earn commission selling products online Archives

You can earn commissions online even without a product of your own to sell. It’s a business model known as affiliate marketing. With affiliate marketing, third party referrers send customers to the product/service and get paid a slice of the profit. When a sale is made it is tracked back to the affiliate who referred the customer.

Affiliates can do all sorts of activities to make sales online:

PPC advertising – pay per click
Blogging and v’logging – video blogging
Email marketing – sending automated email messages using an autoresponder.
Social media platforms
SEO – search engine optimisation
Link building for website authority
Niche website building
Other content creation -e.g. ebooks and infographics

Earn Commissions Online Selling Other People’s Products

To make your first sale online can be a bit of a challenge. Initially you’ll need to get some training and set up a website and/or sales funnel. A sales funnel is a system whereby the affiliate can send qualified subscribers into an email marketing campaign. The subscriber is then sent a series of automated messages which lead to affiliate products.

This whole system can be automated and scaled up to a global audience. This means affiliate marketing can be very lucrative and ultimately give you a passive income.

There’s other ways of doing affiliate marketing too though. You don’t necessarily need a sales funnel. Some affiliates build blog websites and refer traffic directly to the affiliate products from there. But an email list is recommended because it gives you more control over the traffic you generate. Some affiliate marketing tactics are much faster than others.

For example, PPC – pay per click marketing is very fast, but more expensive than blogging, which is a very slow method of marketing. However, in the long run and with enough content, blogging can give you a passive income from the work you’ve done previously.

Your Lifestyle

Your lifestyle may determine the route you take as an affiliate marketer. If you’re time rich, but don’t have much budget for marketing, you might choose a longer term route which meets your needs better. Blogging might fit in this scenario, or video blogging (v’logging).

If you’re busy in a full time job and don’t have much time, you would be better off using paid marketing to get traction more quickly and automate the process. Paid marketing is much more scalable than content creation. Plus it is much faster too. However, be prepared to spend money initially while you’re learning the skills.

On the whole a good rule of thumb is that if you’re busy, use paid ads. If you’re broke, hustle; meaning create content and build up a “digital asset” over the longer term. Once you have built a large blog presence online (or a bunch of videos), you can send the traffic you generate to a relevant product/service which is suitable for your audience.

Target Audience & Affiliate Marketing

Your target audience is an important part of marketing as an affiliate. Knowing who is going to be most interested in the product/service you’re promoting is vital if you want to attract the right audience and sell your product/s. If you attract an audience which isn’t a good fit for your chosen product, you’ll struggle to sell anything.

So whether you are promoting affiliate products through blogging or paid ads, it’s worth spending some time thinking about who you want to attract with your marketing. If you’re selling a Yoga course, for example, you don’t want your content to be about flower arranging! The content you create should be aligned with the product/s you are selling.

See how to know your target market and customer avatar worksheet.

Earn Commissions Online: The Right Products

Your choice of product to sell is pretty important to if you want to become successful as an affiliate marketer. Some products are better than others and some pay much more than others too. For example, Amazon has an affiliate program and you can sell pretty much anything from the site for a commission.

However, the commission rates are pretty low and range typically between 5% and 11%. Digital products pay much more: usually around 30%-40% commissions. Then there’s subscription affiliate products and high ticket affiliate marketing products.

Subscription products are good because they pay recurring commissions and a high ticket product usually pays over $500 in commission for a single sale. So you don’t need to sell as many of them in order to become profitable.

Earn Commissions Online: Why Most Fail

Not everyone who attempts to earn commissions online is successful. In fact there’s a huge number of affiliates who quit. The affiliate marketing success rate is low for a number of reasons:

There’s a very low barrier to entry: nearly anyone can “give it a go”
People quit too easily
People think affiliate marketing is easy
It requires a different mindset than most people have (see growth mindset and affiliate marketing)

Serious about building an income online? Access a free video series to learn more and get started.

You can earn commission selling products online, even if you don’t have any products yourself. Affiliate marketing is a business model in which third parties are rewarded for passing customers on to other people’s products. Anyone can become an affiliate too. All you need to do is join an affiliate program and get your unique affiliate link. Once you have your link, you can advertise it to make sales. When someone buys a product through your unique affiliate link, the sale is tracked back to you and you receive a commission based on the referral.

As long as you have a laptop and internet connection, you can promote products and services online from anywhere. The key to making a success out of affiliate marketing is of course to get good at finding customers for products. When you can do this in large numbers, you can potentially replace your income from online referrals. This can give you a huge amount of freedom; both in terms of your time, geographical location and from a monetary perspective too.

But what does it take to become successful as an affiliate marketer? What are the average earnings from affiliate marketing? What are your chances of success?

Earn Commission Selling Products Online – Affiliate Marketing

To earn commission selling products online there are many strategies you can use:

Blogging
Video blogging (v’logging)
Social media marketing
Email marketing – building an email list
PPC – pay per click advertising
SEO – search engine optimisation
Link building – part of SEO
and so on..

To sell products en-mass, you need to learn how to reach an ever growing audience and this typically doesn’t happen over night! Most affiliates will have at least some struggles when they begin to learn the skill of selling online. Many will also quit! To become successful in selling products online you need to get good at marketing. Affiliate marketing means marketing other people’s products and services. The marketing part of the equation is your responsibility as an affiliate. Unless you get good at this skill, your chances of success in affiliate marketing are pretty low.

The Email List

One of the best and fastest methods of selling products online is through using an email marketing list. Autoresponders are automated email marketing systems which allow affiliates to collect emails from a website and send automated messages out on a regular basis. Through building a large list of subscribers, affiliates can sell products in large numbers through sending email marketing messages to their subscribers.

An email list can be built up to many thousands of subscribers which gives affiliates the means to reach an ever growing audience. By connecting to their subscribers on a regular basis, affiliates can built trust, give value and ultimately promote useful affiliate products which allow them to earn commissions based on the sales.

The email list is pretty important for affiliates as it gives them control of their traffic. Without traffic, an affiliate can’t sell products and services online. Traffic can be generated in many ways through either building content or paying for it. Paid traffic is far quicker than free traffic, which takes a lot longer and more effort to obtain.

Earn Commission Selling Products Online – Types Of Product

Not all affiliate products are equal, and not all pay the same in affiliate commissions. Physical products, for example typically pay less than digital products in terms of commission percentages. A typical physical product you might find on Amazon, for example, pays between 3-10% commission, depending on the product. A typical digital product on the other hand will pay much more – usually from 20-40% commission.

Some products are much more expensive than others too, so you’ll earn a larger commission if you refer a sale. High ticket affiliate marketing products are typically those which pay out a minimum of $500 for referring a sale.

There are subscription affiliate programs too which pay affiliates recurring commissions. These are good for financial stability if you’re a beginner affiliate especially because regular recurring commissions can help to stabilise your affiliate income.

Marketing – The Key To Selling Products Online

Marketing is the key to becoming successful as an affiliate marketer. Whether you decide to use paid marketing, build a blog or create a YouTube channel, you’ll need to attract an audience which resonates with your messaging and who are a good fit for the products and services you choose to promote. Blogging, for example can be used to attract an audience through SEO – search engine optimisation. Over time and with patience, a blog can ultimately attract website traffic completely for free!

If you’re less patient, you can use PPC – pay per click marketing to attract traffic directly from social media platforms or from search traffic. This is often used to send targeted traffic to a landing page where affiliates collect emails and follow up with automated messages via email marketing. Email marketing combined with PPC (pay per click advertising) is one of the fastest ways you can build an affiliate business. Combined with a high ticket product range this can give you the best chance of building a profitable income from scratch with affiliate marketing. See also best products to sell as an affiliate.

Access a free video series to learn more about affiliate marketing.