Wondering how to make money by promoting other people’s products online? A business model known as affiliate marketing lets you do just that! The affiliate refers customers to a product/service through their unique identifying link, or “affiliate link”. When a customer makes an online purchase, the sale is tracked back to the affiliate and they receive a commission based on the sale.
Affiliates are third party referrers and don’t need to own or even purchase the products themselves. They simply join an affiliate program which has the product they want to promote. Then they promote their affiliate link online through using various strategies.
There’s many ways to do this including strategies such as:
- blogging,
- video blogging,
- paid marketing,
- email marketing,
- SEO (search engine optimisation) and
- social media marketing strategies.
Not all affiliates use the same methods of promotion and there’s thousands of products to choose from.
How To Make Money By Promoting Other People’s Products Online
What’s great about affiliate marketing is that it can be done around an existing job and your income can build up over time. It offers one of the most flexible ways of working and you can work from anywhere globally providing you have a laptop and internet connection.
Affiliate marketing is performance based however. So on the other hand you can work really hard and still not get paid if you don’t make any sales! Once you get affiliate marketing working for you though, you can earn passively from it from the systems and content you have built.
Affiliate marketing is an appealing sounding proposition for anyone who is fed up of working in a job and wants more time and financial freedom. But not everyone makes affiliate marketing work for them and there’s a high drop out rate in affiliate marketing.
One of the best known affiliate programs is Amazon. Anyone can join Amazon’s partner program, get an affiliate link and start promoting any of the thousands of products on the site.
How To Make Money By Promoting Other People’s Products Online: Product Promotion
Most affiliates will struggle initially if they haven’t had any training. (Access a free video training series here). The biggest challenge for new affiliates is putting a marketing message in front of the right people who will go on to purchase through their affiliate link.
To consistently make sales is the next hurdle for affiliates who have started generating sales. The next step is scaling an affiliate business to reach more and more people with your products and services.
Depending on your business model, the products you promote, available time and marketing budget, you might take one of several options to build an affiliate business online.
The main two marketing strategies are paid marketing and free strategies or content marketing. Paid marketing methods are much faster and more scalable. Whereas free methods typically take much longer, involve more work and are less scalable. However, with free marketing strategies which involve content marketing you can benefit from passive income from previous content you’ve created.
If you have a lot of time, content marketing might be more suitable. But if you have less available time, paid marketing might be more suitable.
Marketing Strategies
One of the most popular methods of building a large affiliate business is through email marketing. With email marketing, affiliates collect emails from a website or landing page by offering something for free to subscribers. They then send out regular messages to their subscribers promoting affiliate products. With a small list, you might think that affiliate marketing does not work. But with a huge list of subscribers, and by providing genuine value in your messages and building trust, you can sell thousands of products to subscribers on your email list.
Email marketing is a versatile form of online advertising which can be used in conjunction with both paid and free marketing methods.
With paid marketing, you can direct website traffic in a number of ways using a number of marketing platforms. YouTube, Facebook and Google Adwords are just some of the most popular marketing platforms you can use as an affiliate. With Adwords (Google Ads), you can target specific online search terms which relate to the products you are selling. Send targeted traffic to a website or landing page and collect subscribers information via email.
Blogging is another popular affiliate marketing strategy which is cheap to do but will typically take several months or even years to come to fruition, depending on the topic you choose, and the relative competition.
Summary
There’s many ways you can sell other people’s products online using a wide range of products and services and multiple marketing methods are available for their promotion.
Depending on your choice of affiliate business models and marketing methods, it can take several months or even years to get traction in an affiliate marketing business. Around 95% of affiliates quit so it’s a good idea to get training and support if you are serious about building an online business that generates an income.