Yes you really can get paid for recommending products online. It’s a clever business model known as affiliate marketing. You don’t have to own the product yourself and can simply refer customers to them for a “cut” of the profit. When someone buys a product through your unique affiliate link, the sale is tracked back to you. The product owner then pays you an affiliate commission based on the sale.
There’s many affiliate programs available online. You can find them in almost any area you could think of. One of the most popular programs is Amazon’s. Anyone can join Amazon’s affiliate program, grab an affiliate link to any one of thousands of products available on the site and promote their link online in a number of different ways.
So how do affiliate marketers promote products online? Well this article is one such method. If someone lands on my content and buys something from my website, I earn an affiliate commission based on the sale. But there’s many more ways you can promote your affiliate link besides blogging.
Get Paid For Recommending Products – Choose Your Product & Promotion Strategy
Start by joining an affiliate program such as Amazon’s. Once you have joined, you should be able to access an affiliate portal on Amazon’s website. Here is where you can access your affiliate links to whatever product you choose to promote from the site.
Once you have your link, you can learn the methods of link promotion such as:
- Blogging
- Email marketing
- SEO – search engine optimisation
- PPC – pay per click
- Social media marketing
You don’t have to learn all these methods. You can choose just one method and stick with it until you have fully mastered it. Some affiliates choose blogging, some use paid marketing. Others use YouTube and upload multiple videos to attract an audience. Checkout this article on 22 ways to promote affiliate products for some strategies you can use. One of the simplest and best methods of product promotion is to build an email list of subscribers and automate a series of email messages designed to sell an affiliate product.
Get Paid For Recommending Products – Email Marketing
Affiliate marketing is similar to a friend recommending a nice restaurant. The only difference is that when your recommendation leads to a sale, you can earn a commission! But if you only tell one person about your recommendation, your earnings are limited to whether that particular person buys (or not)! So to expand your potential customer base of recommendations you can build an email list of subscribers.
An email list is one of the best things you can invest in as an affiliate. It lets you automate communication with multiple people at once and build your list up over time. By providing some kind of service through your list, you can attract people who are likely to want your product/service. Build trust by offering consistent value through your emails. Some affiliates build email lists into the tens or hundreds of thousands of subscribers. With one email, you can recommend a single product to thousands of people at once!
You can access an email autoresponder here and get started with list building. For a step by step walkthrough of the setup process you can access a training resource here.
Types Of Products
There’s all kinds of affiliate products you can promote online and get paid a commission for sales you generate. You’ll find many on Amazon, as I already mentioned. However, Amazon’s products will typically pay only between 1% and 10% commission on any sales you generate. This is quite low, so you’ll need to sell a lot of products to make a good income from this strategy. There’s other products you can choose to recommend which are much more lucrative such as high ticket and subscription products.
A high ticket items typically has a much higher price tag than a standard affiliate product. This means you’ll earn more for each referral. Subscription affiliate products are also worth noting because you can earn recurring commissions from them. These are products such as training and mentorship products which carry membership fees and software products. Digital products are also worth considering if you’re thinking of becoming an affiliate. A typical digital product will pay much more than a standard physical product. Digital products typically pay between 30% and 40% commissions.
Summary
You can get paid for recommending products and services online using a business model called affiliate marketing. Affiliates are third party referrers who recommend products – typically online.
To become an affiliate you only need to join an affiliate program and get your unique affiliate link. The main skill to learn is some form of online marketing method such as blogging, paid marketing, email marketing or social media marketing.
Most affiliates build an email list of subscribers. The bigger their list, the more they can potentially sell and the more they will make. You can build an email list with either paid marketing or free, organic marketing. Organic marketing (e.g. blogging) will typically take longer though than using paid marketing.
If you’re interested in building your own online enterprise through product recommendations, you can start here with this online resource.