You can earn commission selling products online, even if you don’t have any products yourself. Affiliate marketing is a business model in which third parties are rewarded for passing customers on to other people’s products. Anyone can become an affiliate too. All you need to do is join an affiliate program and get your unique affiliate link. Once you have your link, you can advertise it to make sales. When someone buys a product through your unique affiliate link, the sale is tracked back to you and you receive a commission based on the referral.
As long as you have a laptop and internet connection, you can promote products and services online from anywhere. The key to making a success out of affiliate marketing is of course to get good at finding customers for products. When you can do this in large numbers, you can potentially replace your income from online referrals. This can give you a huge amount of freedom; both in terms of your time, geographical location and from a monetary perspective too.
But what does it take to become successful as an affiliate marketer? What are the average earnings from affiliate marketing? What are your chances of success?
Earn Commission Selling Products Online – Affiliate Marketing
To earn commission selling products online there are many strategies you can use:
- Blogging
- Video blogging (v’logging)
- Social media marketing
- Email marketing – building an email list
- PPC – pay per click advertising
- SEO – search engine optimisation
- Link building – part of SEO
- and so on..
To sell products en-mass, you need to learn how to reach an ever growing audience and this typically doesn’t happen over night! Most affiliates will have at least some struggles when they begin to learn the skill of selling online. Many will also quit! To become successful in selling products online you need to get good at marketing. Affiliate marketing means marketing other people’s products and services. The marketing part of the equation is your responsibility as an affiliate. Unless you get good at this skill, your chances of success in affiliate marketing are pretty low.
The Email List
One of the best and fastest methods of selling products online is through using an email marketing list. Autoresponders are automated email marketing systems which allow affiliates to collect emails from a website and send automated messages out on a regular basis. Through building a large list of subscribers, affiliates can sell products in large numbers through sending email marketing messages to their subscribers.
An email list can be built up to many thousands of subscribers which gives affiliates the means to reach an ever growing audience. By connecting to their subscribers on a regular basis, affiliates can built trust, give value and ultimately promote useful affiliate products which allow them to earn commissions based on the sales.
The email list is pretty important for affiliates as it gives them control of their traffic. Without traffic, an affiliate can’t sell products and services online. Traffic can be generated in many ways through either building content or paying for it. Paid traffic is far quicker than free traffic, which takes a lot longer and more effort to obtain.
Earn Commission Selling Products Online – Types Of Product
Not all affiliate products are equal, and not all pay the same in affiliate commissions. Physical products, for example typically pay less than digital products in terms of commission percentages. A typical physical product you might find on Amazon, for example, pays between 3-10% commission, depending on the product. A typical digital product on the other hand will pay much more – usually from 20-40% commission.
Some products are much more expensive than others too, so you’ll earn a larger commission if you refer a sale. High ticket affiliate marketing products are typically those which pay out a minimum of $500 for referring a sale.
There are subscription affiliate programs too which pay affiliates recurring commissions. These are good for financial stability if you’re a beginner affiliate especially because regular recurring commissions can help to stabilise your affiliate income.
Marketing – The Key To Selling Products Online
Marketing is the key to becoming successful as an affiliate marketer. Whether you decide to use paid marketing, build a blog or create a YouTube channel, you’ll need to attract an audience which resonates with your messaging and who are a good fit for the products and services you choose to promote. Blogging, for example can be used to attract an audience through SEO – search engine optimisation. Over time and with patience, a blog can ultimately attract website traffic completely for free!
If you’re less patient, you can use PPC – pay per click marketing to attract traffic directly from social media platforms or from search traffic. This is often used to send targeted traffic to a landing page where affiliates collect emails and follow up with automated messages via email marketing. Email marketing combined with PPC (pay per click advertising) is one of the fastest ways you can build an affiliate business. Combined with a high ticket product range this can give you the best chance of building a profitable income from scratch with affiliate marketing. See also best products to sell as an affiliate.
Access a free video series to learn more about affiliate marketing.