Wondering how to make the first sale as an affiliate? Your first sale is a massive milestone as an affiliate marketer. Many would-be affiliates aspire to become financially free and make thousands per month. But this can’t happen before you make your very first sale. The first sale is therefore a significant step to help build confidence in yourself and your marketing skills. Once you can make one sale, you can make many more.
So how can you make your first sale as an affiliate. Here’s a few key components which should help you gain traction.
How To Make Your First Sale As An Affiliate – Aligning With A Product
There’s many ways to skin a cat and the same is true of affiliate marketing. You’ll need a strategy to make your sale, but rather than talk about strategies I’m going to cover some important principles. You can ready my article 22 ways to sell affiliate products for some marketing ideas.
Firstly choose a product you actually adore. Unless you’re head over heels with a certain product, it’s going to be much harder selling it. When you’re aligned with a product, you can sell it without doubt, knowing it has huge value. Ideally choose something you have bought yourself too. If you don’t actually want to buy your product, how are you going to authentically promote it to others?
Find a product which is aligned with a topic or subject that’s close to you. That way, you can create some content around your product. Drawing people to your affiliate product is easier when you align yourself and your interests with your product.
How To Make Your First Sale As An Affiliate – Before Selling, Know Your Audience
Many affiliates will rush in pasting their affiliate link hither and thither. But this seldom works unless you have a carefully selected audience and you know who you’re selling to. Your target audience is key to selling affiliate products and if you don’t even know who they are, you’re going to struggle.
To define your target audience you need to brainstorm what kind of people will benefit and appreciate your product the most. Most people in the online world don’t give a jot about your product. But a small slice of the online marketplace will step over people to buy it from you. Your work in defining your target audience and customer avatar will shave potentially months or even years off your first sale. See customer avatar worksheet pdf and define who exactly you’re going to target with your advertising/content.
Choose A Strategy
Choosing a strategy can take some time. There’s many ways you can sell affiliate products, from paid advertising, niche websites, social media strategies to content creation. Depending on your circumstances you can pay for advertising and build an email list or build a resource such as a blog which draws in traffic organically.
You can of course do more than one strategy too. Build a blog up slowly while testing your paid advertising strategy. However, if you jump around too much, you won’t get traction in any area. So choose a strategy you can stick with for some time. If you’re a blogger, like me, pick a topic you love writing about. that way, blogging become more of a hobby and you’ll sustain it for much longer.
How To Make The First Sale As An Affiliate – Mindset
If you’re looking for a sale, but not doing the work, you could have a very long wait. So your strategy needs to be for the long term. Short sporadic efforts will seldom give you any traction as an affiliate, even if they give you a lone sale.
On the other hand, you can get lucky and make a sale by pasting your link on social media. Affiliate marketing is sometimes unpredictable and so your income from it will be unpredictable too. But the goal isn’t just the first sale and no more, the goal should be to learn how to make that first sale, and then make many more with this knowledge. So the “one-off” sale isn’t the long term goal, but it will act as a motivating factor when it comes in.
With affiliate marketing there’s often a lot of work that goes on where you don’t get an immediate paid reward for it. This can seem like a trial, but it’s well worth it when sales start coming in while you sleep!
A good analogy for your affiliate business is a Chinese bamboo tree. It takes several years of gestation before it breaks through the soil. After it does though, it can grow 90 feet in just a few weeks. Your affiliate business can be the same. Once you figure out how to make your first sale, you’re on easy street and can replicate this strategy and improve on it.
Set Your Intention
Affiliate marketing isn’t always easy and you’re going to come up with a number of problems trying to make your first sale. A good antidote to this is to set your intention so that no matter what you keep going. You can always have a break, give it a rest and come back to affiliate marketing. It’s a super versatile business model which is very forgiving. Around 95% of affiliates will quit and this is important to remember. They wouldn’t quit if it was easy!
Remember what affiliate marketing can give you too which can help keep you going when it gets tough:
- Complete time and financial freedom
- Financial independence and freedom from a job/boss
- No more commute
- Live anywhere earn any amount!
That’s pretty awesome and well worth the effort. On the other side of a whole bunch of work is that freedom. Keep this in mind when you think of quitting. Build your mindset such that doubt doesn’t exist and quitting isn’t in your vocabulary!
Fail Forwards
Fail forwards is a term I picked up in the community I’m a part of. Sign up to my email list to learn more about it. Failing forwards is something you have to do as an affiliate. It’s not a direct path to success from a particular straight road. Rather it’s a path of learning from your failures. Those failures are really stepping stones to success. If you can see your “difficulties” as those stepping stones rather than some massive calamity, you’re going to do much better than if you catastrophize over them!
Each “failure” teaches you something. If a strategy doesn’t work immediately, you should at least have some feedback. Affiliate marketing is about getting more and more feedback until you can simply zone in on those sales and do more of that. Once you have made your first sale, you can use your data/tracking to do the thing which brought it about.
This can take some time but the key is to never quit. If you keep at it, and keep failing, eventually you’ll stumble on a strategy which works for you. Once you do, consider it a massive success however small the sale commission is. That sale will keep you in the game! It’ll motivate you and inspire you. Once you’ve made your first sale, You’re unstoppable! Keep going and never quit!