If only I had found the best way to do affiliate marketing 10 years ago! I wouldn’t have wasted so much time and effort! But of course surely the “best” way to do anything is purely subjective, right? There’s many ways to do affiliate marketing and if you’re doing it the wrong way, you should expect a long and difficult journey.
Some affiliate marketing strategies take months and others take years. You can also make a lot of mistakes on the journey. See 23 affiliate mistakes newbie affiliates should avoid. According to your own personal circumstances of course, one route may be more suitable than another. But if you’re stuck in a career you’re desperate to escape from, there’s a faster way to do things. Would you rather take months or years to escape your job?
Some people are more risk averse than others too and according to your ability to invest, take risk and learn new skills, you might prefer one route over another. In this article, I’m going to discuss some of the many routes you can take as an affiliate marketer. Of course there’s many I haven’t even tried and the very nature of affiliate marketing means it’s constantly evolving. But if you want to know the best way to do affiliate marketing, skip to the last section of this article.
Best Way To Do Affiliate Marketing
I started learning about affiliate marketing back in the early 2000’s. I wanted to sell my own ebook and couldn’t get anyone to my website. So I put myself on one of those “earn money online” courses to learn. Instead of selling my own ebook I realised there was a better way to earn online – selling other people’s products.
With my ebook on sale for $10, I could make $10 for each sale. But with someone else’s video course selling for $100, I could make $40! So it was a no brainer to abandon my ebook idea and start selling other people’s products instead. If I was going to spend the same amount of time and effort on both, the affiliate marketing model was going to pay more – even though with my own product I earned 100% profit!
So I set about learning how to market products from a simple website. In the process I learned the worst ways to do affiliate marketing – those which don’t work! As a new affiliate marketer, you’re going to experience some set backs. Some of what you do simply won’t work. Actually MOST of what you don’t won’t work.
Pareto’s principle states that 80% of outcomes come from only 20% of the effects. This is worth bearing in mind as an affiliate. Throw some mud at a wall and some will fall off. Affiliates need to learn from the mud that sticks! Once some mud sticks (you make progress), you need to know which actions created those outcomes.
Slow Strategies Vs. Fast Strategies
A slow strategy such as blogging might take 12 months of work before you start to see some activity and progress. At first, you won’t see very much happening. But if you stick at it, and keep creating content, over time you’ll see some traffic – visitors on your website. Keep your attention on these small “wins” and keep doing those things which produce those results.
It’s easy to become demoralised if you pick a slow strategy. Small amounts of work won’t produce large results. Writing a blog post every week won’t give you a scalable income. More likely, you’ll get the odd visitor on your website who takes no action.
Only about 1% of visitors will sign up to your website. Then, only about 1% of your subscribers will purchase a product from you. So it’s a numbers game. With blogging, or organic marketing, it’s a long, slow process of continuing to create content. Within 6 months to a year of doing so, you should have a nice organic amount of traffic. Of course you can still make mistakes. You can create content which is miss-matched to your products. You can write content without promoting it. You can expect Google and other search engines to do your job for you (big mistake).
But with organic marketing you should expect to work, work, work without much to show for it in the first 6 months. If you do everything right, you should see a few sales here and there. Keep going and you’ll see a few more. This grows over time and is really quite exciting when it finally happens. But it’s a long barren desert before you see the oasis!
Best Way To Do Affiliate Marketing
So organic traffic is a slow strategy and takes time. You can speed up your progress of course by using an email list, subscription products and high ticket products. But getting traffic will be slow if you go the long route of generating traffic organically.
Once you reach a certain level of success too, this isn’t scalable. And although you can rinse and repeat your best performing content (and of course share it more), you’re still stuck in a model which requires a lot of work for slow progress forwards. Over time however, your body of work which you’ve created acts as a resource to give you free traffic, leads and sale. So this compounds over time and you should see free sales coming in if you stick with it long enough.
Paid Marketing
But if you’re not prepared for all this work, and want your affiliate business to move more quickly to escape a job, for example, there’s a far better way. Taking that affiliate marketing is a numbers game, your fastest way to reach a large number of people is through using paid marketing.
Paid marketing, unlike content marketing is much faster and more scalable. It does however cost money. At first you’ll spend money learning how to run campaigns. This is the point where many affiliates quit. They run a few campaigns, lose money and quit. But those who stick it out are in a very good position indeed once they start gaining traction. They will have created a profitable business which is automated and scalable if they achieve that.
Paid marketing is out of the reach of many affiliates because they haven’t got products which cover the cost of learning how to run paid campaigns. So they burn their capital running campaigns which don’t work. Then they give up because they assume that it just doesn’t work.
The High Ticket Sales Funnel
A high ticket sales funnel consists of multiple high value digital products which pay the affiliate the largest possible commissions you’ll find online.
With such a funnel, you can expect to earn a much larger amount than you would from standard affiliate products. Amazon and eBay typically pay from 1-12% commissions to their affiliates. This is a narrow margin which doesn’t give you much scope for using paid marketing. But digital products typically pay much more (around 40%). Combined with high value products and you can make $1000+ on a single sale for some items.
When you make a $1000 commission (and above) on a sale, you can afford to test and measure paid marketing campaigns much more easily. When you only make $12 on a sale, it’s almost impossible to use paid marketing at all.
Paid marketing is the best way to do affiliate marketing because you can reach a much larger audience much more quickly. But you need to use the right business model. See affiliate marketing business models.
Best Way To Do Affiliate Marketing
Of course the “best” way to do affiliate marketing is entirely subjective. Many will want a cheap strategy they can implement over time without risking capital. But some can use an affiliate marketing business to replace their existing income very quickly. For those people, the best strategy is to use paid marketing and a high ticket business model – see SFM Digital Business System.
With recurring membership commissions, multi-tier commissions and high ticket product sales, you can build a profitable business online quite quickly using paid marketing. It will still take time of course and you’ll need to invest heavily in a sales funnel and of course your marketing.
With a low valued affiliate product, like you might find on Amazon, you can only make a small commission (12% maximum). But with high ticket digital products you can make 40% commissions on products valued at $2500 – $20,000. A single sale can give you a commission of $8000!
Once you’ve set up your sales funnel, start here, you should turn your attention to a paid marketing platform such as YouTube. (The platform you choose will depend on your commission structure). See affiliate marketing business models.
Test and measure your marketing until you find a campaign which gives you a profitable cost per lead. Then increase your budget and scale up. Compared with organic traffic this can be a far faster and more scalable route. However, the downside is that it requires a large investment to attain the top commission structure and you’ll need to spend a lot on advertising before you find a profitable campaign.
Summary
The best way to do affiliate marketing is entirely subjective however. For some this will be way out of their reach due to finances. If you’re time rich but don’t have the budget for this strategy, organic marketing might be a better route to take, depending your circumstances. If you’re in a corporate job and don’t have any time, you can use the automation of an online business to build an income using the above strategy and gain traction very quickly.
There is of course a middle ground too. You can use recurring commission products and high ticket products with organic strategies. Ultimately, it is up to you to decide which strategy suits you best, and which strategy you would be happy using according to your finances, patience, risk aversion and ability to create content and/or find a passion project you can monetise.
For a breakdown of the various online earning strategies you can access a free workshop video series here which explains a few different ideas.