Getting paid online for referrals is one of the most popular methods of making money online. Affiliate marketing as it’s known, is a way to generate income by recommending products and services which you don’t personally own.
A good analogy of affiliate marketing is a friend recommending a nice restaurant. Only with an affiliate recommendation, you earn a commission if your friend visits the restaurant. When you buy a product from a blog, it’s likely that the blog owner is an affiliate. They get paid when someone buys something through their unique affiliate link.
So how do you become an affiliate and start getting paid online for referrals?
Getting Paid Online For Referrals – How To Start
Anyone can become an affiliate and you only need to join an affiliate program and get your unique affiliate link. Share your link online and make sales by finding customers who want the particular product you are promoting. Amazon, for example, is one of the best known affiliate websites and anyone can join and promote any of the thousands of products available on the site.
It’s also a good idea to join a course which can give you some help. Most affiliates will struggle at first if they don’t have a marketing technique which they know works. Once you find a strategy which works, you can do more of the same. There’s several methods of promoting affiliate links online such as:
- Blogging
- Pay per click advertising
- Video marketing
- Social media marketing
- SEO – search engine optimisation
- Email marketing
Getting Paid Online For Referrals – Email Marketing
Email marketing is one of the most popular methods of selling affiliate products online. By collecting subscribers from a website, affiliates can send out automated messages and promote their particular products to a growing number of people. Email marketing is a good method of marketing because it allows you to speak to a lot of people and automate the process.
See also the power of email marketing.
With a small email list, you might only make a small number of sales. But as your number of subscribers grows, you can see your affiliate sales take off quite dramatically. Some affiliates will build email lists into the tens or even hundreds of thousands of subscribers.
Getting Paid Online For Referrals – Attracting Customers
To attract the right kinds of online users to your content, you need to first understand who to target your marketing towards. Since most of the people online aren’t going to want what you’re selling, it pays to focus solely on those who are likely to buy. This is known as your target audience – the small “slither” of the online marketplace who is interested in what you have to say and sell!
To attract the right customers to your products you need to know what kind of information they are looking for online. So for example a product review will attract someone looking for a specific product. Whereas a “how to” guide will likely attract a different kind of online user. One of these users is looking to buy something, and the other is only looking for some free information.
Since most online users are using the internet as a means of sourcing free information, it pays to understand who you should target with your content by understanding your customer avatar. See also customer avatar worksheet pdf.
Paid Vs. Organic Traffic
To attract people online you can either pay for advertising or build content (or both). Organic marketing is free traffic which comes through the search engines and without having to pay for it. Typically it is much more difficult to obtain organic traffic in large quantities than it is to pay for it.
Still, organic traffic is free so many people seek to obtain it through creating a lot of content. Blogging is an example of an organic marketing strategy. Although it’s a very cheap means of generating traffic online, it’s quite slow and difficult to scale. Paid marketing on the other hand is faster to start and more scalable.
See also PPC vs organic marketing.
Choosing Products
There’s thousands of affiliate products you can choose from online. Amazon alone has hundreds of thousands of products available to sell. However, Amazon’s pay structure is not the best for affiliates and they can earn as little as 1% commission for successfully selling a product. Digital products will generally pay much more (between 30-40%) and then there’s high ticket affiliate products and subscription affiliate products which pay out recurring commissions.
Ideally choose a product you can fully get behind with your marketing strategy. If, for example, you’re going to become a blogger, choose a topic (and product) which you can enjoy building content around. So if you have a particular interest for example, your blog could be built with content on your hobby. Choose a product which would appeal to your audience.
See also best products to promote as an affiliate.