There’s a tonne of affiliate marketing advice available on the internet. But what advice will help you the most in making money from affiliate marketing?
- How can you get started if you’re a complete beginner?
- What are the best affiliate products to promote?
- How will you promote your affiliate offers?
- What are the best promotion tactics?
Affiliate marketing can be tough and the right information will give you a huge head start. So getting help if you’re a beginner should be your first port of call. You can access a free video series here and an all in one affiliate training resource.
Affiliate Marketing Advice – Know Your Products
If you choose to sell something as an affiliate, it’s useful to get to know your products well. When you know your products well it serves multiple purposes:
- You understand the benefits of your products.
- You can create more content around your products.
- It helps you define your audience better.
- You will come across as more authentic to your buyers if you understand the product, and have bought it yourself.
- You can answer customers questions regarding the products you recommend.
Choosing your products is important for affiliates too. It’s good to choose a product you believe in and use yourself. It sets you apart from less authentic affiliates who’s only aim is to make money.
Affiliate Marketing Advice – Know Your Audience
Knowing your target audience is a major key to knowing how to sell to them. There’s a saying in business, “try to sell to everyone, and sell to no-one”. Your target audience for affiliate marketing should be well defined. If you don’t get to know your target market, you’ll waste a lot of time putting your marketing message in front of the wrong people.
Since affiliates sell globally, you have the world to sell to as an affiliate. But if you don’t know how to define your target audience, your affiliate business will be like a scatter gun. You’ll waste your energy. You want your marketing efforts to be like a sniper, not a scatter gun!
By defining who exactly will be most interested in your products or services, you can save marketing time and budget, and focus your efforts on those people who are most likely to become customers. See customer avatar worksheet pdf for more on this topic.
Getting the wrong people to a website, for example, won’t result in a sale. So knowing your customer avatar well is a worthwhile use of your time.
Choose A Marketing Strategy
Affiliate marketing is nothing without marketing. The word is right there in the term “affiliate marketing”! But this can be easy to forget if you’re new to the business. You can get easily distracted after joining an affiliate program; following training videos and building websites. It can be easy to think your job is done, even if you’re just watching training videos all day long!
Without an effective marketing strategy, your affiliate business cannot work.
Marketing can take the form of paid ads, blogging, video blogging or social media marketing strategies etc. There’s a huge number of marketing strategies you can choose from. See 22 ways to promote affiliate products.
The marketing strategy you choose will depend on your circumstances. If you’re very busy, use paid ads. If you don’t have the money; hustle! Creating content is an option if you have time but not the money; but it will typically take a lot longer to get traction than through using paid ads.
Affiliate Marketing Advice – Build A List
Top affiliates have email lists because a list can put your in charge of your traffic and allow you to build longer term relationships with your subscribers.
Whether you’re using paid marketing or organic marketing, you can build an email list by offering something to your subscribers for free from a website or landing page.
As your list grows, and you communicate regularly with your subscribers, you can promote affiliate products over a much longer time period than a website would allow. You can also build your list to thousands of subscribers. A single email can mean multiple sales in this scenario. A website can take years to generate this kind of readership. But an email list can be built very quickly. Affiliate marketing is a numbers game and an email list will help you reach more people in less time.
Affiliate Marketing Advice – Subscription Products
Subscription products deserve a mention here too. With most affiliate products you only get paid once for each sale. But with subscription affiliate products you can make a sale and earn a recurring income from that one sale. With many sales this mounts up to a nice passive income.
Products such as business tools are particularly good for affiliates because they are hugely valuable to the people that use them. As such, online business owners will tend to maintain their subscriptions (to online tools and membership programs) which help them build their businesses for life. If you sell those particular products, this means you can more easily earn money consistently from an affiliate business.
One off or (one time) commissions only pay once so you need to keep making regular sales in order to keep the money coming in.
High Ticket Affiliate Products
High ticket affiliate marketing products typically pay $500 and over in commissions. If you consider the basic products you’ll find on Amazon, for example, you can see the difference. An Amazon product valued at $100 might only pay out $3-$10 in commission for referring a sale. See also Amazon affiliate marketing commission.
But high ticket products will pay much, much more. When you consider that it will often be from the same amount of effort that you can make $10 or $500, you’ll want to focus your efforts on the high ticket items.
Many people think that high ticket items won’t sell as well as the low value ones and in some ways this is true. Of course they may not sell in the same quantities, but once you know how to target your audience, the work involved won’t be very different for both types of products.
Product Range
Most affiliate products only pay you once and after that the company you have referred the customer gains a customer – often for life! That’s a shame because it means you’re only rewarded once for your efforts. You then need to keep sending new customers to the products in order to earn more money.
With subscription products you are rewarded for the lifetime of a customer. But with a product range, you can also earn commissions if a customer purchases a product from the same company – even years after your initial referral.
Product ranges are also often linked to high ticket products which means when your referral upgrades their membership, you earn a fat bonus! For more on this see SFM Digital Business System which offers a range of products you can promote as an affiliate, including subscription products and high ticket products.
You also benefit from a built in sales team, who close sales on your behalf. So there’s no need to personally sell those high ticket items yourself. (You simply refer the basic entry level products in a product range, the sales team does the up-sell). This is a good route to take if you want to sell high ticket items, but don’t want to personally do any selling!