Earn Commissions Selling Products Online

Anyone can earn commissions selling products online using a clever business model called affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketers earn commissions by promoting other people’s products through their unique affiliate links. When a sale is made, it is tracked back to the third party “affiliate” who referred it. They receive a commission based on the sale. Some commissions can be as much as 50% and some can be as little as 1%.

earn commissions selling products online

Physical products, for example tend to pay lower rates of commission than digital products. So if you become an affiliate on Amazon, for example, you can promote items and earn anywhere from 1% to 20% on their range of products. Digital products pay more because there are fewer costs involved in delivering a digital product. Therefore the savings can be passed on to the advertisers (affiliates). With a digital product someone can purchase from anywhere in the world and access the product immediately over the internet. Examples of digital products are ebooks, online courses and software products.

Earn Commissions Selling Products Online

To earn commissions selling products online you first need to find a product you want to promote. There’s a huge variety of affiliate products to choose from and you can find them in pretty much any topic you can think of. Amazon, eBay, Clickbank and other major online marketplaces offer affiliate programs you can join and promote a huge variety of products.

earn commissions selling products online

Once you have chosen a product to promote, join the relative affiliate program which lets you promote it (through your affiliate link). In any affiliate program you will get access to an affiliate “portal” where you can access your unique affiliate link and use that to send buyers to the product. When someone makes a purchase through your affiliate link, you earn commissions based on what you sell.

There’s many ways in which affiliate promote their links. You can become a blogger, use an email marketing service or promote through you social media platforms. You can create a YouTube channel or run paid advertising. Checkout this article: 22 ways to promote affiliate products.

Earn Commissions Selling Products Online – Choosing Your Marketing Strategy

You can pick any marketing strategy you like according to your needs. If, for example you have a busy lifestyle and not much time, you might prefer to use paid advertising to drive traffic to a landing page. From there, collect subscribers on an email list and promote your products automatically through your marketing list.

build an online business

On the other hand, if you have a lot of time and not much money, you can choose a marketing strategy based around content creation instead. Blogging and video blogging are two such strategies used by affiliates to draw in website traffic to send to affiliate products. There’s also unpaid social media marketing strategies you can use too.

Choose a platform such as Facebook or Twitter, and focus on finding people in your target audience who might be interested in your product .

Earn Commissions Selling Products Online – Most Lucrative Products To Sell

As I already mentioned, some products pay as little as 1% commission. So you’ll need to sell a lot of that particular product in order to make it worth your while. Digital products tend to pay more – typically 30-40%. But there’s also high ticket affiliate marketing products to consider too. These are products which pay much more per sale than your average item.

Subscription products are a good idea too. These are products which carry ongoing monthly fees; many of them pay the affiliate an ongoing recurring commission for sales they have referred. So even with fewer sales of both high ticket and recurring commission products, you can earn more as an affiliate than with low value “one off” commissions.

Here’s an example of some high ticket products: Even at 8% commission, you can earn a nice commission if you manage to sell one of these products. With high ticket items, you can earn more even with fewer sales.

earn online from sales of other people's products

Summary

Anyone can earn commissions selling products online by becoming an affiliate marketer and joining an affiliate program. Once you have joined you will be able to promote products offer by that particular program. Amazon for example has an affiliate program anyone can join. You can then promote products from Amazon and earn from those sales.

There’s many different affiliate products you can choose from and some are more lucrative than others. For example, recurring income affiliate products and high ticket items will generally let you earn more per sale than the standard low value physical product you might find on Amazon.

There’s also many ways to promote affiliate products. From blogging, to video marketing, pay per click advertising, email marketing and social media strategies. You can even promote affiliate products offline in a variety of ways. Providing you send your customers through your affiliate link, where they purchase a product, you can earn from those referrals.

Learn more about affiliate marketing and get started here.

Earn Commissions Online

You can earn commissions online even without a product of your own to sell. It’s a business model known as affiliate marketing. With affiliate marketing, third party referrers send customers to the product/service and get paid a slice of the profit. When a sale is made it is tracked back to the affiliate who referred the customer.

Affiliates can do all sorts of activities to make sales online:

  • PPC advertising – pay per click
  • Blogging and v’logging – video blogging
  • Email marketing – sending automated email messages using an autoresponder.
  • Social media platforms
  • SEO – search engine optimisation
  • Link building for website authority
  • Niche website building
  • Other content creation -e.g. ebooks and infographics

Earn Commissions Online Selling Other People’s Products

To make your first sale online can be a bit of a challenge. Initially you’ll need to get some training and set up a website and/or sales funnel. A sales funnel is a system whereby the affiliate can send qualified subscribers into an email marketing campaign. The subscriber is then sent a series of automated messages which lead to affiliate products.

This whole system can be automated and scaled up to a global audience. This means affiliate marketing can be very lucrative and ultimately give you a passive income.

earn commissions online

There’s other ways of doing affiliate marketing too though. You don’t necessarily need a sales funnel. Some affiliates build blog websites and refer traffic directly to the affiliate products from there. But an email list is recommended because it gives you more control over the traffic you generate. Some affiliate marketing tactics are much faster than others.

For example, PPC – pay per click marketing is very fast, but more expensive than blogging, which is a very slow method of marketing. However, in the long run and with enough content, blogging can give you a passive income from the work you’ve done previously.

Your Lifestyle

Your lifestyle may determine the route you take as an affiliate marketer. If you’re time rich, but don’t have much budget for marketing, you might choose a longer term route which meets your needs better. Blogging might fit in this scenario, or video blogging (v’logging).

niche blogging

If you’re busy in a full time job and don’t have much time, you would be better off using paid marketing to get traction more quickly and automate the process. Paid marketing is much more scalable than content creation. Plus it is much faster too. However, be prepared to spend money initially while you’re learning the skills.

On the whole a good rule of thumb is that if you’re busy, use paid ads. If you’re broke, hustle; meaning create content and build up a “digital asset” over the longer term. Once you have built a large blog presence online (or a bunch of videos), you can send the traffic you generate to a relevant product/service which is suitable for your audience.

Target Audience & Affiliate Marketing

Your target audience is an important part of marketing as an affiliate. Knowing who is going to be most interested in the product/service you’re promoting is vital if you want to attract the right audience and sell your product/s. If you attract an audience which isn’t a good fit for your chosen product, you’ll struggle to sell anything.

target

So whether you are promoting affiliate products through blogging or paid ads, it’s worth spending some time thinking about who you want to attract with your marketing. If you’re selling a Yoga course, for example, you don’t want your content to be about flower arranging! The content you create should be aligned with the product/s you are selling.

See how to know your target market and customer avatar worksheet.

Earn Commissions Online: The Right Products

Your choice of product to sell is pretty important to if you want to become successful as an affiliate marketer. Some products are better than others and some pay much more than others too. For example, Amazon has an affiliate program and you can sell pretty much anything from the site for a commission.

However, the commission rates are pretty low and range typically between 5% and 11%. Digital products pay much more: usually around 30%-40% commissions. Then there’s subscription affiliate products and high ticket affiliate marketing products.

high ticket

Subscription products are good because they pay recurring commissions and a high ticket product usually pays over $500 in commission for a single sale. So you don’t need to sell as many of them in order to become profitable.

Earn Commissions Online: Why Most Fail

Not everyone who attempts to earn commissions online is successful. In fact there’s a huge number of affiliates who quit. The affiliate marketing success rate is low for a number of reasons:

  • There’s a very low barrier to entry: nearly anyone can “give it a go”
  • People quit too easily
  • People think affiliate marketing is easy
  • It requires a different mindset than most people have (see growth mindset and affiliate marketing)

Serious about building an income online? Access a free video series to learn more and get started.

Promote Products Online And Earn Commissions

Anyone can promote products online and earn commissions based on their referrals. Affiliate marketing is a business model which allows anyone to earn by making online referrals.

It’s a bit like recommending someone to your favourite restaurant. Only, when you refer someone to an affiliate product, you earn a commission if they make a purchase. Affiliates are everywhere online. In fact you’ve probably already made a purchase through someone’s affiliate link.

promote products online and earn commissions

There are affiliate links on my site too. Should you purchase something through one of my affiliate links, either on the site here or through my emails, I earn a commission.

Anyone can become an affiliate by joining an affiliate program and learning how to promote their affiliate links. Access a free video series here to learn more.

Promote Products Online And Earn Commissions – Strategies

There’s various strategies affiliate marketers use to promote and sell products online. If you already have a website, you can even promote products from it, if you can find affiliate products which your visitors would like.

Some affiliates build information websites, like this one. Others build email lists and use paid marketing campaigns to drive traffic into their list. Then they promote affiliate products to their email subscribers.

promote products online and earn commissions

List building is one of the best ways to do affiliate marketing. With an email list, you can send emails to your subscribers, promoting various products and services which they might like. If someone purchases something, you earn commissions based on the sale.

As affiliates get better at list building, they can build huge lists of subscribers – sometimes hundreds of thousands of people. By sending out a single email, they can sell hundreds of products simultaneously.

Some affiliates use blogging as a cheap strategy for getting traffic to their affiliate products, like me. You can also use YouTube videos, both paid and organic methods to get visitors to purchase your products.

Organic marketing strategies take much longer in general though than paid marketing. For blogging and organic video marketing, you need to create a lot of content over several months or years. Over time, once your content starts working for you, you can promote products online and earn commissions from work you’ve done previously.

Promote Products Online And Earn Commissions – Types Of Products

There’s thousands of affiliate programs you can join to promote products online and earn commissions from. Depending on the kind of content you want to create, or how you go about it will determine the kinds of products you promote. If you have an existing website, which already gets traffic, you can find suitable products by looking for affiliate programs in your niche. Just type “your_niche affiliate programs” into Google and see what comes up.

Affiliate programs are available in most topics and areas, so choose something which is suitable for your audience. For example, if you have a fishing related website, look for a fishing affiliate program.

finding affiliate programs

As an affiliate marketer, it’s useful to choose a topic, and program you have an affinity with, especially if you want to be a content creator. Creating content to draw in traffic to your affiliate products does take time and effort. So you’ll need to choose something you like to create content around.

Types Of Products – Digital, Physical, High Ticket, Recurring

If you want top promote products online and earn commissions from them, it’s worth knowing that some products pay considerably more than others. For example, Amazon pays affiliates between 3% and 11% commissions on products they refer through the Amazon affiliate program. This is pretty low, and it’s hard to make a good income using only Amazon.

Digital products on the other hand pay considerably more: 40% and upwards typically.

You can also promote recurring commission products such as software products which carry a monthly fee. Or, membership products are also a good way of earning a recurring income from each sale.

High ticket affiliate products are those which offer a large value to the customer. These can be affiliate marketing coaching courses to help people build online businesses, for example. 1 on 1 affiliate marketing coaching courses offer the most value to people wanting to earn an income online. So they carry a larger price.

See also highest paying affiliate programs list for more of the top paying affiliate programs.

The Fastest Way To Become Profitable Online

the six figure sales funnel

Most people who want to promote products online and earn commissions, don’t want it to take years before they see a profit. Most new affiliates want to see results quickly. To build an online business in the quickest possible time is expensive because you’ll need to learn how to use paid marketing, and ideally purchase a high value sales funnel (like the one above).

Once you have a sales funnel up and running, with a range of products in it, you can learn paid marketing to send targeted visitors into it. Without either a high value sales funnel, or using paid marketing, your affiliate business will likely take much longer to take off.

There’s still ways to sell products online and profit from them, such as organic marketing. This article is an example of a slower strategy – blogging. With blogging it can take months or years before you see any traffic. With paid marketing, you can turn your traffic on the same day as setting up your advert.

Give Yourself An Advantage Online

Whatever strategy you choose to promote products online and earn commissions from the sales, you should at the very least have:

  1. A recurring income product, ideally a product range
  2. An email autoresponder – so you can build a list of subscribers
  3. Your own hosted website – you can use free blog sites but these are much more difficult to generate traffic for. See create website and earn money.

If you’re ready to get started you can join a training program through this link. Or learn more about how an online business works through the free video series by clicking the image below.