If you’re wondering how to earn an online royalty payment, listen up! Royalties are typically paid to musicians, actors, writers and other types of performers or creators. As a former professional stuntman, I earn royalties from the film and TV performances I have done in the past.
Some time ago, I wondered how I could earn royalty payments working online, in some way. The answer I discovered is a clever business model known as affiliate marketing. Affiliates earn commissions through product referrals. As an affiliate, you’re effectively a third party referrer of customers. Affiliate marketers benefit from their content even years after they have created it, effectively making their income similar to royalties.
So what is affiliate marketing, how does it work, and how can you benefit from it and earn from it?
Online Royalty Payment – Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular ways to generate an income online. Affiliates are third party referrers but they can earn an income similar to royalties by selling other people’s products and services online. This website, for example is an affiliate website. If you should buy something from one of my recommendations here, I earn a commission based on the sale.
But there’s many ways you can earn as an affiliate. Here’s a few of the most popular strategies which affiliates use to sell other people’s products online:
- Blogging
- Email marketing
- Paid advertising
- Video marketing
- Social media platforms
- SEO – search engine optimisation
Online Royalty Payment – Affiliate Marketing Commissions
Royalties are paid to performers and creators based on work they have done previously. But you can earn commissions in a similar fashion as an affiliate in a number of ways:
- Create content which can be monetised with affiliate products – this can be written content (blogging) or video content for example
- Build an email list of subscribers and automate the sales process through email marketing using an autoresponder
- Sell subscription products (which continue to pay long after the sale)
Blogging, is a good example of how affiliate marketing can earn you a royalty income because once you have created a lot of content, you can get traffic and sales automatically, and for free! With paid marketing, you can pay to get people to a website but you need to keep paying in order to keep generating sales.
Earning On Autopilot – Other Earning Methods
Another way you can effectively earn a royalty income online is through using advertising on your content. Google Adsense pays content creators to place advertising on their content. With each click on an advert, creators get paid a percentage of the advertising fee. With enough content and visitors these small amounts can add up to a nice passive income – much like a royalty.
Content creators use video and blogging to build up a portfolio of online content which can be monetised with Google Adsense or a similar alternative. Over time content can attract the attention of the search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo and Duckduckgo.com etc. When this happens you can have a nice passive income from a blog or video channel on YouTube.
Traffic Creation
With any monetisation strategy online you’ll need traffic; that is visitors. You can build content to attract traffic or you can pay for it. The best way to monetise paid traffic is through an email list. The email list is the number one asset which affiliate marketers should have in order to build a profitable business from the internet.
With a website, most visitors are simply browsing. Seldom does a visitor make a purchase on their first stop on a website. It usually takes several touch points before a website visitor makes a purchase. (This is a good reason to use Google Adsense since clicking an advert is more likely than making a purchase).
But once you get website visitors to sign up to an email list, you can extend the period which which they can make a buying decision. This is great for affiliates who are selling products. It allows them time to build a relationship with their website visitors over the longer term. Often, someone will make a purchase even years after joining an email list. This just isn’t possible directly from a website, because most visitors will leave and never return!
Get Started
If you’re ready to get started as an affiliate marketer, the key sticking point for many new affiliate marketers is generating traffic and choosing the right products. So to be successful as an affiliate you’ll need some help and support.
Access an “all in one” online training tool which gives you a solid step by step process you can follow here.