I looked for a long time for a legit online business that pays out. After several years of jumping from one course to another, I eventually found an online community of entrepreneurs who helped me make a living online. Before that happened I tried many online strategies including an eBay business, Forex marketing, and even created my own ebooks to sell online.
But I didn’t have the money to trade with using Forex, the eBay business wasn’t going anywhere and I couldn’t sell my ebooks! I put myself on a marketing course which led me to another business model known as affiliate marketing. With affiliate marketing you get paid for recommending and selling other people’s products over the internet. Despite affiliate marketing being a legit online business that pays, for me it didn’t work at first. I tried all kinds of strategies but had problem after problem.
Legit Online Business That Pays
Affiliate marketing is the best business model I found. But there’s different ways of using affiliate marketing and many ways to do it. Amazon for example is an online shop which many are comfortable buying from. Did you know anyone can join Amazon’s affiliate program and recommend products from the site for a share of the profit?
Many affiliates start out by promoting products from the likes of Amazon – as I did. Unfortunately Amazon products aren’t the best for affiliates. Amazon pays its affiliates between 1% an 11% commission depending on the product sold. In comparison, many digital products like you’d find on Clickbank pay much more – between 40% and 60% commissions.
So obviously it’s better to promote the higher commission products. For what can amount to the same amount of work, you’ll get up to 60% commission on certain products compared to 1-11% on others. Why work hard making only smaller commissions? The answer is often a lack of knowledge. I spent years working away online promoting low value items and making very little. I could have spent that same time promoting larger value products which offered bigger commissions.
This is why knowledge is valuable in affiliate marketing.
Legit Online Business That Pays – Other Kinds Of Products
There’s other considerations too. With digital products you earn larger commissions because there’s less costs involved in manufacture and delivery. Digital products can be accessed over the internet with zero postage or handling costs. This makes them the perfect products for affiliate marketers.
Recurring income affiliate products are another game changer for affiliates. It took me a long time before I learned this valuable insight. Before I started promoting recurring income affiliate programs I would only get paid once for a sale. A recurring income program is something which offers a membership or some kind of software. Software products work well for affiliates if they make a single sale and keep earning for a lifetime from each customer they refer to a product.
Of course advertising is a consideration for affiliates. Many beginner affiliates quit because they don’t get any results in their affiliate businesses. They work at the wrong activities and don’t manage to make any sales. They assume that affiliate marketing does not work and so quit before they make any sales.
Marketing Your Affiliate Business
Marketing is one of the biggest obstacles for affiliate marketers. Affiliate marketing is a performance based business. Unless you make sales, you don’t get paid at all! So marketing is an important skill which every affiliate will need to learn. There’s a couple of main ways to advertise your affiliate products and they can be divided into two main categories:
- Running paid advertising – PPC pay per click/direct response marketing
- Content marketing – like this article which is a “free” source of advertising, but takes time and effort to create.
For low cost items like a book on Amazon, for example, you can make a few cents/pence profit. This means that paid marketing is out. You can’t run a paid advertising campaign to a $10 product, make $0.10 in commissions and turn a profit. However, if you have a business model which gives you 40% commissions on products valued at over $1000, there’s much more scope for using paid advertising. With products which pay out $8000+ commission in your digital “shop”, you can even afford to make some mistakes while you’re learning! See SFM digital business system.
The SFM – Six Figure Mentors
I eventually found an online business system and community which helped me to build an income from the internet. In 2015 I saw a video on Facebook and signed up for a free video series. This led me to join the community which is known as SFM – The Six Figure Mentors, or “Mentors”.
The Mentors is an online training program and community which helps people from all walks of life learn the skills to build online businesses from scratch.
With affiliate marketing there is a lot to learn and it’s not an easy “get rich quick scheme”. It takes time to learn the skills to promote products over the internet. But with the right training and software, anyone can learn.
If you’re committed to the path of building an online business and don’t quit, getting the right help and advice, and the right product range can mean the difference between success and failure.
Here’s a picture of one of the online mentorship webinars I’ve attended during my SFM journey.
And here’s a picture of me with co-founder Jay Kubassek at a London event shortly after joining this community.
