What’s the best way to make a living online? One of the best ways to make a living online is through product promotion. As someone who has tried numerous methods of earning online, including Forex marketing, buying and selling on eBay and affiliate marketing, I can definitely say that I have found affiliate marketing to be the most reliable.
Affiliate marketing is one of the simplest business models available online and you earn commissions through referral product sales. However, there’s definitely some things you need to understand in order to do affiliate marketing well.
There’s pitfalls with affiliate marketing as with any online earning method. But if you get the right direction, and spend some time upfront building a system for selling a specific product, you can use that infrastructure to sell again and again, on virtual autopilot.
What’s The Best Way To Make A Living Online – Build A Selling System First
A selling system is the infrastructure you need to start earning a living online through product referrals. This might comprise of a website, a landing page, an email marketing system and some automated email messages. Selling systems are used all the time on the internet and their biggest asset is that they can sell an unlimited number of products through a single portal.
Once you have a selling system in place, you can drive traffic to it using paid advertising, (or some other traffic generation method). Once you start earning revenue from it, you’re in a position to scale up to larger amounts.
But before you rush off and build a system to sell online, you need to understand a couple of concepts to optimise it’s efficiency.
What’s The Best Way To Make A Living Online – Knowing Your Audience
The first step to optimising your online sales system is knowing who you are going to be serving with your products. If you’re selling a business tool, for example, your audience is business owners, or those wanting to start a business. If you’re selling a training course, you need to target the small section of the online marketplace who are most interested in your course.
So for example, if you’re selling an online tutorial for piano learners, you’ll need to target those people specifically. Your advert, website, landing page and email series will all need to be aligned with a single congruent message. This is aimed at a specific target audience, also known as customer avatar.
If you try and sell to everyone, and your message is scattered. You attract the wrong crowd and your messaging becomes too diverse. But if you provide a single and congruent message which solves a problem for your audience through a single product, sales will come much easier.
Here’s an example from one of my mentors. He sold a dating related product which helped men with online dating. He targeted men who were interested in online dating, and provided a single message which spoke to their main concern. Because he had a focused campaign, he was able to create a stream of sales through a single ad. He made his first million dollars in sales. It was through a single campaign selling one product, over and over.
Creating Online Assets Which Can Generate Repeat Sales On Autopilot
The “tools” of affiliate marketing are powerful when used with the right knowledge. These are:
- A website/landing page – can sell globally 24/7
- An email marketing autoresponder – allows for automated messages to be sent out to subscribers
- Affiliate products – lets you make unlimited sales (without having to fulfil on product delivery)
The knowledge is understanding your target audience and being able to target that slice of the online marketplace (with marketing) and convey a specific message which speaks to their problem succinctly, and leads them to a valuable affiliate product.
When you can do this well, you will know how to make a living online.
Summary
So that’s what I consider the best way to make a living online. Find an affiliate product which is hugely valuable and learn how to promote it. This requires some upfront work in building a “digital asset”. But once you have learned how to sell an item online once, you can simply rinse and repeat. If you’ve built a digital asset which can use a repeatable system which is also automated, you can sell globally to an unlimited number of people.
The first step is to build a digital asset and choose an affiliate product to sell. Once you’ve done this, you need to choose a marketing strategy in order to drive traffic towards your offer.