Getting paid for online referrals is one of the best ways to earn money! You can earn from your armchair, with your feet up! You can earn from your laptop, from anywhere in the world. Once you’re making sales online, it means you can earn an independent income from anywhere. The implications are great. You can work in your own time and in your own way, quit your job and never have to work a job again or have a long commute again.
However, the downside is that there’s work involved in attaining this achievement. Firstly, you will need to learn a few new skills. You’ll also need to find a suitable product (or products) which you want to sell online and a method of selling it! There’s thousands of affiliate programs you can join and millions of products to choose from.
Certain products can pay much more than others too, so it’s worth doing some research to find the best kinds of products to sell. Subscription and high ticket products are the best in my personal experience. With a high value subscription product, you get paid recurring income from memberships which you have referred. High ticket items pay much larger commissions so you can get large paydays even with only a few sales.
With the right type of products, too, such as software products which are essential for business for example, customers will always maintain their subscriptions because the products are so necessary.
How To Get Paid For Online Referrals – Selling
While product choice is an important factor in getting paid for online referrals, your method of promotion is also as important. If you don’t find a method of product promotion which works, you won’t sell! So it’s definitely worth arming yourself with the right training and education for a good foundation.
Selling online is not a matter of being a “salesy” type person either. With the right marketing method, online sales can happen in your sleep without any “hard-selling” on your part. By using selling systems which drive traffic towards your offer, you can even sell in multiple countries worldwide – and on complete autopilot!
Once you have learned this skill, you can use it again and again to sell anything to almost anyone online. Access a training resource here to get started.
The main methods affiliates use to sell online are:
- Paid advertising – using platforms such as Google Adwords, YouTube, and social media
- Email marketing – an important part of selling online is automating email messages to deliver value (and your offers)
- Content marketing – content, (like this blog post), can be used to attract an audience organically through various means (social media, SEO (search engine optimisation), email marketing etc.)
How To Get Paid For Online Referrals – Choosing A Product To Sell
Choosing a product to sell is often where you begin the affiliate marketing journey. A lot of affiliates start out on Amazon because there’s so many products to choose from. You can find Amazon’s affiliate program here and anyone can join. Once inside an affiliate platform, you can access your unique identifying links – known as affiliate links. By selling a product online through your unique identifying “code”, you’ll earn commissions and get paid a portion of the sale price of any given product you sell.
Certain products will pay more than others. For a comparison, most physical products will pay between 1% and 10% commission. With digital products you can earn from 30%-40% commission. Digital products pay much more because they can be delivered automatically over the internet. As such there’s very little cost involved in manufacture and delivery. Whereas with physical products there’s more costs involved in manufacturing, postage and handling.
So although Amazon is a popular choice for affiliate marketers when they get started online, it doesn’t offer the highest levels of pay available. Amazon pays between 1% and 10% for most of it’s affiliate products. You can also find products in almost any category with a simple search online. Simply type in to a search engine “{your topic} affiliate program” to find products in almost any niche.
Promotion Of Your Affiliate Link
Once you have found a product through joining an affiliate program, you can get your affiliate link. This is just a link of code which you can attach to your blog posts, email messages or use throughout your social media platforms. There’s many ways to promote your affiliate link, but the most leveraged method is through using a paid advertising platform. Many affiliates will start with Google Adwords or Bing which lets them create ads related to their product.
While some affiliates send traffic directly to their offers, this is often thought of as a waste of advertising budget. It’s far better, especially if you’re paying for advertising, to collect emails and start building an email list of subscribers who you can serve somehow.
An email list gives you much more control over your traffic, whereas paid traffic is expensive to acquire, organic traffic takes time to build. But once you have captured an email address of a visitor, you can deliver value to them and build some trust.
Top earners from referrals always have an email list of subscribers to promote their products to. So it’s definitely worth getting an email autoresponder if you’re going to sell products online. You can get one free here.
Free Marketing Methods
While paid marketing is much faster and more scalable way to selling affiliate products online, it does take some time to learn. While learning a paid marketing method, you can expect to spend some advertising budget while you make a few mistakes. So it’s worth starting with a small budget you can afford to lose.
But if paid marketing isn’t appealing to you, there’s also a cheaper solution which is organic marketing. Organic traffic can be built upon through content creation and many affiliates use this approach to generate website traffic and sales.
This can be done through blogging, video (e.g.YouTube), or using social media to interact and connect with people.
While a free marketing method can take longer to attract an audience to sell to, it compounds over time. So the more content you have, the easier it becomes to attract customers over time. A blog or a YouTube channel are two possible avenues for organic traffic generation. See also how to get traffic for free.
Finding The Right Audience – Your “Customer Avatar”
The “customer avatar” is the right person to attract to your website if you want to sell a specific product. Since there’s so many people online at any given moment, trying to sell to everyone results in selling to no-one!
In order to get paid for online referrals, you must attract a specific audience who see the value in what you’re selling! For example, if you had a DIY store, the type of person who usually shops with you might be of a certain age. You might attract mostly people aged from 30-50, for example. This “data point” is worth a lot to you once you figure it out and understand who is most likely to want your product.
As you learn more about your customer avatar, you can collect more and more “data points” until you have built up a very specific customer profile. Once you understand “who” that is, you can target them more specifically.
Getting paid for online referrals is much easier when you understand your customer avatar. Checkout the customer avatar worksheet for more info on this.
What To Expect
To get paid for online referrals you must join an affiliate program, get your affiliate link and learn some kind of marketing/promotion method. Getting your affiliate link is the easy part, but content promotion is where many affiliates get stuck. There’s a large drop out rate in affiliate marketing for this reason – most affiliates struggle making money with their promotion method.
So it’s definitely worth investing in a course of study to get the right foundations first. Once you have got some basic training, you must start with a marketing method and learn through trial and error! This can be a little frustrating at the beginning but if you have a good understanding of your product and your customer avatar, you’re already ahead of most affiliate beginners who attempt it.
With paid marketing and organic (free) marketing methods there are upsides and downsides. Free marketing is obviously cheaper, however, it will take much longer to get any traction. Paid marketing is much faster and you can get a more immediate feedback to see if it’s working or not. With blogging or video creation (content marketing) it will take a lot longer before you see any results.
The tipping point in blogging, for example, where the sales are coming in without much effort, might be weeks/months down the line. With paid marketing, you can expect results within days, depending to your marketing budget.