how to get first sale in affiliate marketing Archives

How To make Your First Affiliate Sale

Wondering how to make your first affiliate sale? Your first sale as an affiliate marketer marks and important milestone. Once you’ve made a single sale, you’ve proved your strategy to work.

Once you’ve made one sale, you can make many more. Before the first sale can be tough because you’re finding your feet as an affiliate. You’re no doubt encumbered by scepticism and doubt. Making that first sale gives you momentum and belief which are two important factors in success in affiliate marketing. Without belief you don’t even try. Without momentum you’ll dawdle and stagnate.

So how do you do it? Are you going to create a blog, use a YouTube channel or build an email list using paid marketing? Are you using banner ads or a paid marketing platform such as Google Adwords, Bing, or YouTube? There’s so many ways to promote affiliate products it can be overwhelming for a beginner. So here’s a guide to get you on the right track.

How To Make Your First Affiliate Sale – Choosing Your Niche

Your niche is the topic, area or category in which you want to talk about or promote your product/service. You can do this on a blog or create video content on YouTube for example. Or, you can run adverts and send people to a landing page where you collect their email address and follow up with email marketing.

Your niche is important because you’re going to spend some time creating content in it. Whether you’re running paid ads, doing email marketing, blogging or creating videos, you’ll have more success if you choose a topic you have some interest or passion in. Making a sale online can take some time and dedication, and you’ll have greater staying power if you’re passionate about your topic and product.

If you’re going to create content as a means to drive traffic, choose a topic which you love and which isn’t too competitive. See also how to choose the best niche for affiliate marketing.

How To make Your First Affiliate Sale – Choose Your Platform

There’s multiple platforms you can use for affiliate marketing. Some of them are free and some are paid platforms. There’s pro’s and cons with each method of affiliate promotion. With paid marketing, you can get traffic very quickly. But you’ll need to pay for advertising and this can get costly, especially when you don’t know what you’re doing. The best advice is to tread carefully as paid marketing platforms can swallow up your money very quickly.

Free blog platforms such as Hubpgaes.com and Blogger.com let you create written content to attract your target audience. They are free, which is the upside, but the downside is that it can take a long time and a lot of effort to start getting free visitors to your blog posts. YouTube and TikTok are two free video platforms you can use to create and upload video content to attract your audience.

How To make Your First Affiliate Sale – Join An Affiliate Program

There’s thousands of affiliate programs you can join. Amazon, eBay, Clickbank and JVZoo.com are some of the most popular places where affiliates go to find affiliate products. You can find products in almost any niche you can think of too. Simply do a web search for “{your niche} affiliate program/product” and you should find a program with a suitable product to sell.

Ideally find a product which you would personally buy yourself. If you wouldn’t but the product yourself it’s probably not a great fit for you to promote it. But if you can rant and rave about a product, because you genuinely love it, it’s going to be much easier to promote it genuinely and authentically.

As a beginner affiliate I promoted many products I didn’t care much about with not much success. Nowadays I only promote products I personally have bought and use myself because it’s a much more genuine and heart-felt to sell affiliate products. I would definitely recommend using products you love, not just choosing products because they pay well or fit in with your niche.

But saying that it’s worth understanding how much each program pays. Checkout my post on affiliate marketing commission rates for more on this topic.

The Power Of Email Marketing

Depending on your marketing method, and there’s lot to choose from, you should definitely consider using email marketing. Email marketing is one of the best ways to sell affiliate products online. With an email list, you can gain much more control over your traffic.

Whether you choose to become a blogger, or use paid marketing, you’re at the whim of your advertising budget or the latest Google algorithm to get traffic. But once you start generating your own email list, you can send messages to your list at any time, helping subscribers with a specific problem and promoting your products to them.

As your list grows, you should find it easier to generate affiliate sales once you understand the best ways to generate traffic and collect email subscribers. See also the power of email marketing.

Product Reviews & Target Audience

One of my very first affiliate sales came from a product review I wrote about a website building software. It’s long since obsolete now, but when I started out it was a useful product which helped me build my websites.

So I wrote a review on Hubpages.com and got a sale! I was over the moon. Reviews are good because they attract people who are looking for your specific product, or one like it. With “to do” articles, like this one, you attract a different audience and it can be more difficult to sell from them.

One of the best uses of your time as a new affiliate is to get to know your target audience. Your target audience is the small cross section of the online marketplace who is most likely to want your particular product. Once you understand them really well, you’re in a much better position to create content (or run advertising) which attracts them specifically, and not the millions of online people who are not looking for what you’re selling.

Checkout the customer avatar worksheet pdf to learn more about your target audience.

Making Money Is A By-Product Of Creating Value

Another way to think about selling affiliate products online is as a by product of creating some useful and amazing content. With the 95% of new affiliates who drop out, you’re going to need a strong reason to keep going and make your first sale.

For some affiliates it comes easy and happens within a few months. But for others it can take years to make a break through. So one of the best ways to guarantee your first sale is to choose a topic and strategy of marketing online which is aligned with your values and fulfils a need in the marketplace outside of only trying to sell.

When you align yourself with a larger vision for your affiliate business which you enjoy, you’ll go much further than most. This gives you a huge edge over those who only want the outcome of selling affiliate products – profit.

A Case Study

Take a look at one of the most successful affiliate websites online: Martin Lewis’s MoneySavingExpert.com. Yep, that’s an affiliate website and money is made from product recommendations. But the site offers huge value to consumers and this is the primary reason for it – the money is a by product of helping people save money from their utilities, mortgages, credit card bills and a whole host of other advise, help and support.

So being successful as an affiliate can be a by product of helping them solve certain problems. When you align your affiliate business with a market need and successfully solve problems with your products, you can create an affiliate business through helping.

This is much more rewarding and satisfying than simply selling products for the sake of monetary gain!

Summary

So hopefully you have some ideas about how to make your first affiliate sale online by now. There’s many ways in which affiliates sell products online. Checkout my article 22 ways to promote affiliate products for some ideas. But before setting off on a long journey, such as affiliate marketing, it’s wise to create a plan.

Make sure you take the time to consider your niche. In a niche you love, you’re going to keep going much longer than in one in which you have no interest.

Once you have made your first sale, you can repeat the process to make many more. But building a successful affiliate business can be rewarding in so many ways, and not just financially. If you align your affiliate strategy with a purpose, vision and mission, you’re much more likely to stay the course for long enough to start generating sales and making your business profitable.

Learn more about starting an affiliate business from scratch here.

How To Get Sales In Affiliate Marketing

Just how do you get sales in affiliate marketing? And how come some affiliates make hundreds or thousands of sales while many struggle? There’s a couple of reasons why newbies struggle while long term affiliates thrive! Long term affiliates have some battle scars. They’ve often failed more times than the beginner has even tried. Because of this they know what they’re doing!

The other reason long term affiliates can make hundreds or thousands of sales easily is because they already have an audience.

As a beginner it takes time to build your confidence and time to build your audience. But for a seasoned affiliate with an email list of over 10,000 subscribers, for example, it’s another story.

A single email sent to an engaged audience can result in a number of sales, so for the long term affiliate making sales is easy. But a newbie who has just learned how to build an email list doesn’t have this power yet! They need to figure out who their audience is, what product/s to sell and how to get traffic to their offers.

So if you’re new, and have maybe just joined an affiliate program, you’re probably wondering how to take your affiliate link and turn it into cash! Heads up!

How To Get Sales In Affiliate Marketing – Your Audience

You can’t make any sales without an audience. You need someone to actually click on your affiliate link and make a purchase. Spamming it throughout your social media isn’t the best tactic and although you may get a lucky sale, it’s not a great tactic without some planning.

Understanding your target audience for affiliate marketing is one of the best things you can do as an affiliate. Your “target audience” is the small cross section of the online marketplace who is going to be most likely to want what you’re selling.

So if you’re selling a Yoga course, you might want to find people who fit that particular demographic. How old are they? Where do they hang out online? Where do they live and are they mostly male or female? Once you have gathered more information on your most suitable customer avatar, you can spend your time more productively in finding them online. Checkout the customer avatar worksheet pdf for more on this.

You can’t hit a target if you can’t see it. So dissecting who you are going after with your product is some of the best spent time you must find as an affiliate. When you intricately know who you’re selling to, finding them with your marketing becomes easier.

How To Get Sales In Affiliate Marketing – Marketing

The clue is in the term “affiliate marketing“. Without marketing, you’re not going to be able to put your product in front of customers. Marketing can be defined as any interaction with your potential customer. That could be through an email message, a paid advertisement, a blog post or a YouTube video. Or it could be from all of the above.

The more marketing points of interaction with your chosen customer avatar, the better. These are known as touch points and studies have shown that most online customers won’t buy from a single “touch point” alone. They need more like six or seven touch points before they will make a buying decision – especially from a website they don’t already know and trust.

So as an affiliate, your job is to create many points of contact with your potential customer to make the sale. While this can be tricky at first, you can automate this process through the use of building an email list, or running a re-targeting campaign on top of your standard marketing strategy.

How To Get Sales In Affiliate Marketing – Building The Email List

Building an email list is one of the best things you can do for your affiliate business. Whatever products you sell, having a list of email subscribers puts you in charge of your traffic and allows you to build trust and increase the number of touch points you have with your audience.

From a website, it can be much trickier to make an affiliate sale. The visitor only has a few minutes on a website after which they leave, potentially forever. But if you can get them to join an email list you can send them marketing messages over a much longer timeframe.

Making affiliate sales from an email list is therefore much easier than selling directly from a website, hoping your visitor will purchase on their first (and perhaps only) visit.

The Lead Capture Page

To build an email list you can either build a blog website (and create a lot of content), or pay to send targeted visitors to a landing page. From a website, you can offer something of value (such as an ebook) in exchange for your visitor’s email address.

Here’s an example of a landing page:

Why use landing pages? Simple. A landing page gives visitors a simple choice: sign up to your list or leave the page. With a blog website, there’s much more going on. So it’s much more difficult to “squeeze” a subscriber because they’re more distracted by all the options and content which they can browse. Landing pages are also known as squeeze pages because you’re attempting to squeeze a decision out of your visitors!

When using paid advertising, it’s much better to send visitors to a squeeze page as you’ll get more people joining your list than through sending them to a website. Once on your list, you have more opportunity to make an affiliate sale because you have a longer time to build trust with your subscribers through your email messages. Get a landing page software here.

How To Get Sales In Affiliate Marketing – Multiple Touch Points

Email marketing is just one way to get your marketing message in front of your potential customers more than once. You can also use other tools such as PushEngage.

Push engage is a push notification software which lets you automate update messages when you post new content on a blog. I use Push Engage on this website and if you accept notifications, you’ll be updated when I publish new content.

Another strategy used by affiliates is retargeting. Retargeting lets affiliates set up advertising campaigns which target people who have already seen their content somewhere before.

So if you have a YouTube channel, you can target people who have seen one of your videos before. With a blog, you can “follow” your visitors around the internet with an advert and bring them back to your site.

How To Get Sales In Affiliate Marketing – Mindset

Your mindset as an affiliate is a pretty important but often neglected key to online success. To get sales as a beginner affiliate can be much more difficult than for longer terms affiliates. Long term affiliates have gained experience as well as built a larger audience.

For the beginner who is full of doubt and scepticism, there’s a lot to overcome. Not only do you need to overcome your own fears, but you also have a large period of learning to get through before you can start taking some action in building an affiliate business.

At the very beginning, you won’t have any website traffic or email leads. This means you have a lot less leverage than a top affiliate with a huge list of subscribers. But remember they started there too (with nothing)! So if you’re struggling with no sales, remember to keep going and don’t quit! It’s easy to quit but harder to keep at it, especially when you don’t see any results from your hard work!

Your Choice Of Product

There’s all kinds of products which you can sell as an affiliate. Some products pay more than others and some sell better than others. If you’re going to make sales in affiliate marketing it’s worth choosing products which are going to be around for some time and which are super valuable.

A small shift in trajectory of a space craft can send it miles off course over a long journey. The same is true with your choice of products. Using low valued physical products will only give you small “one off” commissions. But choose to sell high ticket affiliate marketing products, and those which pay recurring income and your whole journey can be totally different.

The same amount of work can result in a completely different experience depending on your choice of what to promote as an affiliate. Choose wisely! One of the best way to get sales in affiliate marketing is to choose a program which has a build in sales team and a range of products (including high ticket and recurring commission). Learn more here.

Summary

There’s many ways to get sales in affiliate marketing and it’s a good idea to think big! After all, as affiliates you can market your products globally from your laptop and sell to people anywhere in the world.

One of the best ways to connect with an ever growing audience is through using email marketing. Get an autoresponder here for free and learn how to build an email list. Promote high value products to your list which offer high ticket and recurring income commissions.

With a range of high value products, you can more easily access the more expensive (and better) marketing platforms. But of course depending on your situation, you might also want to use a cheaper marketing solution such as blogging or video blogging, for example.

Access a training resource here for more info.