You can earn commissions online even without a product of your own to sell. It’s a business model known as affiliate marketing. With affiliate marketing, third party referrers send customers to the product/service and get paid a slice of the profit. When a sale is made it is tracked back to the affiliate who referred the customer.
Affiliates can do all sorts of activities to make sales online:
- PPC advertising – pay per click
- Blogging and v’logging – video blogging
- Email marketing – sending automated email messages using an autoresponder.
- Social media platforms
- SEO – search engine optimisation
- Link building for website authority
- Niche website building
- Other content creation -e.g. ebooks and infographics
Earn Commissions Online Selling Other People’s Products
To make your first sale online can be a bit of a challenge. Initially you’ll need to get some training and set up a website and/or sales funnel. A sales funnel is a system whereby the affiliate can send qualified subscribers into an email marketing campaign. The subscriber is then sent a series of automated messages which lead to affiliate products.
This whole system can be automated and scaled up to a global audience. This means affiliate marketing can be very lucrative and ultimately give you a passive income.
There’s other ways of doing affiliate marketing too though. You don’t necessarily need a sales funnel. Some affiliates build blog websites and refer traffic directly to the affiliate products from there. But an email list is recommended because it gives you more control over the traffic you generate. Some affiliate marketing tactics are much faster than others.
For example, PPC – pay per click marketing is very fast, but more expensive than blogging, which is a very slow method of marketing. However, in the long run and with enough content, blogging can give you a passive income from the work you’ve done previously.
Your Lifestyle
Your lifestyle may determine the route you take as an affiliate marketer. If you’re time rich, but don’t have much budget for marketing, you might choose a longer term route which meets your needs better. Blogging might fit in this scenario, or video blogging (v’logging).
If you’re busy in a full time job and don’t have much time, you would be better off using paid marketing to get traction more quickly and automate the process. Paid marketing is much more scalable than content creation. Plus it is much faster too. However, be prepared to spend money initially while you’re learning the skills.
On the whole a good rule of thumb is that if you’re busy, use paid ads. If you’re broke, hustle; meaning create content and build up a “digital asset” over the longer term. Once you have built a large blog presence online (or a bunch of videos), you can send the traffic you generate to a relevant product/service which is suitable for your audience.
Target Audience & Affiliate Marketing
Your target audience is an important part of marketing as an affiliate. Knowing who is going to be most interested in the product/service you’re promoting is vital if you want to attract the right audience and sell your product/s. If you attract an audience which isn’t a good fit for your chosen product, you’ll struggle to sell anything.
So whether you are promoting affiliate products through blogging or paid ads, it’s worth spending some time thinking about who you want to attract with your marketing. If you’re selling a Yoga course, for example, you don’t want your content to be about flower arranging! The content you create should be aligned with the product/s you are selling.
See how to know your target market and customer avatar worksheet.
Earn Commissions Online: The Right Products
Your choice of product to sell is pretty important to if you want to become successful as an affiliate marketer. Some products are better than others and some pay much more than others too. For example, Amazon has an affiliate program and you can sell pretty much anything from the site for a commission.
However, the commission rates are pretty low and range typically between 5% and 11%. Digital products pay much more: usually around 30%-40% commissions. Then there’s subscription affiliate products and high ticket affiliate marketing products.
Subscription products are good because they pay recurring commissions and a high ticket product usually pays over $500 in commission for a single sale. So you don’t need to sell as many of them in order to become profitable.
Earn Commissions Online: Why Most Fail
Not everyone who attempts to earn commissions online is successful. In fact there’s a huge number of affiliates who quit. The affiliate marketing success rate is low for a number of reasons:
- There’s a very low barrier to entry: nearly anyone can “give it a go”
- People quit too easily
- People think affiliate marketing is easy
- It requires a different mindset than most people have (see growth mindset and affiliate marketing)
Serious about building an income online? Access a free video series to learn more and get started.
