From
There’s a huge variety of affiliate programs giving you access to thousands of affiliate products you can use to earn an income online. Amazon alone has thousands of affiliate products to choose from. Anyone can join Amazon’s affiliate program and promote any of the products you’ll find on the site.
Clickbank is another online product marketplace where you can promote multiple products from the site. Clickbank is a digital product marketplace. Digital products can be a good idea for affiliates because they typically pay much larger commissions than physical products. Amazon’s commission structure is from 1% -20% commission whereas Clickbank’s products will pay from 30%-40% in most cases.
Digital products also let you earn recurring commissions from certain products which carry subscriptions. With a subscription products you can earn a lot more over a typical year even with fewer sales.
High ticket affiliate products are those which pay much larger than average commissions. So a single sale of a large value (high ticket) item can earn you as much as 10 or even 100 low value product sales.
How To Make Commissions Online – Attracting Your Target Audience
Whatever you choose to promote as an affiliate it’s important to understand how you will attract buying customers. Most online users won’t want to buy your products. But certain, specific people will. Attracting these specific people towards your website and affiliate products is the key to success with selling online.
To do this effectively, you first need to identify who you want to attract. Certain types of people and specific types of online searches will be more aligned with your products or services than others. When you can identify who your customer avatar is – that is, the type of person who would benefit most from your products, you can become more proficient at attracting them to your products and earning commissions through your affiliate links.
For example, if you’re using Google Adwords to place advertising online, certain keywords will be more likely to bring in paying customers. Product review queries, for example, attract a certain type of person. Those people looking for product reviews have a strong intention to purchase something.
Email Marketing – Building Trust With People En-Mass
Email marketing is used to build trust with a large volume of people through automation. On a website most visitors leave within a few minutes. This gives affiliates very little opportunity to close the sale. But with email marketing, visitors can subscribe to an email list and get email updates over a much longer period. Even months later, you can make a sale online when using an email list.
To get people to join your email list you can send traffic to a website or landing page. A landing page is best because they are more efficient at collecting email subscribers at a low cost. On a website, visitors can browse around and click about – searching through your content. But on a landing page they only have two options: sign up or leave.
With an email list you can build trust over time by offering value driven messages which help subscribers with a certain, specific problem. When your subscribers trust you, and if you offer products which help them and are carefully aligned with their needs, you can place them in your messages and sell through your affiliate links.
You don’t need to personally speak with customers or hold/deal with products yourself either. Simply link to the products through your email messages.
Get Started
Ready to get started? You can learn more and get started here. Join an online community and training resource which gives you all the tools, products and resources you’ll need.
Wondering how to make your first sale on Clickbank? Clickbank is a great place to start as an affiliate. There’s thousands of products to choose from and digital products tend to pay more than physical products, too. Still, you need to do your homework first because you can struggle if you choose the wrong product to sell, or the wrong marketing strategy to sell with.
So what is the “right” product to sell and what are the “right” marketing strategies?
How To Make Your First Sale On Clickbank
Since most website visitors won’t buy on their first visit to a website it’s a good idea to use email marketing with your selling strategy. On average, studies show that it takes 6-8 touch points before someone will buy online.
With digital products and from an unknown seller this is so much more the case. On a popular website such as Amazon, there’s a lot more trust. But with digital products such as you’ll find on Clickbank, you need to build more trust with your audience to make those sales.
Building trust on a website can be tough, especially when you consider that most visitors only stick around for a few minutes. After that they are gone forever. By capturing their email details you can follow up with an email marketing campaign which does just that – builds trust.
How To Make Your First Sale On Clickbank – Product Choice
With email marketing you can send visitors to a landing page or website and collect their email address by offering something of value in exchange. Ebooks, video training or some kind of “value add” can be used for this. If you don’t have anything to offer, create an ebook on your topic of choice. This leads us nicely into the next topic – product choice!
Your choice of product has a great deal to do with your success as an affiliate marketer. Choose a bad product, and no amount of trust building will matter. Promoting the wrong product to a badly aligned audience is another potential issue too. So getting very clear on this will save you a lot of problems later. (See also customer avatar worksheet pdf).
Ideally choose a product which aligns with who you are – your values and interests. That way, it’s much easier to create content around the topic – such as your ebook lead magnet, for example. Once you have picked your topic, you can head to the Clickbank marketplace to look for a suitable item to sell.
How To Make Your First Sale On Clickbank – Product Choice
Find a product which you want to buy yourself. This is pretty important because if you are picking a product you want to sell, it’s so much more difficult selling it when you aren’t even interested in buying ityourself!
You can also look for products which are already selling well. This can be seen using the Clickbank gravity score. A high gravity product will already be selling whereas a low gravity score can indicate a new product or one which which hasn’t sold; this can also mean it’s not a successful product to choose. Too high a score can mean it’s a competitive product too though, so choose one which is suitable accordingly.
If you’re aligned with a particular product on a personal level, it can be so much easier to be an ambassador for that product, if you fully believe in it and align with it. This will help when you’re creating content around your topic later.
How To Make Your First Sale On Clickbank – Marketing Strategy
So you’ve picked your product and you have an email autoresponder! What next? To actually draw in paying customers you will need some kind of marketing strategy.
You need to offer them something worth signing up to to build your email list and then give them some value by remaining on your email list. Why build an email list? Simple, without one you must sell on a website, and statistics show that most people take 6-8 trips to a site before they actually buy. So building an email list is vitally important because it gives you more opportunity to sell to your subscribers over a longer period of time.
On a website most people are gone in a few seconds. On a list you can sell to them even months or years after they join. So whether you’re going to use paid marketing to attract an audience, or build content, you should definitely get an email autoresponder. Get one here if you haven’t done so yet.
How To Make Your First Sale On Clickbank – Organic Traffic Vs. Paid Traffic
To build organic traffic can take some time and commitment. So expect to be working on a website or video channel for several weeks/months before you can reap the rewards. A simply organic strategy is to build a niche website around your topic. Over time, you should attract visitors through the search engines: Google, Bing etc.
You can also build a YouTube channel or use other social media platforms to find your target audience and attract the right kind of visitors. Clear out your diary because this takes time and you’re going to need to be patient.
Here’s another reason why you should pick a topic you are passionate about before you choose a product. In the right topic, you’ll work much harder and for longer, because you’ll love the process. If you only want the end result, and/or are misaligned with your product or topic, it’s going to be much more difficult to sustain your efforts.
Paid traffic is a much faster route, but you’ll need a marketing budget to test out your ads and build your list. If you’re going the paid marketing route, use a landing page builder such as Convertri to collect emails from. It’s super fast and you’ll save money in the long run because you’ll get a cheaper lead cost when using the best tools for the job!
Send targeted web traffic to your landing page and collect emails to build your email list.
Building Up Your Emails
The power of email marketing can be ignored by affiliate marketers at their peril! Without it, you’re relying on passing traffic most of which won’t convert into a sale. With email marketing you can maintain content with prospects over a much longer period. To make sure that your leads keep opening up your email messages though, you’ll need to deliver some kind of value through your messaging. If it’s clear you’re only spamming your subscribers trying to sell a product over and over, what’s their reason for opening your messages?
But if you deliver useful messages designed to help them overcome a specific problem, and understand the value of your product, then they are more likely to keep opening them.
With an email autoresponder you can queue up messages and deliver content automatically. So once you’ve created the content once, it can run on autopilot; delivering messages to your subscribers on a regular basis as they subscribe to your email list.
Put Value First And Focus On Helping
When you try and sell first, you can easily put off your potential customers. Remember they don’t know you. Imagine walking into a shop and being bothered by a pushy sales person. Your first reaction might be to walk straight out again. The same is true with selling online. Instead of trying the “hard sell” with your Clickbank product, put value first. In what ways can you help someone with your content and email marketing campaign first?
Here’s another reason why you should choose your product carefully. If your product doesn’t offer real value to someone and massively help them with a specific problem, there’s no incentive to buy. With the right product you can genuinely offer up your products knowing they are super valuable.
Trust is built online by being authentic and genuinely helping people through your content and email marketing campaigns. Once your subscribers get to know, like and trust you, they are much more likely to buy from you, if your products are a good match for their needs.
Stay The Course
As much as we would all like to make sales easily online, it just isn’t all that easy! You’ll need to stick at your course for some time. Unfortunately most affiliates will quit long before they put in the the time and effort needed for success online. There’s a 95% drop out rate among affiliates. Why do affiliate marketers fail? This is for a number of reasons but essentially there’s no (financial) rewards for affiliates until they make the first sale. So if your motivation is tied up only with the financial reward, you’re on a timeline to struggles-ville!
If you can make the journey more intrinsically motivated and enjoy the journey, you’re going to stick at it for much, much longer. This extra time period is what you need as an affiliate. Most affiliates will quit before they even get 1000 subscribers on their email list. So, your first 1000 subscribers could be an early goal to set yourself for a start!
Welcome to this post “Affiliate Marketing For Beginners 2024”. Affiliate marketing isn’t new but it’s constantly evolving. With Google updates, regulation updates (GDPR), disclaimer notices, cookie policies and so on to consider. More than ever you need advice and help for the checks and balances needed to be an affiliate.
Anyone can become an affiliate marketer too, but it’s becoming more necessary to prove your “worth” to some affiliate companies; some of whom require you to have your own website and a large email list before joining their programs. There’s no guarantees with affiliate marketing and as a performance related business, you only get paid when you make those sales. Since it’s pretty easy to become an affiliate and there’s a very low barrier to entry, this means there’s lots of people jumping on the band wagon. This means there’s a tonne of competition.
This might explain the 95% of affiliates who quit. See also why most affiliates fail. So this post is to give you a heads up on some of the lessons I have learned in my 10+ years as an affiliate and some of the most important pieces of advice I can give.
Affiliate Marketing For Beginners 2024 – Methods
There’s a number of affiliate marketing strategies you can use to make sales online. Some are better than others and some are cheaper than others! Depending on your strategy it can take several months or even years to make regular income from affiliate marketing. Some start making headway within a few weeks, but it’s not uncommon to struggle at first with affiliate marketing. That’s why it’s a good idea to join a community and get help and support. You can do that here.
Here’s some of the basic methods which affiliates use to sell affiliate products online:
Blogging – I’m a blogger and you’ll find over 700 posts on this website alone. Plus I’ve got several other websites too!
Video marketing – YouTube or TikTok are examples of free platforms you can upload your video content to. You can also pay to advertise too.
SEO – Search Engine Optimisation is a popular method for selling affiliate products online. Website owners use SEO to get their websites found through Google and other search engines
Social media platforms – Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter (Now X!), Instagram and so on all offer opportunities to find customers for affiliate products, using either free or paid for marketing strategies.
Email marketing is one of the best strategies for selling online. So whatever other method you use you should definitely use email marketing.
PPC – Pay Per Click marketing is one of the fastest and most scalable strategies you could use as an affiliate.
Affiliate Marketing For Beginners 2024 – Types Of Product
There’s thousands of different affiliate products you can choose to sell online which pay you commissions for the referral. The product/s you choose will have a bearing on your success levels as an affiliate marketer.
As an example, Amazon has one of the most popular affiliate programs you can use. Amazon’s rates though aren’t the best. they pay between 1% to 20% commission on any products you can sell.
Digital products are another option. With digital products you stand to earn more per sale with the usual commission structure of 30%-40% for digital items. because there’s no delivery costs, and manufacturing costs are much lower, the savings are passed to affiliates!
Then there’s high ticket affiliate programs and subscription affiliate products which pay out recurring commissions. A sale of a high ticket item can make you a much larger commission than your average affiliate item can. So these are definitely worth considering.
Affiliate Marketing For Beginners – Why Build An Email List
I was an affiliate some time before I learned the importance of building an email list. Let me help you here – get an email autoresponder for free!
An email list gives you control. Without one, you’re going to have to rely on getting your traffic (visitors) from either paid sources (which is expensive) or for free (which is tough). But once you start building an email list, (and providing value to your subscribers), you can compound your efforts much more easily.
Long term affiliates build email lists into the tens and even hundreds of thousands of subscribers. They can send out a single email to all of their subscribers at once. If only a small percentage of their list buys something, it can be a massive pay day! If you sell high ticket and/or subscription products so much the better!
Whatever you decide to do on your affiliate journey, it’s worth knowing a few home truths. Many will tell you how “easy” it can be making money online. Let me tell you it isn’t! How else can you explain the huge drop out rate among affiliate marketers (95%)?
There’s costly methods and cheaper methods of course. The more expensive methods are faster and less difficult. Buy a high ticket sales funnel which pays out the largest commissions. Use paid marketing and scale up to a global audience. However, this strategy doesn’t suit everyone. There’s more investment involved in this kind of strategy.
Alternatively you can go the route of the content creator. Build content such as with blogging or video and over time more people will find you organically through the search engines. As someone who has gone this route, let me say it’s a long path. Especially now in 2024 due to the super high competition online it can take months before you can reap the fruits of your labours. So it’s worth picking a topic you’re passionate about if you intent to become a blogger/video blogger (v’logger).
Why Use High Ticket Items
Most affiliate products might sell at around the $50-$100 mark. So if you consider a 5% commission on these (physical items) you’ll earn $2.50-$5 per sale. This means you’ll need a lot of sales to make a good living from it. Use digital products and your commission rate will jump up by 30% in some cases. With subscription items which pay out recurring commissions you’re going to get more per sale. When the same work is required for much of whatever you do as an affiliate, it pays to heed this advice early!
When you consider that a high ticket product might pay you $1000 per sale, you can see that even with fewer sales you can earn a lot more. Remember that whatever you believe about people’s spending habits, and the cost of living etc., with an internet based business you can sell to anyone globally. So why target low paying items with your affiliate efforts when you can sell to people who are spending huge amounts?
For more on this topic see high ticket affiliate products. For the best “bang for your buck” combine high ticket, digital and subscription affiliate products. Use a digital business model to go this route. More on this here.
What are buyer intent keywords and how can you use them to make money from your blog? Consider the intent behind this article title and keyword. What is your intent for searching for this keyword (if you have done a search for it)? Presumably it is to learn how to generate a greater volume of targeted visitors to your website?
With a strong buyer intent keyword as your article title, you have a much better chance of converting your website visitor into a buyer, if they find your content via search. It is their search which differentiates them from other visitors.
Consider these two examples of keywords for example:
Buy Camera
Pentax k1000 for sale
If you decide to create content for these two keywords, which do you think would be most beneficial for making sales, all things being equal? “Buy camera” obviously has more traffic, but if you ranked at the top place on Google for both these terms, which do you think would yield the greatest amount of sales, assuming you could sell the product they wanted through your affiliate link?
The answer would be “pentax k1000 for sale”, in all likelihood. With the term “buy camera” there’s not a specific product you can sell from this content. Visitors are more likely to be in the information gathering stage, rather than the buying phase of their customer journey. Plus, the term “buy camera” would also be more competitive too, since there’s only two words in the keyword. These are two benefits of targeting long tail keywords for your article titles:
They are easier to rank for on the SERPS – search engine results pages
They are more specific and that means and can have a stronger buyer intent
Discovering Buyer Intent Keywords You Can Rank For
Most of the strongest buyer intent keywords are hugely competitive so it can be much more difficult to create content which ranks for them. In the context of affiliate marketing, (the topic of this site), getting buyers to my website can be difficult. The main keywords such as “affiliate marketing courses for beginners” for example will be too competitive to rank for. So you have to think outside the box a little.
Creating pdfs and free downloadable documents such as ebooks can be a good way to find keywords with strong customer intent.
Another simple strategy to get your content in front of buying traffic is to create a review of a product you can sell. Reviews are great for affiliates because you can more easily rank your content for a review, especially if your product is fairly new. With an older product, there’s going to be a lot of competition already ranking on Google, so it’s harder to find free organic traffic.
Reviews are great of course because they attract visitors who are in the last step of the buying cycle. They have already done some research on a product and zoned in on something specific. Checkout my Modern Wealthy Review if you’re looking to start an online business from scratch.
Good Keywords Vs. “Browser” Keywords
As a blogger, it’s a good idea to identify the intent behind your chosen keyword/s before you spend a heap of time blogging on it. You can attract traffic from your blog posts especially if you target long tail keywords with low SEO competition. But if that traffic is only browsing, all your efforts can be for nothing. Fine you may get people to your content, but if there’s not a strong intention to buy, you’re less likely to sell anything from that traffic, even in large numbers. A smaller volume of well targeted traffic can be much more lucrative.
This is why it’s worth asking yourself some questions about your keyword before you write your article, or create a video:
What is the intent behind this keyword?
Does my product/service align with this search query?
Is it worth creating this piece of content?
If your content doesn’t match your products you offer on your website, it might be better to find a keyword which is more aligned with what you offer. You don’t want to spend all your time attracting the wrong audience to your website! See also target web traffic and customer avatar worksheet pdf.
Summary
A good buyer intent keyword is more likely to bring in paying customers to your business if you can get your content found when they search online. Most internet searches are for gathering of information, not buying. So if you create the wrong content on your website, you can struggle to make sales no matter how much traffic you attract.
Not all buyer intent keywords are alike. Product reviews are a good place to start since there’s a deliberate search intent behind a product review. If you’re looking for product review, you’re likely in the last stage of the buying cycle. Conversely if you’re looking for a “how to” guide, you’re probably not a buying customer; rather you’re looking for free information.
If someone is looking for a course to buy, for example, but doesn’t specify which one, they might still have an intent to make a purchase. Creating content can take some time and effort. So it will pay off if you think about the intent behind the keywords you use to create your content with.
Most website traffic doesn’t translate to a sale immediately, so it’s worth building an email list of subscribers so you can build a relationship with your website visitors as they opt in to receive your email updates.
