how to make money selling other people's products Archives

Wondering how to sell other people’s products online? Anyone can do this by joining an affiliate program and promoting their products/service through their unique identifying link, or affiliate link. Affiliates get paid from product referrals; it’s one of the most popular and simplest ways to make money online.

Amazon, for example has an affiliate program which anyone can join. When you join Amazon’s affiliate program you get access to a dashboard on Amazon’s website. It’s here where you can find your unique affiliate link dashboard and start promoting your link to generate sales. Amazon isn’t the only company you can partner with to promote products. You’ll find affiliate programs for almost any product you can imagine. A website called Hammacher Schlemmer lets you promote products which are valued far higher than most products you will find on Amazon. Here’s an example of a product you can promote; the amphibious Sub-Surface Watercraft!

On this particular item you can earn 8% of the sale value. That’s $24,000! So by choosing high ticket affiliate products you stand to earn a lot more per sale than from promoting low valued products like you might find on Amazon.

How To Sell Other People’s Products Online

Of course joining an affiliate program and getting your affiliate link is only the beginning. If you really want to earn from selling online, you’ll need to learn the strategies for selling online. There’s several ways in which you can promote your affiliate link to make money. These can be divided into two main categories; paid marketing and unpaid marketing. Free marketing requires a lot more work than paid marketing of course. This piece of content is an example of a free marketing strategy (blogging), which although is free takes time to create.

Paid marketing is a much faster method of making sales online but the catch is that it costs money! Here’s a few of the main strategies which affiliate marketers use to generate sales through their affiliate links:

Blogging and v’logging – video blogging
Content generation – creating written, video some other type of content (e.g. charts, maps, images, presentations, webinars, diagrams, pictograms, screenshots, gifs, memes, comics, infographics etc.
Email marketing – many affiliates build email lists of subscribers and promote their links to their subscribers.
PPC – Pay Per Click advertising is a fast and scalable strategy used by affiliates
Viral marketing – using posts and content which get rapidly shared on social media

How To Sell Other People’s Products Online

Depending on the product you choose and your particular circumstances, preference and abilities, you might choose any one of the above methods, or choose a combination of more than one. Your choice might also depend on the particular affiliate products you choose to promote.

For example, if you’re promoting low value products from Amazon, it will be much more difficult to make your business profitable using paid marketing. But if you choose high ticket affiliate products, paid marketing would be a more viable choice, because your return on investment will be much more (covering the cost of advertising).

One of the most popular methods of advertising affiliate products is through an email marketing list. With an email list, you use some form of marketing to send targeted visitors to a landing page. Here you collect their email address and follow up with some useful information which they have subscribed to receive. You can also promote your products to your subscribers (through your affiliate links).

Email List Vs Website

While you can also sell affiliate products directly from a website, very few visitors will actually buy from a website on their first visit. Most website owners therefore have learned to offer a “freebie” giveaway on their websites in order to encourage people to sign up to an email list.

Once a website visitors signs up to your email list from your website, you have a greater opportunity to build a longer term relationship with them and sell your affiliate products. On a website, on the other hand, they only have a few minutes to make a buying decision. Most website visitors will leave without having taken any action.

With an email marketing list, you can email your subscribers over a much longer period. Often people will sign up to my list from my website and make a purchase months (or even years) after they subscribe! This just isn’t possible on a website and most visitors will leave after only a few minutes, never to return!

Selling Through Blogging

Although blogging is a slower way to generate traction online, it’s a popular method because it’s super low cost! Bloggers create a lot of content on their websites to attract the attention of search traffic. Search traffic is the traffic which comes from search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, Duckduckgo and the like. When someone types a keyword into the search bar on Google, they are delivered a number of website pages in the results (SERPS – search engine results pages).

The goal of a blogger is to rank their content on the SERPS so that they get free traffic to their website and make affiliate sales – either directly from website banners or through their email list.

Blogging is a slow strategy but if you find a topic you enjoy writing about it can be very lucrative. Plus, if you stick with it for long enough it can give you a passive income, potentially for years! However, in most affiliate topics there’s a lot of competition. So it’s important to choose wisely because you’ll likely be blogging for a long time before you break through and start seeing a large volume of free traffic.

PPC – Pay Per Click Advertising

Pay per click advertising on the other hand is much faster. You can pay for visitors who are using search engines for their queries and place ads in front of the people you want to attract. You can also use YouTube, Facebook or one of the many other social media platforms to pay for traffic. Paid traffic can be turned on almost instantly, whereas traffic from blogging can take months, or even years to get in volume.

Paid traffic is also much more scalable than content marketing. So once you find a winning advert which generates profit, you can simply turn up the daily budget to make more sales. However there is an interim period where affiliates will need to test and measure different adverts (at their own expense). Most adverts won’t lead immediately to profit and to find which adverts are profitable can take some experimentation.

Pay per click advertising allows you to try out different ads to see what works and what doesn’t. When you find a winning ad, you can simply leave it running and create many more; scaling up the good ones and cancelling the ones which perform poorly.

If you’re interested in getting started with your own online business, access a free video series through this link.

Are you wondering how to make money selling other people’s products? A clever business model known as affiliate marketing lets you do exactly that.

Join an affiliate program
Get a unique affiliate link which directs people to the product and is “coded” to you.
Learn how to generate sales with that link.
Collect your commission on sales you generate.

Anyone can join an affiliate program, although some programs require you to have an up and running website or some kind of online following. But the vast majority of affiliate programs don’t require anything other than you to create a profile. Amazon is one of the most popular affiliate programs and anyone can earn commissions by referring customers to products on the site.

There’s a heap of other affiliate programs too covering all kinds of products and services on the internet.

How To Make Money Selling Other People’s Products – Product Promotion

The trickiest part of making money selling affiliate products by far is promotion. Some affiliates are bloggers, and promote affiliate links through their articles. Others will use paid advertising and build an email list of subscribers, promoting affiliate products to their list. There’s no “one size fits all” strategy with affiliate marketing although the top affiliates generally all have an email list, so it’s important to get one. (See free autoresponder for affiliate marketing). You can also promote affiliate products using:

SEO – search engine optimisation
Link building – to increase web ranking on the search engines (e.g. Google)
Social media marketing – both paid and free strategies can be used
Video marketing – using TikTok or YouTube for example
Ebook creation – ebooks can be used as lead magnets to help encourage website visitors to join an email list or sold directly from a website

How To Make Money Selling Other People’s Products – Choosing An Affiliate Product To Promote

You can choose any product you can find on the internet providing it has an affiliate program attached to it. Many products you find online will allow you to promote it through your affiliate link and earn commissions. However not all affiliate products pay an equal amount in commissions.

Physical products for example tend to pay less in commissions than digital products. Amazon’s commission structure goes from paying just 1% commission to around 11%. Digital products such as training courses and digital downloads tend to pay from 20%-40% commissions.

Subscription affiliate programs/products are a good idea for affiliates to promote because they offer ongoing commissions on each sale. So a single sale can bring in commissions for months or even years. High ticket products are those priced at a higher value than most online products and services. They typically will sell for over $500 and so you can earn a lot more on their sale. Ideally use a high ticket business model which offers a product range which includes high ticket and recurring income products for the best return on your investment.

List Building

List building is the preferred way to sell affiliate products online for a couple of reasons. Whether you pay for advertising to get people to your products, or whether you’re a content creator (like a blogger), you’ll need people to purchase your products to make money.

To get people in front of your affiliate products either takes time (in terms of generating content) or money (with paid advertising).

By sending website traffic to a landing page and collecting emails you get much more control over that traffic. With a website, a visitor only sticks around for a few minutes and then they are gone forever. With an advert, sending someone directly to an affiliate product, the same applies.

But on an email list you can continue to build a relationship with your subscribers for weeks, months and even years. Building an email list gives you control over your traffic. See also the power of email marketing. From a list you can continue promoting your affiliate products over a longer duration. Studies show that most people need several “touch points” before they make a purchase online.

how to make money selling other people's products — Source: https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/intl/en-cee/consumer-insights/consumer-journey/study-reveals-complexity-modern-consumer-paths-purchase-and-how-brands-can-make-inroads/

Using Paid Advertising Combined With Email Marketing

Combining paid marketing platforms with email marketing creates a powerful way to make money selling other people’s products. Email marketing allows you to extend the “getting to know you” period of building trust and paid marketing allows you to test and measure your advertising quickly.

Although initially there’s some learning with paid marketing, over time and with practice it can give you the best opportunity for selling items en-mass. Compared with other marketing strategies such as blogging and video blogging, for example, it’s much faster and more effective.

However paid marketing is costly and this means it’s far better to use the kinds of affiliate products which pay the most. Digital products which offer multiple payment strategies, software and membership products ( which pay recurring commissions), and high ticket products offer the best opportunity when using paid advertising.

Other free strategies are slow and less scalable. Blogging, for example can take months or years to generate traction, depending on the relative competition in your particular topic/niche.