Learning how to sell other people’s products online is one of the best skills you can learn in today’s turbulent climate. A clever business model known as affiliate marketing lets you place yourself in-between online purchases and take a commission for sales you have referred.
It’s a little like recommending a friend to a nice restaurant. Except that, with affiliate marketing you get paid for your recommendations.
Learning this skill could very well be the last thing you ever need to earn a living and become financially independent. Affiliates who earn full time from the internet can work from anywhere and never need to work a job, deal with a boss or take a commute ever again! That’s gotta be worth a little effort, right?
How To Sell Other People’s Products – Which Products?
There’s all kinds of products and services which affiliates can sell. Amazon and eBay are two of the most well know affiliate platforms. Anyone can join and promote products from these platforms through their unique affiliate link.
When someone clicks on your affiliate link and makes a purchase, you earn a commission based on that sale. There’s other things affiliate can promote too. Physical products like you would find on Amazon and eBay tend to pay the lowest levels of commission – 3%-11% typically. Digital products on the other hand will often pay 40% commission and over.
Digital products can afford to pay more because of the low costs involved in delivery of products. With a digital product you can deliver the item automatically over an internet connection. This cuts out many costs you would have with physical products such as manufacture, postage, handling and storage.
Some digital products also carry memberships too. With some membership products you can even earn recurring commissions based on each sale. See recurring commission affiliate programs.
Selling Online
There’s many strategies to selling other people’s products over the internet. Some affiliate marketers use content, like this article, to generate website traffic and lead people to products. Others use paid marketing and run adverts, leading visitors to a landing page where they collect their email. From there, they run email marketing campaigns to promote affiliate products.
The key to selling other people’s products online is knowing who the customers are and putting the right products in front of the right people. If you already have a website, and simply want to add another revenue stream to your business, affiliate marketing might be a solution.
To find the right products for you website you need to think about your topic and what your website visitors would be anxious to purchase.
This comes down to knowing your target audience.
Why Is Target Market Important?
Why target market is important? Whatever product or service you choose to promote, you’ll need to get very clear about who your products serves the most. What pains or problems does your product solve for people and how does your products do that. When you delve deeply into your customer avatar, you will know all about them: age, sex, location, interests, friendship groups and family circumstances etc. When you know this information, it becomes all the more easy to target the right audience for your products and services.
Without this knowledge, you can spend a huge amount of time running adverts, creating content and getting nowhere. The internet is a big place and you need to become laser focused on who your message is the most relevant to.
In a high street store, it’s very easy to know what someone wants. In a shoe shop, don’t try and sell them flowers. This sounds obvious, but it’s a mistake people make online all the time. They don’t define their customer avatar clearly enough. Because of this they try and sell to everyone and end up lost and confused as to why nobody is buying.
With a well defined customer avatar, you know where they hang out online. You’ll know what they are searching for and you’ll know how to target them with your products and services.
Using Websites To Sell Other People’s Products
Many affiliate marketers use a website to sell other people’s products. A website is a good place to start and offers a cheap method of getting eyes on the products you want to sell. Most affiliates start with a website and are disappointed when nobody comes to visit it.
Even with a great looking website and a number of awesome products, you will never make any sales without traffic (visitors). To get traffic you can do several things:
- Build a social presence on any one of the many social media websites
- Create content on your website – see niche blogging for profit.
- Place links on other blogs and websites to bring in visitors + increase your site’s authority with the search engines
- Build content on other platforms (e.g.YouTube, ezinearticles.com), linking back to your website
- Optimise your website for the search engines and your content (SEO – search engine optimisation)
- Use paid marketing to bring targeted customers to your website – Adwords, Facebook, YouTube, Bing etc.
Building An Email List To Sell Other People’s Products
The email list is the “ace” up the affiliate marketers sleeve. Most affiliates build an email list so they can sell other people’s products from their list. As the number of subscribers on their list grows, they can earn more by selling other people’s products.
Some top affiliates grow their email lists into the hundreds of thousands of subscribers. A single email to a large list can result in multiple sales simultaneously. List building is one of the best ways to earn money by selling other people’s products online.
The fastest way to build an email list is through using paid marketing and sending visitors to a landing page. Once on the landing page, visitors enter their details to access certain information or get some freebie of some kind.
As subscribers enter their details they enter the “sales funnel”. A sales funnel is a system of email marketing and product delivery which “warms up” customers and then offers an “entry level” product to the subscriber.
How To Sell Other People’s Products – The Sales Funnel
A sales funnel is the best way to sell other people’s product online. It lets you build a relationship with your customers by giving them something of value, and following up with an email marketing series.
With some products, you can earn commissions from a number of different strategies. Having only one product in your funnel is not as efficient as having multiple products to earn from.
With a product range, you can sell an initial product, and then follow up with more valuable products which they might like. Ideally a good funnel will have:
- A digital product range – so you can offer existing customers more products
- A recurring income product – you earn an ongoing income from each customer
- A high ticket offer – high ticket digital products valued over $2000 giving the affiliate a 40% commission
- Multi-tier commissions – earn from sales made by your referrals
- A built in sales team – closing sales on your behalf
See SFM Digital Business System for more on this kind of product range and to access a funnel.
Using Paid Marketing To Sell Other People’s Products
The fastest way to sell other people’s products online is through using paid marketing. Depending on which products you are selling, you can either send customers directly to the product sales page, or into a marketing funnel. The sales funnel in many ways is better.
If you send someone to a sales page, they have only one opportunity to purchase that item. But if you collect their email address, you can follow up with countless emails over a much longer period of time.
Often sales are made from subscribers who have been on a marketers list for years. So given that you’ll be spending money to get people to products, it’s a good idea to collect their information. That way, you can build a relationship and extend the period of time in which they can make a purchasing decision.
To earn an income through using paid marketing selling other people’s products, you’ll need to make a profit. That’s obvious! But initially, you’ll need to test and measure your advertising campaigns and determine whether a certain strategy is working.
Most beginner affiliates will do this for a while and then give up because it’s not working, or they’re making a loss. But those who stick at it will eventually figure out a strategy which gives them a positive return. When this happens they simple leave their advertising campaigns running, and/or scale up by increasing their budget.
