Wondering how to earn passively from affiliate marketing? Affiliate marketing is one of the most accessible businesses whereby anyone can earn a passive income. It does however take some work to get to this point and there’s a few things you can do to give yourself an advantage.
Affiliate marketing is a business model which allows you to earn through the sale of other people’s products online. Join an affiliate program, get your affiliate link and start promoting. It is the promotion stage of affiliate marketing which trips most would-be affiliates up. Too many quit because they don’t give enough attention to getting the right training and support when it comes to promotion.
There’s many ways to promote affiliate products:
- Blogging
- Pay per click advertising
- Email marketing
- Social media
- SEO – Search Engine Optimisation
- Offline advertising
But to earn passively from affiliate marketing you need to be selling products. No sales means no commissions, so it’s vital you get a marketing strategy going which works. When it does start working, those sales can be coming in night and day and without you trading your time. This is the magic of affiliate marketing.
How To Earn Passively From Affiliate Marketing
To earn passively you need those sales to come in on autopilot. This is done through either using paid marketing or through building content. Enough content and enough free traffic and even small commissions can give you a nice affiliate passive income. To use paid marketing can be more difficult so it’s worth using a digital affiliate business system. The benefits of an affiliate business system are that you can earn considerably more per customer than for most affiliate products.
Most products only pay you once. But using an affiliate business system gives you the ability to earn through up-sells and subscription products for which you earn recurring income. This is one of the main secrets of top affiliates – they use subscription affiliate products. When they make a sale, they continue to earn for the lifetime of that customer.
With a one-off commission, you need to keep selling over and over again. But with recurring commission each sale adds to your monthly recurring income, which is passive once you’ve made those sales.
How To Earn Passively From Affiliate Marketing – The Use Of Automation
Automation is the key to a passive income when selling products and services online. With affiliate marketing you don’t need any products of your own and you can sell almost anything you can find online. So long as a product has an affiliate program, you can join that program and sell that product as a third party referrer.
Products can be sold through the use of automated systems which is another “ace” up the affiliate marketers sleeve. Using either content, or paid marketing, you can collect email subscribers from a website and send out automated messages. Here lies another one of the affiliates tricks – the ability to automate delivery of marketing messages to thousands of subscribers simultaneously.
Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to build trust online and sell affiliate products. Combined with the sale of subscription products, email marketing gives you a huge advantage when it comes to generating a passive income online with affiliate marketing.
Breaking Even On Advertising
Earning passively is much easier the more customers you have. With an online business you have access to a global audience. But to reach that audience with your subscription products is going to cost a fair amount in marketing, if you use paid marketing. Paid marketing is much faster than organic marketing (content creation). With content, you can expect to work for several months just to get a small amount of traffic. Paid marketing is faster and you can get instant traffic in a matter of hours. The only problem is that paid marketing is expensive.
Much of the traffic you pay for won’t buy from you, so to find a profitable strategy takes some “tweaking”. Run paid advertising and sell an “entry level” product from your product range. This allows you to break even on your advertising budget. You’ve now got a customer for free and you’ve sold a subscription product – which means recurring income.
With a high ticket product range, you can also earn from up-selling to existing customers too. A high ticket product range gives you more opportunity to either break even on your advertising budget, or make a profit. With recurring income subscription products, you pick up a passive income from each customer. So your job as an affiliate is to find an advertising campaign which lets you break even or make a profit on the first item in the sales funnel.
Earning Passively From Content Marketing
Another way to earn passively from affiliate marketing is through creating content. Although this is a much slower strategy than the more scalable paid marketing route, it’s still a viable option if you have the time and inclination to build content – either through blogging or using video.
Given the time and resources you can build an information resource online which attracts a lot of free traffic from the search engines. This website, for example is a blog website with over 700 articles on it. It generates free traffic from the search engines and people sign up to my email list and purchase affiliate products.
The main problem with organic traffic is that it takes a lot of time and effort initially to build your resource. But once you have built it, it can bring in free sales on autopilot night and day! It’s a cheap alternative to using paid marketing if you don’t have a large marketing budget and a high ticket sales funnel.
