Affiliate marketing is the business of selling other people’s products online. Anyone can learn how to become an affiliate and get paid for product referrals. Affiliates use all kinds of tactics and strategies to get their products in front of buying customers through their affiliate links. When someone buys something through an affiliate link, the referrer is credited for the sale. They will usually get paid a percentage of the sale value, according to the terms of the affiliate program.
Many affiliates will start out using Amazon’s affiliate program. Once you join, you get access to an affiliate “portal” where you can get your unique identifying link, or affiliate link. You can promote any of the thousands of products from the site once you have joined.
Selling Other People’s Products Online – Products
Despite Amazon being so popular with new affiliates, it’s not the best paying affiliate program you can use for product referrals. Amazon’s commission structure runs from 1% to 20% with most products falling into the 3-10% commission range.
So, if you promote (and sell) an affiliate product worth around $100, you can earn as little as $3 per sale. This means you need to make many sales in order to make a good income from your affiliate marketing business.
On the other hand, a product sale can be worth much more if you choose to promote high ticket affiliate products or subscription affiliate products. Even digital products will pay more per sale than most physical products (typically 30-40%). So you should choose your products wisely before rushing into affiliate marketing.
Subscription products are good for affiliates because they can earn ongoing commissions from each sale they make. So with what is often the same amount of work, you can earn substantially more just by choosing the right products to promote.
Selling Other People’s Products Online – Promotion Methods
There’s many ways in which affiliates promote other people’s products online to earn commissions. Here’s a few of the most common methods:
- Blogging and content – this article is an example of a blog post
- Video content – Many affiliates upload videos to YouTube or TikTok to generate website traffic either through paid marketing or organically
- Social media – there’s many social media sites you can use to generate traction for an affiliate business by finding suitable people for your products
- Email marketing – most successful affiliates will have an email list where they can contact their subscribers “en-mass” on a regular basis
- Paid marketing – Pay per click advertising is one of the fastest and most scalable methods used by affiliates
- Landing pages – many affiliates build landing pages to collect subscribers by offering a giveaway offer
- SEO – search engine optimisation is used to generate traffic from the search engines and is used with content generation (e.g. blogging/video blogging)
Not all affiliates use the same methods (or products) to build their online businesses. Some will build a shop and direct website traffic to Amazon products. Others will build an email list and sell digital products. However, whatever your method you won’t get far with affiliate marketing without traffic (website visitors). So every affiliate needs to learn a strategy whereby they can attract their target audience in order to sell products to the most appropriate visitors they can find!
Selling Other People’s Products Online: Target Audience
The target audience is a particularly important thing to understand for affiliates because they can place their marketing message in front of a global online audience -i.e. everyone! Most people don’t want whatever it is you have to sell. But a small sub-section of global online traffic will be interested in buying your product/s. That is the target audience for your particular product. By getting to know your “perfect” customer, or customer avatar, you’re much better prepared for success as an affiliate.
You can define your target audience by their online browsing characteristics, their age, location, interests etc. Basically, the more you understand your customer avatar, they more focused you can be on targeting them specifically with your marketing messages. You are also better able to communicate in an effective way with people you know and understand.
Platforms such as Facebook, YouTube and Google Ads can all be used with very specific targeting, so as to place your ads in front of the right kind of visitors according to keywords, location, age, interests and a number of other demographics according to the product you are selling.
Competition & Training
Selling other people’s products online should be fairly straight forward. However there’s many other affiliates who are building websites and running advertising and this means there’s a lot of competition for advertising space online. Therefore many affiliates will struggle finding customers for their products and give up too early! The best thing you can do if you want to be successful as an affiliate is invest in learning the skills you will need to actually sell your products: marketing!
The route you take with your marketing will often depend on your marketing budget, choice of products and the available time you have every day to work on your business. Affiliate marketing gives you a lot of flexibility and you can build an affiliate business around an existing job.
To learn more about other online business models and affiliate marketing access the free workshop videos here.