There’s lots of people wondering how to make money online from home so here’s a short beginners guide. While there’s plenty of ways to earn online one of the simplest and most popular ways is through selling other people’s products and services; a business model known as affiliate marketing.
With affiliate marketing you can join an affiliate program, get your unique affiliate I.D. or affiliate link, and promote it online to earn commissions on products you sell. One of the most popular affiliate programs available is Amazon’s.
Yes, Amazon that popular website which you’ve probably already bought from, has an affiliate program. When you join the program you can access an affiliate platform where you can create an affiliate link to over 12 million products on the site.
But before you rush off to Amazon, you’re going to need some help in the actual promotion of your affiliate link. This is the “crux” of the affiliate marketing model; getting your affiliate link in front of the right audience, and in large numbers.
How To Make Money Online For Beginners From Home – The “Right” Audience
It’s worth noting too that Amazon isn’t the best paying affiliate program. Some products on Amazon pay as little as 1% commission, so you’ll need to sell a lot of them, and very cheaply, in order to make a profit.
However, there’s other products and services which pay much more; such as digital, subscription and hight ticket products. For more info find the form on this website and sign up to the free video series. You can also download my free ebook “Affiliate Marketing For Beginners” too, just click here for access.
Anyway, I digress! Back to the right audience. When you’re selling an affiliate product online you need a strategy to get your affiliate link in front of as many people as you can. But most people online aren’t going to want the toaster, or dinner set you’re promoting, for example. In fact, the bulk of online traffic wants something totally different and most are browsing for information, not products. So finding the right “slice” of the online marketplace to put your affiliate link in front of is paramount to earning online through affiliate marketing.
To do this we can zone in on what we affiliates call the customer avatar or target audience. The target audience is the small slice of the online marketplace who is actively looking for what we are selling. So for example, product reviews are a good idea for affiliates because they attract people who are looking for a specific product, which we can then sell though our affiliate link.
How To Make Money Online For Beginners From Home – Choosing A Marketing Strategy
There’s many ways to sell other people’s products online with affiliate marketing. Some affiliates choose blogging, others use video. Some use paid marketing and build a large list of subscribers. But most successful affiliates will have an email list of subscribers who they promote their products to.
Having an email list is one of the most important things for affiliates because it allows them to collect a large number of subscribers who have shown an interest in their topic/niche.
A list also puts the affiliate in greater control over their traffic, which is necessary to attract buyers for your products. You can use a website to collect emails by offering some free information to your website visitors. Some affiliates use specific landing pages to collect email subscribers and this is a good idea.
A landing page is a specific web page built specifically for the purpose of collecting email addresses. It’s much more efficient than a normal website because there’s less choice for visitors. They either sign up or leave, whereas on a website, they can browse around.
Generally an affiliate will choose a marketing strategy which suits their available time and resources and their budget. Here’s a few strategies:
- Content marketing : blogging, video blogging
- PPC – pay per click marketing – using a paid marketing platform such as Google Adwords
- Social media marketing – sharing content on social media, pasting your affiliate links in your profile etc.
- Paid social media marketing – using a social media platform to run paid ads
- Email marketing – list building lets you collect emails from a landing page/website using a free giveaway such as an ebook
How To Make Money Online For Beginners – How Long Does It Take?
If you’ve read this far you’re probably asking how long this is going to take to make any money from selling other people’s products. The timescale will differ according to how much time you can put in and your marketing strategy. With a large budget and if you’re using high ticket affiliate products, you can start generating leads and sales very quickly, within a few weeks with a paid marketing strategy. But if you’re choosing another route, such as blogging, you’re in for a longer journey.
Blogging or any other content creation strategy involves creating a lot of content and building a digital “asset”. Once built such an asset can generate free leads and sales without paying for traffic. However it can take several months to get to this stage and the time will depend on your input and the relative competitiveness of your niche.
Affiliate marketing is not a get rich quick scheme, although many promote it as such, so you should expect to work at it consistently for several weeks or months before you can see sales dropping in. Once you have put that work in though you can benefit from the automation of online selling, according to your marketing strategy. With a scalable strategy (e.g. paid marketing) you can build a large 6 figure enterprise quite quickly with enough investment capital. If you’re only looking for an extra income you can do this too, even with only a few hours each day.
Summary
Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular ways to earn an income online through the selling of other people’s products and services. Anyone can become an affiliate and earn an income this way. Simply join an affiliate program and get some training. Training is well worth your time if you’re going to take affiliate marketing seriously. It’s the best investment you can make on this path because everything you do will be based on what you know (or don’t know) about how to successfully market a product online.
Access my free ebook here and a free video series to learn more.