Wondering how to make your first affiliate sale? Your first sale as an affiliate marketer marks and important milestone. Once you’ve made a single sale, you’ve proved your strategy to work.
Once you’ve made one sale, you can make many more. Before the first sale can be tough because you’re finding your feet as an affiliate. You’re no doubt encumbered by scepticism and doubt. Making that first sale gives you momentum and belief which are two important factors in success in affiliate marketing. Without belief you don’t even try. Without momentum you’ll dawdle and stagnate.
So how do you do it? Are you going to create a blog, use a YouTube channel or build an email list using paid marketing? Are you using banner ads or a paid marketing platform such as Google Adwords, Bing, or YouTube? There’s so many ways to promote affiliate products it can be overwhelming for a beginner. So here’s a guide to get you on the right track.
How To Make Your First Affiliate Sale – Choosing Your Niche
Your niche is the topic, area or category in which you want to talk about or promote your product/service. You can do this on a blog or create video content on YouTube for example. Or, you can run adverts and send people to a landing page where you collect their email address and follow up with email marketing.
Your niche is important because you’re going to spend some time creating content in it. Whether you’re running paid ads, doing email marketing, blogging or creating videos, you’ll have more success if you choose a topic you have some interest or passion in. Making a sale online can take some time and dedication, and you’ll have greater staying power if you’re passionate about your topic and product.
If you’re going to create content as a means to drive traffic, choose a topic which you love and which isn’t too competitive. See also how to choose the best niche for affiliate marketing.
How To make Your First Affiliate Sale – Choose Your Platform
There’s multiple platforms you can use for affiliate marketing. Some of them are free and some are paid platforms. There’s pro’s and cons with each method of affiliate promotion. With paid marketing, you can get traffic very quickly. But you’ll need to pay for advertising and this can get costly, especially when you don’t know what you’re doing. The best advice is to tread carefully as paid marketing platforms can swallow up your money very quickly.
Free blog platforms such as Hubpgaes.com and Blogger.com let you create written content to attract your target audience. They are free, which is the upside, but the downside is that it can take a long time and a lot of effort to start getting free visitors to your blog posts. YouTube and TikTok are two free video platforms you can use to create and upload video content to attract your audience.
How To make Your First Affiliate Sale – Join An Affiliate Program
There’s thousands of affiliate programs you can join. Amazon, eBay, Clickbank and JVZoo.com are some of the most popular places where affiliates go to find affiliate products. You can find products in almost any niche you can think of too. Simply do a web search for “{your niche} affiliate program/product” and you should find a program with a suitable product to sell.
Ideally find a product which you would personally buy yourself. If you wouldn’t but the product yourself it’s probably not a great fit for you to promote it. But if you can rant and rave about a product, because you genuinely love it, it’s going to be much easier to promote it genuinely and authentically.
As a beginner affiliate I promoted many products I didn’t care much about with not much success. Nowadays I only promote products I personally have bought and use myself because it’s a much more genuine and heart-felt to sell affiliate products. I would definitely recommend using products you love, not just choosing products because they pay well or fit in with your niche.
But saying that it’s worth understanding how much each program pays. Checkout my post on affiliate marketing commission rates for more on this topic.
The Power Of Email Marketing
Depending on your marketing method, and there’s lot to choose from, you should definitely consider using email marketing. Email marketing is one of the best ways to sell affiliate products online. With an email list, you can gain much more control over your traffic.
Whether you choose to become a blogger, or use paid marketing, you’re at the whim of your advertising budget or the latest Google algorithm to get traffic. But once you start generating your own email list, you can send messages to your list at any time, helping subscribers with a specific problem and promoting your products to them.
As your list grows, you should find it easier to generate affiliate sales once you understand the best ways to generate traffic and collect email subscribers. See also the power of email marketing.
Product Reviews & Target Audience
One of my very first affiliate sales came from a product review I wrote about a website building software. It’s long since obsolete now, but when I started out it was a useful product which helped me build my websites.
So I wrote a review on Hubpages.com and got a sale! I was over the moon. Reviews are good because they attract people who are looking for your specific product, or one like it. With “to do” articles, like this one, you attract a different audience and it can be more difficult to sell from them.
One of the best uses of your time as a new affiliate is to get to know your target audience. Your target audience is the small cross section of the online marketplace who is most likely to want your particular product. Once you understand them really well, you’re in a much better position to create content (or run advertising) which attracts them specifically, and not the millions of online people who are not looking for what you’re selling.
Checkout the customer avatar worksheet pdf to learn more about your target audience.
Making Money Is A By-Product Of Creating Value
Another way to think about selling affiliate products online is as a by product of creating some useful and amazing content. With the 95% of new affiliates who drop out, you’re going to need a strong reason to keep going and make your first sale.
For some affiliates it comes easy and happens within a few months. But for others it can take years to make a break through. So one of the best ways to guarantee your first sale is to choose a topic and strategy of marketing online which is aligned with your values and fulfils a need in the marketplace outside of only trying to sell.
When you align yourself with a larger vision for your affiliate business which you enjoy, you’ll go much further than most. This gives you a huge edge over those who only want the outcome of selling affiliate products – profit.
A Case Study
Take a look at one of the most successful affiliate websites online: Martin Lewis’s MoneySavingExpert.com. Yep, that’s an affiliate website and money is made from product recommendations. But the site offers huge value to consumers and this is the primary reason for it – the money is a by product of helping people save money from their utilities, mortgages, credit card bills and a whole host of other advise, help and support.
So being successful as an affiliate can be a by product of helping them solve certain problems. When you align your affiliate business with a market need and successfully solve problems with your products, you can create an affiliate business through helping.
This is much more rewarding and satisfying than simply selling products for the sake of monetary gain!
Summary
So hopefully you have some ideas about how to make your first affiliate sale online by now. There’s many ways in which affiliates sell products online. Checkout my article 22 ways to promote affiliate products for some ideas. But before setting off on a long journey, such as affiliate marketing, it’s wise to create a plan.
Make sure you take the time to consider your niche. In a niche you love, you’re going to keep going much longer than in one in which you have no interest.
Once you have made your first sale, you can repeat the process to make many more. But building a successful affiliate business can be rewarding in so many ways, and not just financially. If you align your affiliate strategy with a purpose, vision and mission, you’re much more likely to stay the course for long enough to start generating sales and making your business profitable.
Learn more about starting an affiliate business from scratch here.
