Earn Commissions Selling Products Online

Anyone can earn commissions selling products online using a clever business model called affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketers earn commissions by promoting other people’s products through their unique affiliate links. When a sale is made, it is tracked back to the third party “affiliate” who referred it. They receive a commission based on the sale. Some commissions can be as much as 50% and some can be as little as 1%.

earn commissions selling products online

Physical products, for example tend to pay lower rates of commission than digital products. So if you become an affiliate on Amazon, for example, you can promote items and earn anywhere from 1% to 20% on their range of products. Digital products pay more because there are fewer costs involved in delivering a digital product. Therefore the savings can be passed on to the advertisers (affiliates). With a digital product someone can purchase from anywhere in the world and access the product immediately over the internet. Examples of digital products are ebooks, online courses and software products.

Earn Commissions Selling Products Online

To earn commissions selling products online you first need to find a product you want to promote. There’s a huge variety of affiliate products to choose from and you can find them in pretty much any topic you can think of. Amazon, eBay, Clickbank and other major online marketplaces offer affiliate programs you can join and promote a huge variety of products.

earn commissions selling products online

Once you have chosen a product to promote, join the relative affiliate program which lets you promote it (through your affiliate link). In any affiliate program you will get access to an affiliate “portal” where you can access your unique affiliate link and use that to send buyers to the product. When someone makes a purchase through your affiliate link, you earn commissions based on what you sell.

There’s many ways in which affiliate promote their links. You can become a blogger, use an email marketing service or promote through you social media platforms. You can create a YouTube channel or run paid advertising. Checkout this article: 22 ways to promote affiliate products.

Earn Commissions Selling Products Online – Choosing Your Marketing Strategy

You can pick any marketing strategy you like according to your needs. If, for example you have a busy lifestyle and not much time, you might prefer to use paid advertising to drive traffic to a landing page. From there, collect subscribers on an email list and promote your products automatically through your marketing list.

build an online business

On the other hand, if you have a lot of time and not much money, you can choose a marketing strategy based around content creation instead. Blogging and video blogging are two such strategies used by affiliates to draw in website traffic to send to affiliate products. There’s also unpaid social media marketing strategies you can use too.

Choose a platform such as Facebook or Twitter, and focus on finding people in your target audience who might be interested in your product .

Earn Commissions Selling Products Online – Most Lucrative Products To Sell

As I already mentioned, some products pay as little as 1% commission. So you’ll need to sell a lot of that particular product in order to make it worth your while. Digital products tend to pay more – typically 30-40%. But there’s also high ticket affiliate marketing products to consider too. These are products which pay much more per sale than your average item.

Subscription products are a good idea too. These are products which carry ongoing monthly fees; many of them pay the affiliate an ongoing recurring commission for sales they have referred. So even with fewer sales of both high ticket and recurring commission products, you can earn more as an affiliate than with low value “one off” commissions.

Here’s an example of some high ticket products: Even at 8% commission, you can earn a nice commission if you manage to sell one of these products. With high ticket items, you can earn more even with fewer sales.

earn online from sales of other people's products

Summary

Anyone can earn commissions selling products online by becoming an affiliate marketer and joining an affiliate program. Once you have joined you will be able to promote products offer by that particular program. Amazon for example has an affiliate program anyone can join. You can then promote products from Amazon and earn from those sales.

There’s many different affiliate products you can choose from and some are more lucrative than others. For example, recurring income affiliate products and high ticket items will generally let you earn more per sale than the standard low value physical product you might find on Amazon.

There’s also many ways to promote affiliate products. From blogging, to video marketing, pay per click advertising, email marketing and social media strategies. You can even promote affiliate products offline in a variety of ways. Providing you send your customers through your affiliate link, where they purchase a product, you can earn from those referrals.

Learn more about affiliate marketing and get started here.

Earn Commissions Online

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.

earn commissions online

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).

niche blogging

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.

target

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.

high ticket

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.

How To Earn Commissions Online

Want to know how to earn commissions online? Anyone can earn commissions online by selling other people’s products. Your unique affiliate link is tracked and you receive payment based on what you sell.

Affiliate marketing is the business model which lets anyone promote other people’s products over the internet. You get paid based on the sales you refer.

How To Earn Commissions Online

How To Earn Commissions Online – Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is basically referral marketing. When you successfully refer a customer to a product, you receive a commission based on that sale. It’s a little like recommending a friend to a nice restaurant. Except when your referrals go to the restaurant and buy a meal, you get paid!

You’ll find affiliate marketers all around the internet. They recommend products and services which you might have already purchased through their affiliate links.

affiliate marketing for beginners

Not all affiliates earn the same amount of commissions though and, depending on how you go about an affiliate marketing business, you can have varying levels of success. Affiliates choose products to promote and then promote them through various means and strategies:

  • Blogging – writing content on a website or blog
  • Paid marketing – Using the various paid platforms available
  • Email marketing (list building)
  • Video marketing (YouTube)
  • Using various social media platforms
  • Offline marketing – using traditional marketing strategies such as newspaper advertising, leafleting etc.

How To Earn Commissions Online – Automatic Selling Systems

The best way to advertise online is to use automation in your marketing strategy and automated online selling systems to sell. With an automatic marketing method, you can run adverts 24 hours a day on complete autopilot. By selling other people’s products online using automation, you can earn a scalable income and all without trading your time for money.

first learn, then earn
First learn, then earn..

In most jobs, people trade their time for money and are paid by the hour. Since your time is finite, and there’s only so many hours in the day, there’s always a cap to what you can earn; even on a great income. But with products and the internet, which offers a global reach, automation and selling can replace your income and create an uncapped income potential.

Affiliate products work well for this too because you don’t personally have to handle products or deal with customers. Affiliates just create pathways to send customers to products. Postage and customer service is handled by the company with the products, so your only concern is referring customers.

How To Earn Commissions Online – Types Of Affiliate Products & Rates

There’s many types of affiliate products on the internet. Choosing the right products and services can be a bit of a mine field. One way to discern which products are the best to promote is by looking at the affiliate marketing commission rates.

How To Earn Commissions Online

Most physical affiliate products pay between 3% and 10% commissions. This means you’ll earn $10 for a sale of a $100 item at the most, or $3 at the least. But with digital products you can earn a lot more. Digital products can pay out between 40% and even up to 100% commission in some cases.

A 100% commission product is often part of a product range. So companies can afford to pay this much because the lifetime value of a customer will recoup this loss. Digital products don’t need to be physically posted. This saves a lot of money. Manufacturing costs are low also with digital products.

Once a product is created, it can be sold and re-sold again and again without incurring any more costs. With a physical products, manufacturing costs are much higher because you need to create every product you sell.

Savings made can be passed on to the affiliate marketers who promote the products. Hence why digital products are often better payers than physical ones.

How To Sell Products Online

Earning commissions online happens when you successfully sell other people’s products. To do this does take some time and effort. But once you’ve done it once, you can do it again and again using automation.

a landing page example
A landing page collects subscribers information, and gives them something useful in return – like this ebook.

This can be done through a sales funnel. A sales funnel is used to collect subscribers information through a landing page. When someone enters their details on a landing page, they enter the funnel.

the sales funnel
The funnel is an email marketing system which delivers email messages, value and products which might be useful to subscribers

From here they receive a number of email messages which contain affiliate links. When someone purchases a product from an affiliate link, the affiliate earns a commission based on the sale. See affiliate marketing funnels and done for you affiliate funnel.

The lead magnet which is offered on a landing page should be aligned with the product range within the sales funnel. For example, my ebook lead magnet is “affiliate marketing for beginners“.

How To Earn Commissions Online

The products in my sales funnel are products which help people learn how to earn online such as software and training products.

Step 1 – Set Up Your Sales Funnel

You can set up a done for you affiliate funnel using the SFM digital product range. The SFM program will give you landing pages, products and all the software you’ll need to get started earning online. Once setup, you’ll need to promote your sales funnel.

You can do this via various strategies according to the products you place in your “digital storefront”. With more expensive products you’ll be able to use more expensive marketing strategies. Click the image below to set up your account.

the sales funnel set up
Access The SFM Dashboard by signing up for a free account. (You can access module 1 only with a free account). Full access requires a membership.

Paid marketing platforms can be very expensive, so you’ll need a high ticket product range in order to use the more expensive platforms which offer more reach and the ability to scale up quickly. Paid marketing is the fastest way to grown an online business. But it’s not the only way. You can also use cheaper and free marketing strategies such as blogging or video marketing. These types of strategies are typically much slower and more time consuming though, but free!

Step 2 – Choose Your Products

Within the SFM back office you’ll be able to choose a product range you can sell through your sales funnel. The more expensive products give you more personal training, and they also give you larger value commissions you can access through sales you make.

As an SFM Essential member you get the following commission structure in your sales funnel product range:

the SFM product range
(With the Essential membership you can also earn 100% commissions on sales of the All In Package)

If you purchase other products within the range (see the chart above), you can access higher levels of commission. More info on the SFM Commission Structures.

Step 3 – Marketing Your Funnel

Once you’ve set up your sales system, you need to send qualified leads to your landing page/s. This is done through marketing and you can choose from a number of marketing strategies.

niche blogging for profit

One of my marketing strategies is blogging. This article is an example of blogging. By creating lots of content around your products and services, and leading your readers into your sales funnel, you can attract customers for your products.

You can also use paid marketing strategies too, video marketing, social media marketing and so on. In the SFM training area you’ll find lots of training and support with all aspects of marketing online. You can even access 1 on 1 affiliate marketing coaching and training through some of the courses.

Get Started

You can access Module 1 of the SFM back office here for a free trial, or dive straight in with Mentors All In which gives you full access and you can set up your sales funnel straight away.

If you want to learn more about The SFM, you can sign up for a free video series here.

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Best wishes,

Tim