Getting an email marketing service is definitely one of the best things you can do for your affiliate business. Most of the top affiliates use an email marketing service for a number of reasons:
It lets you connect with an unlimited number of subscribers
You can build trust with potential customers through email marketing
It gives you more opportunity for connection than a website
It allows you to showcase your products over a longer time span
Email Marketing For Affiliate Marketers
Email marketing allows affiliates to collect website visitors’ email addresses and send out automated emails. You can automate the process of email marketing by queueing up a number of messages which can be sent in a pre-determined order.
On a website, a visitor only hands around for a small amount of time. Usually this is less than 10 minutes. Once they are gone, they are gone forever. But once a visitor signs up to your email list, this time period is dramatically extended. Email subscribers can purchase affiliate products even years after they have signed up to a list.
Email marketing is powerful and lets affiliate marketers build trust through giving value in their messaging. This is just so much more difficult from a website alone.
Email Marketing For Affiliate Marketers – A Game Changer
My affiliate business took off once I discovered the power of email marketing. It doesn’t happen straight away, but over time it gives affiliates much more leverage. As you learn how to get more subscribers for your email list, previous subscribers move through your sales funnel as they digest your email marketing messages. If you have targeted a good audience for your products, you’ll find people purchasing items as they move through your funnel. See how to know your target market.
By queueing up many messages, you can focus on generating more leads and let your marketing tool do its job. As you get better at targeting and tailoring messages to your audience, you’ll find more people are purchasing your affiliate products.
With a small list, this is not so noticeable. But as your email list grows beyond 1000 subscribers, you should find older subscribers are purchasing your products as well as new subscribers. This has a compounding effect and if you’re using a high value product range, you’ll start to pick up recurring commissions and high ticket commissions which further compound your affiliate income. See recurring commission affiliate programs.
Compounding Effect Of An Email List
As you persevere with affiliate marketing you should get better at collecting email subscribers. This takes some time at first, but if you focus on it you’ll improve and be able to collect many emails each day. Initially a good goal to set is to get 10 subscribers a day. If you can get 10 subscribers a day, you can get 20! If you can get 20 you can get 40 and so on!
Long term affiliates collect over 100 subscribers a day and are able to generate a passive income from their affiliate business. But they all started at the beginning – getting just a few subscribers a day.
Email Autoresponder – AWeber
Aweber started offering a free autoresponder for affiliate marketing to help beginners get started online. The free version of the software has less functionality than the paid version but is perfect for beginners who are just getting started.
It lets you use the software for your first 500 subscribers. Your first 500 subscribers will be the most difficult, and it can take some time to generate this many subscribers when you’re starting out. Once you have learned how to generate subscribers, you are much further along on the journey. See best strategies for affiliate marketing for some.
The best hands off franchise is an online business model which combines affiliate marketing and online training. Many people are looking to earn an income online in some way.
The best way to earn online is to partner with a company which already offers this kind of service, and which pays you for referrals to its products. It’s a hands off franchise in that once you have learned how to refer customers to it, and automate the process, you can earn an income from work done previously.
This kind of business is semi hands-off because you do need to build your business system and learn how to promote it using online marketing tactics. Training and coaching is provided together with an online business system which offers multiple earning strategies. Here’s how it works.
Best Hands Off Franchise – How It Works
The SFM Digital Business System is a fully re-sellable online business system and training program. You can earn money in several ways through the promotion of the system itself, or use the training and support to build an online business using any other strategy.
The training also offers support in other online business models such as direct selling, import export, and drop shipping etc. But if you decide to become an affiliate and promote this online business system yourself, here’s how you can earn from it:
Re-selling digital training courses can pay you one off commissions. Products range from $99 to over $20,000 and you can earn from 30%-100% on certain products, according to your investment level.
You can also earn subscription commissions. Subscription commissions pay you over and over from previous sales you have made.
Use of a marketing platform – paid marketing platforms such as Facebook, Adwords, YouTube etc.
Training and support – access workshop series here.
By sending subscribers into a fully automated sales funnel, online business owners can promote products on complete autopilot. With a good sales funnel and product range, you can earn commissions based on sales of digital training products, closed in-house by a built in sales team.
As an affiliate marketer, your only job is marketing/product referrals. Send qualified leads into a ready made sales funnel and automate the process. Once profitable, scale up by increasing advertising your advertising budget slowly.
Recurring Commissions
One of the best things about an online business franchise model is recurring commission products. With a valuable product, many customers will continue to subscribe for decades, if they are getting huge value from them. Business tools and software packages fall into this category and when profitable online businesses are making money, their owners will continue using them for a lifetime.
With a recurring income business model, you only need to refer people to the products in order to make recurring commissions. It’s a bit like royalty payments. See also recurring income affiliate programs.
High Ticket Commissions
With high ticket commissions, you can earn around 30% commission on high ticket items which sell for over $20,000.
High ticket digital products are some of the best paying products you can promote as an affiliate over the internet. These are coaching and training courses which help online entrepreneurs build an income online. But they are not limited to that. Some physical product offer a larger commission too. Here’s an example of a submarine which can be sold as a referral marketer for an 8% commission of $300,000! That’s a $24,000 commission!
The best hands off franchise I’ve found uses a combination of high ticket products, subscription products and a product range which anyone can use to generate commissions through online promotion.
Online marketing strategies can be used to automate an online business system which can be scaled globally. With digital products, there’s no postage or delivery cost which means the savings are passed on to affiliates (referrers) and they can earn larger commissions when they make sales.
What is affiliate marketing in simple words? Affiliate marketing is a referral based business in which affiliates recommend products online and earn commissions based on their sales. A good analogy is when you recommend a good film or restaurant to a friend. Only when you recommend a product or service as an affiliate, you earn a commission payment based on the sale/recommendation.
Affiliates are referral partners who join affiliate programs and recommend products based on that partnership. So with the analogy above, if you recommend a friend goes to a nice restaurant, and they do, you earn a slice of what they pay for their meal!
There’s thousands of affiliate marketers who recommend products and services on the internet. They do so because they get paid! I’m an affiliate too! If you buy something from this website, or sign up to my email list and purchase something I recommend, I get paid a commission based on the sale.
In simple terms affiliates promote products for a slice of the sale value!
What Is Affiliate Marketing In Simple Words – How It Works
When an affiliate joins an affiliate program, they get access to their own unique affiliate link. This is a link associated with their account. They use their links in a number of advertising methods:
In written content – such as this blog post
Through email messages – through building an email list
In advertising campaigns
On videos they post (e.g. YouTube)
Amazon, for example, has one of the most popular affiliate programs available online. Anyone can join Amazon’s affiliate program if they meet the criteria. To join an affiliate program you simply need to apply, although some require you to have a website already.
Once you have joined a program, you can access the affiliate resource and get your own unique links. Once you have an affiliate link you can use it to recommend a product and earn a commission based on sales you generate.
To generate sales from an affiliate link, you need to find people who want your recommended product, and put your link in front of them. This is done in various ways.
Generating Sales As An Affiliate Marketer
It’s not enough to randomly paste your link on your social media platforms in order to generate sales. You need to find the specific people who will be interested in your recommendations.
This can be done in a number of different ways. See where to promote affiliate links. This blog post, for example, is targeted towards people interested in affiliate marketing. If someone lands on this post, they can find my recommended affiliate training courses I offer on this site. If they purchase something from my links, I make a commission.
A key aspect of making sales as an affiliate marketing is to know your target audience and target them specifically with your advertising or content. See how to know your target market.
To generate a reliable income from affiliate marketing takes some time and dedication. But you can shortcut this journey by using high ticket affiliate products and subscription affiliate programs which help you generate more consistent and larger commissions.
What Is Affiliate Marketing In Simple Words
In simple words affiliates recommend products in exchange for a share of the profits. Sign up to an affiliate program, share your affiliate link, earn commissions based on what you sell!
Although this sounds pretty simple, selling affiliate products online isn’t all that easy! Many affiliates will quit after struggling to make sales. The affiliate marketing failure rate is pretty high, at 95%, although a large proportion of theses affiliates will simply have dropped out!
Many people become affiliate marketers because they want to earn an independent income online and escape their jobs. Affiliates are motivated by a variety of things including income, geographical freedom and financial freedom.
Many affiliates just want to generate more income to subsidise existing employment. Some want to build huge businesses, but often, people become affiliates because it gives them a way to work on their own terms and around their current circumstances.
Most jobs require giving up all your time and this means your lifestyle is dictated largely by how you earn your income. But with affiliate marketing, you can choose your working pattern and build up an income around existing commitments.
What does an affiliate marketer do? Affiliate marketers promote other people’s products and services online. When someone makes a purchase through an affiliate link, that affiliate earns a commission from the sale. Affiliates do all kinds of things to bring people to their affiliate links where they can make a purchase. An affiliate is a third party referrer who only makes money when they bring a customer to a business, product or service.
So whether an affiliate is successful or not is determined by their ability to connect people with products over the internet. This can be done in several different ways.
What Does An Affiliate Marketer Do? Blogging
One simple strategy affiliates use is to build a blog and create content which connects people to a product. This article, for example, can bring customers to the products I promote on this site. Blogging is a cheap but slow strategy whereby affiliates can build a passive stream of customers through their content.
Depending on the product you choose to promote, you will create content around a specific topic. Since this website is built around affiliate marketing, I write posts which connect visitors to products which can help them learn affiliate marketing.
Bloggers do more than write content. They also connect with other bloggers and build links to help them with their SEO – search engine optimisation. SEO is what search engines use to determine which pieces of content (and which websites) to rank on their search listings. When someone does a Google search for example, the results that come up will show the most relevant content. Bloggers aim to get their content ranked on the search engines so they can get free traffic and make affiliate sales through their affiliate links.
What Does An Affiliate Marketer Do? List Building
Affiliates build email lists so that they can promote affiliate products to their subscribers. This is done through using an autoresponder. See free autoresponder for affiliate marketing for one. Lists are built in a variety of ways including:
Blogging – through using a lead magnet
Paid advertising – using a platform such as Google Adwords, YouTube, Facebook etc.
Creating free ebooks – to offer as lead magnets – see ebook lead magnet
A list of email subscribers is one of the best things an affiliate can do for their business. With a large list, a single email can be sent out promoting a product which can sell multiple times.
Subscribers are more likely to purchase affiliate products from people they trust. So a large part of email marketing is building trust with subscribers by offering value and being trustworthy! See also the power of email marketing.
What Does An Affiliate Marketer Do? Paid Advertising
Many affiliates run paid advertising, although not all of them. With paid advertising, affiliates either send customers directly to products and services, or to a landing page. From a landing page they collect email subscribers and follow up with a series of email messages (see email marketing above).
Paid advertising is the fastest way to build an affiliate business. With a paid advert, affiliates can test and measure their ad campaigns to see what works the best. Some adverts will work and be profitable, but others won’t. The job of an affiliate is to determine which of their activities is most profitable and focus more on that! The Pareto Principle, or 80/20 rule say that 80% of results comes from only 20% of actions. So affiliates need to focus on the 20% of activities which produce the greatest outcomes.
With paid advertising, an affiliate can scale up their business quite quickly once they are profitable. Organic marketing, such as blogging is a slower process and can’t be as easily scaled. Paid advertising is also good for affiliates because they can see results quite quickly. Once you turn on an paid campaign, you can see within a few days whether it’s working. With organic strategies like blogging, it can take a lot longer.
Paid advertising platforms:
Facebook
YouTube
Google Adwords
Bing
Yahoo
Linkedin
etc
What Does An Affiliate Marketer Do – eBook Creation
Many affiliates create their own ebooks to either sell directly from their websites or use as a lead generation tool. Ebooks are great lead generators because you can give them away for free to encourage website visitors to subscribe to your email list. Here’s another of my ebooks which I use as a lead generator.
Ebooks can be created through writing on a simple online (Word) document and converting into a pdf. You don’t need to even create your own book cover; although you can do this yourself, many affiliates will outsource this task to online services. Fiverr.com is a good source for affiliates which offers multiple outsourcing services such as:
Article writing
Video creation
Back linking
Ebook covers
etc.
What Does An Affiliate Marketer Do? Testing & Measuring
Affiliates use tools to test and measure their marketing strategies. One of these is tracking. If an affiliate gets good at tracking their sales, they will get to know exactly where they have come from and which marketing methods to focus on for the best outcomes.
Initially, as a beginner affiliate, you won’t have any data, so you’ll try lots of things until you start making sales. Over time, you’ll know how to focus on the best money producing actions which generate the most profit. This is done through testing and measuring of different strategies and using sales tracking.
An example of testing and measuring is use split testing. This is where two adverts are run side by side. After both adverts have received 1000 views, you’ll likely see a difference in the amount who have taken some action on a website. One advert will perform better than the other. Split testing can be done by affiliates to determine the best performing:
Paid advert
Marketing video
Landing page
Email marketing series
Images
Text adverts
Video adverts
Headings
Sales pages
etc.
Training and Mentoring
A large part of an affiliate’s journey is training and mentoring. Affiliates need help and support to build their online businesses, especially if they have no experience. Initially an affiliate will spend a large proportion of their time learning by watching training videos and attending live events. Once this period has given them some action steps, they should shift gears and start focusing on money producing activities.
Even affiliates who have been at it for some time need help and support with their mindsets and the various mental blocks which will stand in their way. Often, limited thinking and poor habits can hold affiliates back. This is where mentorship and accountability groups can help.
Affiliate marketing isn’t easy so it’s well worth getting the help and support you need from the get go. Once you have created some success as an affiliate, it’s much easier to keep going, knowing how you have made it happen. But before this point, it can be frustrating, especially if you haven’t made any money from it.
Having help and support, and joining a community is pretty important here to keep you motivated and positive. Many affiliates will quit after only a short period simply because they didn’t keep going when things got tough! See why affiliate marketing does not work.
Summary
Affiliates promote products and services online to earn commissions from their sale. They do this in a variety of ways including things like:
Email marketing – building an email list
Running paid advertising – sending people to products or to their email list
Blogging and video blogging – creating content
Ebooks – using ebooks as lead generation tools, or selling them online
Link building – and other SEO (search engine optimisation) activities
Outsourcing – using online services to help them build their online businesses.
Social media – using social media accounts to find potential customers for their affiliate products
The goal of an affiliate is to build an income from their online activities. Some affiliates achieve this and are able to replace existing income from employment. If successful, this gives them huge freedom in terms of time, geographical location and financial independence.
There’s a few reasons why affiliate marketing is important. It’s an important way for businesses to promote their products at low cost; they only pay third party referrers when a sale is generated. Affiliates take on the burden of marketing for many products and services online. In exchange they are paid for referring sales on a performance related basis. This is important for affiliates themselves. It can give them a means to generate an independent income from the internet.
Why Affiliate Marketing Is Important – Job Dissatisfaction
For those struggling in 9 to 5 jobs, affiliate marketing is a means to escape. Affiliates can build an income which can completely replace their existing salary from employment. This is pretty important for those who are miserable at their work, or feel trapped working with no interest in what they do.
A recent Gallop poll showed than many workers were not engaged at their jobs. Although many workers still show up for work, putting time in, they are not passionate about work or psychologically engaged with it.
Job Losses & Automation
For the people disengaged in what they do, affiliate marketing offers an alternative way to work. It can give people an opportunity to not only create a new income, but also work flexibly around existing commitments and ties.
Jobs lost since 2020 have been replaced by robots at an alarming rate, according to Time magazine. “..the drive to replace humans with machinery is accelerating as companies struggle to avoid workplace infections of COVID-19 and to keep operating costs low.”
Just where will people be able to earn an income once they lose their livelihoods? Affiliate marketing is an answer. Although affiliate marketing is different to a job, more people are discovering it and earning from it.
For Businesses
Businesses use affiliate marketers because it’s much cheaper than paying for advertising. When a business runs an advert, they take a risk that they’ll pay out more in advertising costs than they’ll make in revenue from that particular advert. Advertising can be expensive and risky.
But if a business uses affiliate marketing to promote their efforts, they take no risk because they only pay the affiliate when they refer a sale. So the advertising risk is taken solely by the affiliate. While this isn’t so good for affiliates, (or at least for those who aren’t making sales), it works for businesses.
So businesses will continue to use affiliate marketing to promote themselves online. It’s cheap and effective and they don’t pay unless they acquire a customer! So basically businesses pay affiliates a percentage of the sale price to acquire a customer, or close a sale.
Can Affiliate Marketing Replace Your Income?
Affiliate marketing, is it profitable? Affiliate marketing is a performance related business model in which the affiliate gets paid for referrals. Make a sale and you earn a commission. But without consistent sales, it’s hard to make a living from affiliate marketing. So learning how to make sales online should be a priority for any affiliate. Once they learn this skill, they have the ability to make many more, and replace their income. But this takes some time and dedication to do.
For those who are dedicated, affiliate marketing can give them a very good income. But not only that; building an independent income online also gives you a lot of freedom and flexibility. You can live anywhere, choose your own working hours and there’s no income cap on what you can earn. For many, affiliate marketing offers an opportunity which can never be matched with a regular employment salary.
Affiliate marketing can replace your income. But it’s not an easy thing to learn and you’ll need to stick at it for some time before you can make it work. Access a free video series here to learn more.
Purpose & Meaning
Not everyone cares about working by the beach on their laptops and building a millionaire lifestyle. Most people simply want enough to manage, pay their bills and live without fear. This, I think, is one of the main reasons why affiliate marketing is important. It offers everyone an opportunity to better themselves and earn an income which relates to their efforts.
For those disengaged in their jobs, working meaningless careers which they have long since lost interest in, working online gives them hope and purpose. Even in the event of a universal basic income being commonplace, this doesn’t replace meaning and purpose.
Will job losses continue to be replaced by automation in the future? Things look bleak if you’re unable to earn an income independently. It places your interests with those who support you. This can worsen matters in the long run, especially considering the state of play at the moment.
Summary
Affiliate marketing is important for business owners who use affiliates to help sell their products. They have less risk with using affiliates to promote their products and services than they would using advertising. So affiliate marketing will continue to be used by businesses into the long distance future.
For the affiliates themselves, the ability to earn independently from a job or a boss allows a lot of freedom: time freedom, work flexibility and financial freedom. For those trapped in a job they hate, affiliate marketing can give them hope and a way out of meaningless activity and low wages.
Moving towards greater automation in business means many more jobs will be replaced in the coming years. Even with a universal basic income, if it comes about, there will likely be a lot of mental health issues because people need purpose not just money! Affiliate marketing can fill this need for those who pursue it.
What’s the truth about why affiliate marketing does not work? Affiliate marketing is a performance based business model in which affiliates get rewarded for referrals. You don’t need a product to become an affiliate, or even to deal with any customers.
That’s why affiliate marketing is so attractive. Anyone can do it from anywhere in the world! All you need is a laptop and internet connection. But despite this many affiliates fail to make any money out of the business model. In fact, only something like 5% of affiliates continue long enough to make it work. The affiliate marketing failure rate is huge. But why? Many people look to affiliate marketing as an easy escape for their 9 to 5 jobs. There’s several problems with this which stops people from succeeding:
They assume it’s going to be easy, incorrectly
They are employees and not entrepreneurs and therefore don’t have the necessary mindsets needed to succeed in business (see affiliate marketing mindset)
Friends and relatives are of a similar mindset and don’t help them, in fact they will most likely encourage them to quit instead.
Most people are impatient and desperate to earn money instantly, so they get frustrated and quit
It’s easier to quit than to keep goingunless you have a huge reason to succeed
Financial limitations stop them from investing in their growth and in training and software which will help their online earnings grow.
Why Affiliate Marketing Does Not Work – Impatience
For some reason, many people think affiliate marketing is some dream business in which they swan around in their pyjamas all day, browsing social media and chatting with their friends! No wonder so many people don’t succeed with it!
Affiliate marketing is a business, and like any other business it requires hard work and persistence. But because it’s so easy to “give it a go”, and nearly anyone can do just that, there’s a huge drop out rate. When people discover that it’s not a “push button” system, which does all the work for them, they give up!
I was in the same camp when I started affiliate marketing back in the early 2000’s. I bought many courses and tried everything. If I hadn’t really needed it, I would have quit too! I built hundreds of websites, had my advertising accounts shut down, tried numerous courses and tactics, and still failed to make consistent sales.
Difficulties
After all of that, I would make a single online commission of $40! Months of work for $40! Nobody is going to sustain this amount of effort for such little reward unless they see the bigger picture. Especially if they need an income immediately, to feed their family and pay their bills!
Affiliate marketing doesn’t work in many cases simply because it doesn’t meet an immediate need for income. But, if you stick at it for the longer term, and overcome your need for immediate gratification, it can give you so much more than just an income. This is the bigger picture most don’t see about affiliate marketing.
Over decades in a job you despise, you eventually see the need to escape. But after those decades you have become more obsolete in any other role. Plus, you have become dependent on your income. Given these circumstances, someone will do anything to escape. But for those not in this kind of situation, shorter term results are what is required. Unfortunately, this might not happen in affiliate marketing. So many move on and never realise the goal of building a passive income from affiliate marketing.
Why Affiliate Marketing Does Not Work – Wrong Marketing Strategy
There’s another reason why affiliate marketing does not work. I chose the wrong marketing strategy with affiliate marketing when I started. I promoted cheap products using slow, cheap marketing strategies.
My strategies were cheap because I had no money to invest. And so my journey was much longer than someone with a marketing budget and a high ticket product offer. Instead, I promote books from Amazon, and other low value items because I didn’t know any different. Amazon pays ridiculously low commissions (from 1% to 11%).
Organic marketing strategies can take months or years to generate traction, unlike paid marketing strategies which can give you instant feedback. Even when my blogs and videos found a customer, I would earn only tiny amounts from each sale because I chose the wrong products to promote!
Why Affiliate Marketing Does Not Work – Wrong Business Model
There’s more than one business model within affiliate marketing. Different affiliate marketing business models pay differing amounts of commission. Amazon affiliate program pays some of the lowest in the industry. Physical products tend to pay less than digital products. With a digital affiliate product you can earn 40-60% commission, compared with 1-11% commission offered by Amazon’s partner program.
So if you have chosen to promote physical products with organic marketing methods, you could have a very long road before you see any results from affiliate marketing. On the other hand, if you choose high ticket products and subscription affiliate programs, you can see a recurring income quite quickly, especially if you choose to use paid marketing strategies to build your business.
With low value physical products, it’s so much harder to use paid marketing and still turn a profit. But with a high valued product range, this is much more attainable.
Knowing How Affiliate Marketing Works
Knowing how affiliate marketing works prepares you for it. With the right mindset and attitude, anyone can succeed with affiliate marketing. Unfortunately for those who jump in and get started without any knowledge, there’s a long learning curve. Once you realise that affiliate marketing requires a huge effort, you’re already disappointed with your results!
To be forewarned is to be forearmed! Affiliate marketing isn’t easy. You need to keep at it and learn and grow. Results don’t come easily. But if you keep your eye on the big picture, maintain a positive outlook and choose to never quit, you can make it work!
For most people looking for a quick income alternative, the long arduous road just isn’t worth the effort. Especially after several months of work with nothing to show.
But if you understand how affiliate marketing works, and see that your previous efforts can be multiplied quickly, you’re much more likely to stick the course.
The Chinese Bamboo Tree Analogy
I like the Chinese bamboo analogy because it relates well to affiliate marketing. The Chinese bamboo requires a gestation period of up to five years. For five whole years a bamboo shows no growth. It needs watering and feeding under the soil.
If you had a bamboo plant, and it showed no promise for 5 years, you would likely have thrown it out, assuming it was dead! But if you knew what the plant was like, you’d keep at it! But once the gestation period is over, and the plant breaks the soil surface, the Chinese bamboo tree can grow 90 feet tall in 5 weeks!
Wrong Mindset
Many people come into affiliate marketing with an employee mindset, looking for a way to earn an income and escape their 9 to 5 job. But since employees are paid for their time, and affiliate marketers are paid performance related commissions, there’s a massive disparity.
Affiliate marketers don’t get paid for their time! They get paid for their results! In the beginning, you’re learning more than you’re doing. So it can take several weeks of study, just to get off the starting blocks with affiliate marketing. If you’re juggling a 9 to 5 and family obligations this leaves little time for building your online business. So it can take months before you break through and see any results, depending on the activities you focus on.
With the right mindset, and a long term approach, this isn’t a problem. But if you expect to earn from your affiliate efforts and it doesn’t happen this can be damaging to your belief in what you’re doing. See affiliate marketing mindset.
Belief
When I first started learning affiliate marketing, a lot of people tried to dissuade me from doing it. Well meaning friends and relatives told me affiliate marketing was a scam! Even though they knew nothing of it themselves! If your belief is hampered, it’s much easier to quit. Knowing affiliate marketing doesn’t work is a sure fire way to guarantee failure. You can’t work on a business you don’t believe in. In the words of Henry Ford “whether a man believes he can or he can’t, he’s right”!
Unless you have belief in your affiliate marketing business which is unrelenting, you’ll dawdle and your results will dwindle! Unless you can fire up your enthusiasm throughout the difficult times, when you’re not making money, when nothing seems to be working, the odds are good that eventually you’ll begin to feel as though it’s really not going to work.
To be successful as an affiliate requires you to keep believing in it, and keep moving forwards. Being part of a community can help with this. Access a free video series here to learn more.
Wondering why affiliate marketing is the best business model? Affiliate marketing is a referral based business model in which affiliates refer sales of other people’s products. If they successfully refer a sale online, they receive a commission based on what they sell.
They don’t have to invest in inventory, or store products. They don’t need to speak to customers or even own any products of their own. It’s not only for these reasons that affiliate marketing makes for the best business model. Affiliates can build residual income from sales they make on complete autopilot.
This gives them a huge amount of freedom which seldom can be matched by any other business model. A traditional business requires premises, staff, equipment and stock. To launch a traditional business requires a huge investment. But an online affiliate business can be started for very little. This makes affiliate marketing a hugely desirable business model available to anyone with a laptop and internet connection.
Why Affiliate Marketing Is The Best Business Model
But it’s not all sunshine and rainbows! Affiliate marketing is still a business, and although nearly everyone can “give it a go”, not everyone succeeds. The affiliate marketing failure rate is high, with only 5% of affiliates actually succeeding over the long term.
Because so many people can try affiliate marketing, this might account for the large “failure” or drop out rate. It’s accessible to anyone with a laptop! So many give it a go but don’t stick at it long enough to make it work for them.
Despite this, affiliate marketing does work for some people. Those who stick with it are much more likely to succeed than those who put a limit on what they will do.
Why Affiliate Marketing Is The Best Business Model – Location Freedom
Affiliate marking is definitely the best business model if you want geographical freedom. A traditional business locks you down to a physical location, unless of course you can afford to pay someone to run it in your absence. Since affiliate marketing can be run from anywhere globally, this makes it one of the most versatile businesses available.
Other online business models like drop shipping, import export businesses and even forex marketing also offer this flexibility and income potential. However, drop shipping is much more involved and you need to be more customer-centric than with affiliate marketing. With affiliate marketing you simply refer sales to customers. You don’t need to deal with them in the same way, or at all with the affiliate model. See affiliate marketing vs drop shipping.
Import export businesses require inventory and storage of products. You also need to invest in stock to get wholesale prices in order to make a profit. This simply isn’t the case with affiliate marketing. You can join a program for free and promote anything globally with affiliate marketing, even without purchasing anything!
Forex marketing is another location free business model. However, it takes a long time and a large investment to learn trading and make a living from doing it. Affiliate marketing does require training to learn, but you can do it relatively cheaply and without risking huge capital. Access a free video series here to learn more about it.
Why Affiliate Marketing Is The Best Business Model – Flexibility
With a traditional business, and many online businesses, you need to work specific hours, and at a specific location. Even with other similar business models like drop shipping and Forex marketing, you’ll need to stick to specific hours and be accountable to customers or market trading hours.
But affiliate marketing offers an opportunity to work as and when you like! The automation which affiliate marketers use works around the clock. This means whatever country you live in, and whenever you like to work on your business, you can do so!
By building automation into an affiliate business, you can collect emails, sell products and build your online presence all on complete autopilot! You can also outsource tasks you don’t like too! Many affiliates use outsourcing and pay others to work on their business while they sleep! So your business can build around the clock, and you can sell affiliate products around the clock to a global audience than never sleeps!
Financial Freedom
Yes financial freedom is why many people become affiliate marketers. Affiliate marketing offers the opportunity to earn from selling products online. As such, there’s no limit to earning potential. But not all affiliate marketing business models are alike, so you need to choose carefully.
For example, Amazon pays affiliates some of the lowest levels of commission within the industry. Some products on Amazon pay as little as 1% commission. Products in some categories even pay 0%, items such as gift cards! 11% is the highest amount of commission you can earn from referring a product on Amazon. See also Amazon affiliate marketing commission.
Some marketing strategies will take longer than others too. Organic marketing is a slow strategy. So if you choose a slow marketing strategy, and low paying products, you can struggle for years with affiliate marketing without getting anywhere!
Paid marketing works much better in many ways. A paid marketing strategy can be turned on immediately and you see instant results. Initially there’s a period of learning here, which is where many affiliates drop out. But paid marketing is much more scalable than organic marketing, which means your business can grow very quickly once you’re profitable.
Best Affiliate Marketing Business Models
The best affiliate marketing business models offer multiple sources of income. A small valued product on Amazon will make you less than a dollar in commission. You’re not going to become financial free by promoting products like this, unless you have a tonne of free traffic. Free traffic is hard won and takes a considerable amount of time, if starting from scratch. You can’t use paid traffic if you’re only making a few cents on a sale! So this means you need to choose products which pay you more.
Using such a system means your ability to build a solid income is much more likely than through using only one-off commissions. A product range gives you the ability to earn commissions at a later date should your referrals upgrade to a larger valued product.
Most affiliate programs don’t offer this. You need to keep selling more and more items to keep earning. But with recurring commissions and a product range you can keep earning from the work you have done previously. With a larger valued offering, and larger commission rates (see affiliate marketing commission rates), you can also use paid marketing more effectively and scale up more quickly to a larger audience.
Affiliate marketing is not an easy thing and still requires a lot of work in order to generate a full time income. But compared to the other business models which are similar, or even traditional businesses, it offers a lot more affordability and flexibility.
An affiliate business can give you more time and geographical freedom and financial independence. It can also give you financial freedom if you are ambitious and choose the right business model.
Are you looking to “sell digital downloads on my website“? For a long time, I wanted to do this. To sell a digital download from your website is a great way to automate sales and generate a passive income. There’s all kinds of plugins which offer to help you to do this, most of which charge a monthly fee. But you can do it yourself too quite cheaply by using Paypal. Here’s how.
Sell Digital Downloads On My Website – Create Your Downloadable Product
To sell digital downloads on your website, start by creating your digital product. This could be a pdf document, an ebook or any other type of digital item. Once you have created it, upload it to your website. Here’s an example of an ebook I created which I use as a lead generating tool.
I’ll use this ebook as an example in this article. Once you have your digital product uploaded, you’ll need to create three pages on your website:
A sales page, showcasing your product, with a Paypal button. (e.g. this article)
A landing page, giving your visitors access to your digital product for them to download
A checkout cancellation page – for those who cancel the purchase mid way through
Once you have created these pages you can head over to Paypal to create a payment button.
Sell Digital Downloads On My Website – Paypal Button
To generate a Paypal button you can head to www.paypal.com/buttons/. You’ll need a Paypal account and to set up a business account. Speak to Business customer support or your Customer Success Manager to find out more. See www.paypal.com/uk/business.
Once you have access you will be able to create a button to place on your website in code form.
Click on the payment option you would like and fill in the fields on your payment button.
Once you have filled in your form and chosen your field options, click on the tab at the bottom for customise advanced features.
Fill out the two fields for when someone pays and if someone cancels checkout mid way through. Your “success” page should be your website landing page where the customer can access your digital download.
Click “create button” at the bottom of the page and copy the code Paypal provides onto your website. This will appear as a Paypal payment button which you can place on your sales page.
Sales Page Example
Here’s a quick example of what a sale page will look like (using my ebook as an example):
Purchase My Amazing Ebook Here!
(An example of what your Paypal button might look like)
Digital Downloads As Lead Magnets & Profitable Referrals
You can also use digital downloadable products as lead magnets. An ebook lead magnet is a powerful way to engage with your website visitors and get them to subscribe to your email list.
Selling your own ebooks has a limited scope for profit. You’ll need plenty of website visitors to make this profitable. An alternative is to sell affiliate products (other people’s products) as a referrer. Referral sales can be made from your website to outside parties which offer much more lucrative digital products than you can create yourself. Profitable digital products to sell online are things such as:
To sell digital downloads on your website you only need a Paypal button and to create a payment process through Paypal. Before creating your button you’ll need to create 3 pages on your site: a sales page, a download page and a cancellation page. Then, build your button and paste the code on your product sales page.
Getting people to find and download your product is another story. But if you already have a heap of traffic to your website, this might not be difficult. If you do already have traffic, make sure you create a downloadable product which is desirable to your existing audience.
If you don’t already have traffic on your website, you will need to either pay for traffic or build content to draw traffic towards your downloadable product. See niche blogging for profit for a strategy.
To access a referral marketing training program which offers a range of digital products you can sell, checkout the free video training series here and follow the steps to get started.
If you’re looking for profitable digital products to sell online, here’s a few ideas to think about. I first noticed the ease and simplicity of selling digital products online after purchasing an ebook on eBay.
It taught me an eBay business model. You can read about it here. However, it was the ebook sale itself which gave me a lightbulb moment! A digital sale means you can automatically take payment and deliver your product using the internet. No dealing with customers, no posting our parcels! I thought it was the perfect business model. And it is!
Profitable Digital Products To Sell Online – Ebooks!
Yes ebooks are profitable. You can create an ebook and sell it online for whatever price people are wiling to pay. They are super easy to create too. All you need is a way to put a written online document in pdf format – and most computers will do this.
There’s various pdf converter software online too if your computer doesn’t do this. You can get an ebook cover done for you for minimal cost using Fiverr.com. I created a couple of ebooks and although I don’t sell them, they are used for building my internet business. Here’s one of them:
Ebooks are brilliant lead magnets too. A lead magnet can allow an online business owner to collect subscribers. They then promote affiliate products through their email lists.
11 Profitable Digital Products To Sell Online – Affiliate Products
Yes there’s thousands of digital affiliate products which will pay you 30% and above on sales you generate. Affiliate marketing is a referral based business model in which the referrers get paid for recommending products online. Here’s some websites which specialise in the selling of digital products:
Clickbank.com
JVZoo.com
Click2Sell.com
There’s thousands of digital products you can promote as an affiliate. Not all affiliate products are the same however and some are more profitable than others. Affiliate marketing is a performance related business model too. This means if you don’t sell any products, you don’t get paid. So learning how to generate sales should be your top priority. Access free training videos here.
Profitable Digital Products To Sell Online – Courses
Some of the best products to sell online as an affiliate are training courses. A digital ebook might only sell for a few dollars. However, a digital training course can sell for upwards of $300, for example.
This means you can earn a lot more from selling high value courses than low value digital ebooks. High ticket affiliate products carry much larger price tags. A high ticket course might sell for thousands of dollars. If you refer a high ticket course which costs several thousand dollars, you can make commissions upwards of $1000 per sale.
Memberships & Subscriptions
Membership and subscription products keep paying you long after you refer customers. A small monthly revenue from a product referral can therefore mount up. Some of the best products which offer this are business related products and services. When a business uses a product and needs it for their business, they tend to maintain their subscription for life!
Here’s a few examples of membership and software products you can sell as an affiliate:
Email autoresponders – list building services for online businesses
Training courses – teaching a skill of some kind
Software for business – SEO (search engine optimisation) and technical help for growing websites/online business
A product range is one of the most profitable digital products you can sell online. Most digital products are stand alone, which means you only get paid once for their sale, apart from subscription products of course, (which pay you a recurring income for each sale). With most digital affiliate products you only make a single commission however. This means you pass the customer to the product owner, who may earn lifetime commissions from that particular customer.
With a product range, you can earn commissions from purchases made at a later date from customers you referred previously. This means you only need to refer a sale once, but you can continue to earn lifetime commissions should your referral purchase anything else from a range of products.
An example of a company which offers a range of products is Apple. They offer phones, MP3 players, computers, laptops, monitors and so on. Apple doesn’t have an affiliate program but if it did it would be worth joining, especially if there were lifetime commissions attached. See SFM digital business system for a digital product range program.
Summary
There’s literally thousands of digital affiliate products you can promote online to earn a percentage of the sale value. The most profitable digital products to choose are those which offer:
If you’re wondering how to not work, you may be a part of a huge proportion of dissatisfied workers. A recent Gallop poll showed that 85% of the world’s workforce is dissatisfied at work. More recently there has been a huge increase in the rate of people quitting their jobs. In April 2021 the number of people quitting their jobs in a single month broke an all time US record. This is being dubbed “The Great Resignation”. Perhaps, in part, this is due to the pandemic and having worked from home for several months people have realised there must be a better way – and of course there is!
How Not To Work – Aligning Your Values
If you have been working in a job you hate for several months or years, you may have come to a breaking point. The pandemic has certainly been a game changer in this regard. Many workers are re-thinking what they consider important. It’s simply not working in a job they hate, or for a boss they hate! Or perhaps not working at all!
When it comes to working in a job you hate, work become monotonous and meaningless, even painful. The very word “work” conjures up feelings of resentment, hate and desperation for many. In this scenario it can be difficult to see an escape plan or a way out. But it is possible to rethink our definition of the word “work” and find a way to align with our inner most values to create a more meaningful basis for activity, which also produces an income.
How Not To Work – Money
Everyone pretty much needs money to survive. Those who don’t work either find a way to make an income which isn’t as painful (as for those who hate their jobs), and/or enjoyable, or attempt to live precariously on the state. Or not working may mean dropping out completely and living in the woods as a hobo. If neither of the latter suggestions appeals, you must find a way in which your work can be enjoyable/meaningful or tolerable until you find an escape plan to get out permanently. Or, you may find a more enjoyable career path on the journey!
To do so can take some time and considerable effort. But if you have a long term plan to defy the 9 to 5, it can make your shorter term activities less painful. Without an escape plan, work can feel like a lead weight around your neck. With a plan of escape, there’s hope! Most people will live to their means and spend what they earn. To escape the endless cycle of working for a living, you need leverage, and to become a good money manager. See money habits of the wealthy.
How Not To Work – Find A Meaningful Goal
“Find a job you love and you’ll never work a day in your life” – Confucius. Sadly this is the dream of the many but the reality of the few.
Finding a job you love can take years, or decades. And you may never achieve it. A better solution is to find a job you don’t hate, which can pave the way towards something better – a worthy goal you set for yourself.
Earl Nightingale –Success is the progressive realisation of a worthy goal.
With a worthy goal, your life has meaning. Without one, your life become relegated to the daily activities you take part in. If making a living is the only path you are on, and if doing so is making you miserable, you need a larger goal worthy of your greatest aspirations.
Build Multiple Income Streams
Those who have successfully escaped the work-hustle grind have often built income streams which set them free of it. While most people are tied to their jobs for life, those who have built multiple income streams eventually escape the need to trade their time for money.
Robert Kiyosaki talks about this in his books: Rich Dad Poor Dad, The Cash Flow Quadrant and many others. The four ways to earn income are:
E – Employment
SE – Self Employment
I – Investment
B – Business
Most people earn an income from the employment quadrant only. If their job ends, this makes their income very precarious. In a job, your income is tied to the time you spend in that job. If you stop working, you stop getting paid. With an online business, for example, this isn’t the same. With a profitable online business you can continue earning income long after you stop working, if you build it up first. The same applies to other income producing assets such as a rental property, or an investment portfolio. Many investors purchase shares which pay out dividends over the longer term. See also smart passive income ideas.
Redefine “Work” For You
If you have previously worked in jobs you hate, for bosses you hate and begrudged every second of it, perhaps it’s time to redefine what “work” means to you. If you relate “work” to drudgery, you’ll expect all work to be drudgery. For many people this simply isn’t the case. Some people are happy in their jobs, you can be too.
If you define work always as psychological pain, you’ll always seek to avoid it. This can create problems if you plan on making any money.
By choosing a different way to define work, you can release its negativity on your life, and find a more pleasant way to view it. When work is simply about scratching a living doing an unpleasant task, it has negative connotations. But if work has some meaning for you, no amount of it will phase you.
Start An Online Business
One way to escape the trading time for money conundrum is to build an income from the internet. Anyone can learn how to promote other people’s products online for a share of the profit. To learn more about building an income online, access this free video series.
