As a beginner in affiliate marketing, it seems as simple as to “promote link and earn money“! With an affiliate link, you can simply promote it and if someone purchases a product, you get a commission. But is it really so simple? Can you really just promote your link and earn money? When I started out as an affiliate marketer in the early 2000’s, I used to think so.
But no, it’s not so simple as to do that. There’s a lot more to it. You can of course get lucky a few times. But to earn money consistently as an affiliate marketer, it takes a lot more than just to promote your link and earn money. Firstly, you need to know how to promote your affiliate link and where to promote your affiliate link. As a beginner, you get your affiliate link and simply paste it anywhere on the internet you can! I pasted affiliate links everywhere, expecting any random person who landed on it to snap up whatever I was selling! Sadly it just didn’t happen like that!
Promote Link And Earn Money
To promote an affiliate link and earn money from it, you need to actually make a sale. Pasting your affiliate link willy nilly anywhere you can doesn’t guarantee any sales. In fact most of the people finding a long messy affiliate link will massively resist clicking on it! Why would they click, just so you can earn money from them?
An affiliate link pasted on your social media platform, for example, isn’t nearly as attractive to a potential customer as one which saves them money on their bills, for example. Or one at the end of a review they are seeking for something they actively want to purchase already. Moneysavingexpert.com is a website which helps people save money on their bills and is also an affiliate website. It’s a good example of how to promote your affiliate link and earn money. But the site wasn’t built overnight.
Many affiliates think that they can make quick money online by getting an affiliate link and pasting it everywhere they can. But their best bet to make money from affiliate links is to give value first. This can be in the form of some information on a website, an ebook or a free downloadable pdf. Or even a free video series to learn about earning online.
Promote Link And Earn Money – Strategies
There’s many ways you can promote a link and earn money online. Once you join an affiliate program, you can get a unique affiliate link which is tracked back to you. Should someone purchase the product/service having gone through your link, you’ll earn a commission.
There’s many strategies affiliates can use to make affiliate commissions using their unique affiliate links. You can build a blog, like this one, build an email list of subscribers, or link through your social media profiles. But making consistent sales through affiliate links can be tricky; especially if you’re relying on passing traffic clicking on your links.
It can be very disappointing as an affiliate beginner when nothing comes of all your link pasting! So you need to be pro-active in building a following and pasting your links in the right way. Read my article on this titled 22 ways to promote affiliate products.
The key to getting people to your link and to want to click on it is to provide value upfront. This can be done through:
- Creating content which help solve a problem for your potential customer – whether a blog, a video or through emails
- Running advertising to build an email list – see the power of email marketing.
- Finding relevant people for your products – through social media, for example.
Common Problems For Affiliates
Do you want to buy a new tyre for your car? Here! Buy this tyre {insert affiliate link}. You don’t want to buy a tyre from me do you? Why? I sell great tyres!? But this is an article about how to “promote link and earn money”! So it’s the wrong content and audience to sell a tyre. If I had a blog about tyres, it might make for a more suitable place for a tyre affiliate link.
This sounds obvious but it’s a common mistake.
I made this mistake too when I first started out as an affiliate marketer. I tried to sell everyone courses about making money online. Most people aren’t searching for such courses. Many don’t believe they can make money online and many don’t even want to try. But I thought that because I was so enthusiastic about it, everyone would be!
Therefore one of the keys to becoming successful as an affiliate marketer is to know your target audience/market. Knowing your target audience is a massive key because when you can get very clear on who would come rushing to your product with their credit card in hand, you know your audience!
That’s a hot audience and a review website is a place where you might find such a customer. With a review website, someone is in the last step of the buying cycle. They aren’t browsing and thinking about it, they are often just about to purchase. They just want to know some tiny detail, or be reassured that their purchase is the right one. Then they will purchase – hopefully through your affiliate link!
By creating content around your affiliate link which draws in the right kind of customer, you can make money from it much more efficiently than by pasting your link wherever will let you! See where to promote your affiliate link.
Making More Money From The Same Link
Not all affiliate links are equal either. Some affiliate links point to low cost products like you’d find on Amazon, for example. A $100 product on Amazon, can make you anywhere between $1 and $12 as an affiliate. Amazon’s affiliate commissions are notoriously low, see affiliate marketing commission rates.
But with digital products you can make $30-$40 for the same amount of work, as an affiliate. So it’s important to know which are the best paying affiliate products, before you start out. Some programs offer recurring commission products and others still pay out high ticket commissions.
If your affiliate link points to a product on Amazon, you can earn a few dollars/pounds. But if it points to a high ticket product range, you could earn lifetime commissions for the same, or a similar amount of work.
Using Paid Marketing To Promote Your Link Vs. Free Marketing
The fastest way to earn money through affiliate marketing is to use paid marketing to build an email list of subscribers. In conjunction with a high ticket product range, you can get a good return on your investment through the selling of high ticket digital products which offer the highest levels of commission.
In order to profit from using paid marketing, your return will need to be greater than your investment – both in advertising and product investment. This means you’ll need to use large value items within a digital sales funnel. Physical products tend to pay much lower levels of commission than digital products. So it’s much more difficult to profit through the selling of physical products as an affiliate – especially if you’re going to use paid marketing.
Paid marketing has two distinct advantages over free marketing strategies. When you set up a paid marketing campaign, you get results very quickly. You can see whether your campaign is working or whether you should stop your campaign before burning through your budget. You can also increase your marketing spend and scale up quickly using paid marketing. With organic marketing, promoting your affiliate link takes time. You can’t see immediately whether your content building efforts are coming to fruition. You also can’t scale up quickly through organic content marketing.